An Analysis of Leadership Challenges in Learning Organizations

This essay examines the challenges of leadership within learning organizations, drawing on the author's internship experience at PEER Australia. It explores the tension between traditional leadership approaches and the five disciplines of a learning organization: shared vision, systems thinking, team learning, mental models, and personal mastery. The essay highlights specific challenges, such as the difficulty of implementing a shared vision, the impact of differing personalities and experience levels among employees, and the complexities of conflict resolution and change management. The author emphasizes the importance of transformational leadership within the learning organization framework but also acknowledges the difficulties in maintaining this approach, especially in the long term. The essay concludes by summarizing the key challenges and suggesting that learning organization theories often overlook the day-to-day issues that leaders face.

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Title: The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization
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The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 1
Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization.............................................................2
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................7

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 2
Introduction
We are all familiar with the term “organizational learning”, which is one of the most
important aspects that all the current organizations should possess. But, there is also a term that
is “learning organization”, which should not be confused or mistaken as organizational learning.
The concept introduced by Peter Senge years ago, explains a company that facilitates a learning
environment for employees for fulfilling the organization’s objective. A learning organization,
thus, transforms people by continuously increasing the abilities that help them in achieving the
organizational as well as personal goals. In the current business environment, with immense
pressure imposed on organizations due to intense competition, there are several learning
organizations that are present in the market, to help companies manage the pressure and to
regularly improve the quality of productivity of the organization. In a learning organization, the
employees are introduced to expansive and new patterns that help in nurturing the thinking skills
of the employees according to the current trends in the market. With this learning process, the
employees build a strong and collective approach to issues that offers effective solutions. I
worked as an intern in the organization PEER Australia, which is one of the best leading learning
organizations in Australia. While my internship period, I learned a lot of new things, but I also
witnessed some challenges associated with leadership in the organization. In this essay, I will be
exhibiting my experience along with the learning organization’s theories.
The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization
The organization PEER Australia is a non-profit organization that is industry-based too.
It is an award-winning Registered Training Organization (RTO) and is also a Group Training
Organization. Till date, the organization has trained more than 48,000 people in different

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 3
packages that are specially designed to meet the development needs of Australia. The
organization operates for private and public organizations. I worked as an intern for nearly six
months. This internship was to understand the working environment of a learning organization.
A Learning organization functions on five disciplines that are shared vision, system thinking,
team learning, mental models, and personal mastery (Bass, 2009). All these different disciplines
develop specific roles for the employees of the learning organizations, which are interlinked and
employees need to fulfill them at any cost.
During my initial days of internship, I realized that the organization does not follow
hierarchical methods of leadership. The leaders do not dominate the employees to follow their
command. Instead, the leader played different roles along with transformational leadership for
nurturing the employees. This is one of the aspects that impressed me about the organization
PEER. With this, each leader has a specific role to perform that was linked with the five
disciplines. Systematic thinking is a crucial part of a learning organization. This is governed by
the system’s theory under which different connections are identified and are examined as a
whole. The leader has to be a designer, who has to determine and formulate policies, strategies,
and regulations. The role of the designer is also to develop a common vision, shared principles
and values (Crona and Parker, 2012). In my opinion, in a hypothetical situation this seems to be a
perfect circumstance for an organization that facilitates growth. But, in the real world, with
different person having different personality traits, the organization might face humongous
repercussions, due to wrongdoing of a single person.
For instance, in a learning organization, traditional leadership approaches cannot be
practiced. But, the chances of every employee having a similar approach to this aspect are
unlikely. In the organization PEER, I found that some of the employees who are a bit old and

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 4
must hold an experience of 20 to 30 years, though adapted all the five disciplines of learning
organization, but in their approaches they were still laid back and practiced traditional business
approaches. Thus, the biggest leadership challenge in a learning organization is that leader who
are stubborn or have behavioral issues cannot exhibit good leadership traits (Cunningham, 2010).
The other crucial aspect of the learning organization is a shared vision. In my opinion,
shared vision leads to giving the highest priority to organizational goals, then to personal goals.
For the leaders, to ensure that all the employees have similar goals. Therefore, the leader of the
organizations has to play the role of a teacher too. The teaching approaches should be in sync
with transformational leadership. In my opinion, with this, there are two challenges that emerge
in implementing effective leadership. Firstly, not all the individuals of the organization can
engage in a shared vision. Secondly, the leaders who have to play the role of teacher will have to
see beyond the superficial territories, along with offering the employees a great learning
experience. The teaching methods of the leaders might not relate well with different individuals,
due to over dominating nature or less patience of a leader. Thus, the other leadership challenge is
mismanagement of changes by the leaders (Fakhri, Sattari and Dadfar, 2014).
From my experience in the organization PEER, though the continuous improvement
process is the best way for the growth of the organization, but for maintaining it for a long time
with effective leadership is a tough task. During my experience in the organization PEER, I
realized that the organization functions in a highly controlled environment and thus, this
contradicted the disciplines of the learning organization. In addition to this, for a learning
organization the best-suited leadership practice is transformational leadership. But,
transformational leadership main trait is free environment. It is due to this aspect of the
transformational leadership that faces huge challenges in a learning organization, which affects

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 5
the functioning of the whole organization (Park and Kim, 2018). For the long term view
approach of the learning organization, the challenges increase with the passing time affecting the
organizational goals and objectives immensely.
From my experience at PEER organization, I recognized that as all the leaders are so
strong and everyone has a different point of view, there were regular conflicts. Now, one of the
biggest challenges that leaders face is resolving conflict (Priefert, 2014). In my opinion and
experience, the majority of the leaders tend to complicate a conflict as they fail to resolve a
conflict. In addition to this, the other challenge which leaders face is implementing a strong
conflict resolution strategy and sticking to it. In my opinion, though a strong conflict resolution
strategy is an effective approach, the leaders fail to follow the different rules and regulations to
the core, which ultimately leads to leadership challenges.
The various different studies of learning organization have exhibited strong opinions on
individual learning approaches and group learning approaches. But, both these aspects have not
been connected. In such a scenario, many a time a leader fails to explain the individuals the
importance of both the practices and how they can be linked with each other. It is due to this
limitation that the leaders fail to provide clear direction to the employees, resulting in an
unsolved confusion for the individuals (Rijal, 2009).
In my opinion, another aspect that impacts the role of leaders in the restructuring of the
organization, according to the latest technology, trend, and technique. This helps in offering the
employees with the latest technique that can help in improving the productivity of the
organization. Also, it is through this approach that the leaders continuously implement new
policies and structure (Senge, 2019). But this also emerges as the biggest hurdle for the leaders
as many of the employees cannot keep track of the different changes that are being made in their

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 6
functioning. In addition to this, the employees who do not have acquired expertise in the earlier
technique finds it difficult to adapt to the new technique due to possessing inadequate
knowledge. Thus, the leaders face the biggest challenge of keeping a record on all the employees
and to regularly monitor the performance of all the employees (Singh, 2011).
In my opinion, the learning organization theories have ignored the different issues that
occur in a workplace that creates challenges for the leaders on day to day basis. In addition to
this, the change management of the organization creates further problems for both the employees
and the leaders. The leaders have different roles to play under a learning organization, but these
roles highly depend on the personal traits of the leaders too, which creates humongous
challenges for the leaders (Yadav and Agarwal, 2016). I have identified all these different
challenges in the leaders of the organization PEER Australia.
Conclusion
With this, it can be concluded that the learning organization environment can present
different challenges for the leaders of the organization due to various different reasons like the
traditional approaches of few employees which contradicts the five disciplines of learning
organizations, the disconnection between the individual learning process and group learning
process, creating confusions for both the employees and the leaders, and also, the limitations that
are caused due to the lack of monitoring employee’s performance on a regular basis. These are
just a few aspects that create problem for the leaders. In the real world, there are many other
humongous problems that leaders face and for a learning organization who’s core trait changes,
the number of challenges is far more.

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 7
References
Bass, B. (2009). The Future of Leadership in Learning Organizations. Journal of Leadership
Studies, 7(3), pp.18-40.
Crona, B. and Parker, J. (2012). Learning in Support of Governance: Theories, Methods, and a
Framework to Assess How Bridging Organizations Contribute to Adaptive Resource
Governance. Ecology and Society, 17(1), pp.1-4.
Cunningham, I. (2010). Leadership development in crisis: leadership development hasn't made
much difference to organizations. Development and Learning in Organizations: An International
Journal, 24(5), pp.5-7.
Fakhri, M., Sattari, S. and Dadfar, E. (2014). Investigate the Relationship between Learning
Organization Disciplines and Organizational Intelligence in Maskan Bank. Nigerian Chapter of
Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, 2(4), pp.25-31.
Park, S. and Kim, E. (2018). Fostering organizational learning through leadership and knowledge
sharing. Journal of Knowledge Management, 22(6), pp.1408-1423.
Priefert, L. (2014). Leadership and Organizational Development: The role of the leader in
Learning Organization design. [online] Unomaha.edu. Available at:
https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-public-affairs-and-community-service/public-
administration/documents/mpa-capstone/lindsey-priefert-capstone.pdf [Accessed 30 Aug. 2019].
Rijal, S. (2009). Leading The Learning Organization. Business Education & Accreditation, 1(1),
pp.131-138.

The Challenges of Leadership in a Learning Organization 8
Senge, P. (2019). Rethinking Leadership in the Learning Organization - The Systems Thinker.
[online] The Systems Thinker. Available at: https://thesystemsthinker.com/rethinking-leadership-
in-the-learning-organization/ [Accessed 30 Aug. 2019].
Singh, S. (2011). Leadership and Organizational Learning in Knowledge Management Practices
in Global Organizations”. Indian journal of industrial relations, 46(6), pp.353-365.
Yadav, S. and Agarwal, V. (2016). Benefits and Barriers of Learning Organization and its five
Discipline. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 18(12), pp.18-24.