Working alone can be very stressful which is why most people need support while they’re acquiring new skills or taking in new information. Several things can go wrong if people don’t learn to support each through the process of learning—here are just a few samples of what can happen.

• Employees will not receive the encouragement they need if they experiment with new things without support. They will try to initiate changes and be demoralized because no one will follow up with them. For instance, a couple of eager beavers go to a seminar and get excited about what they learn, but when they bring back all these new ideas, nobody responds to them. They experience rejection for their ideas and feel like they don’t belong to the team anymore. These individuals will wonder why they bothered to learn something new if no one else seems to care.
• Frustration levels will grow when people work independently on different tasks that should be coordinated. The collective agenda should provide clear direction, however, if the workforce doesn’t work on it together, the result will be chaotic and confusing.
• Some ambitious people will take advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas. They may use the distraction to score points with the boss to gain an advantage over a coworker who is competing for advancement. They often circumvent the normal chain of command by arranging private meetings with key decision-makers to seek approval for their ideas. Similar one-on-one contacts are used to lobby for additional funding on pet projects that may not be in the company’s best interest.
• When people duplicate tasks and projects, energy is wasted. People working independently on the same things and are not aware of the duplication because they aren’t discussing it (the old “right hand not knowing what the left is doing”). New programs start up without official notice, while similar projects, begun earlier and perhaps attacked more efficiently, are forgotten, or ignored.
• Fights, arguments, and disagreements occur regularly because of the lack of communication. People are quick to accuse others when things seem to be going wrong, because somebody (else) must be to blame (obviously I’m not the idiot).
• Unexpected and unnecessary problems arise simply because there is chaos instead of order. People can’t recall who agreed to do what. Problems that were thought to have been solved resurface. Quick fixes replace carefully thought-out solutions, and past mistakes are repeated.
• Careers are unnecessarily sidetracked because some people don’t function as well when pressured to new ways. Working in a group, poor performers can be coached to shore up weaknesses.

Learning objectives

The chaos that ensues from less than full participation in the learning process provides an opportunity for people with aggressive, loud, and dominant personalities to take over and impose solutions that may not be the best ones available. To avoid frustration, people often run with one of these “wonderful” ideas simply because it looks as if somebody knows what to do.

Because people aren’t working together and sharing what they know, it sometimes is unclear what should be happening and what needs to be done by when. Without agreed upon learning objectives, individuals, who conceived projects on their own, are prone at risk of wasting both time and energy. The results may make people feel good because they have accomplished something, but it doesn’t help the corporation achieve its purpose.