ARTICLE 11: LEADERSHIP AND LEARNING:

This article is one of the 51 articles/chapters in my new book, Practical Leadership.

PREFACE:

The best leaders are always learning.  This is the one factor that does not waiver no matter who the leader is.  How the leader learns  depends on the leader and what drives that leader.  Some leaders love to read.  Others may enjoy listening to experts though recordings, seminars, or webinars.  Still others will like to “get their hands dirty” so to speak; they learn best by doing.  And still other leaders will learn by studying the data, facts, and what has been observed.  It doesn’t matter how they learn but it is critical that leaders value learning.

The best run organizations are often thought of as learning organizations. Peter Senge, author of the Fifth Discipline, sees it like this:

People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never ‘arrive’. Sometimes, language, such as the term ‘personal mastery’ creates a misleading sense of definiteness, of black and white. But personal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline. People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident. Paradoxical? Only for those who do not see the ‘journey is the reward’.  (Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, 1990, p 142)

Seeing the world as a laboratory, a place where we can constantly upgrade our knowledge and understanding of our world, that is the true essence of a great leader.  It’s not about being set in your ways or set in your knowledge and understanding. Learning something new is not just a good idea, it’s the foundation for organizational and personal survival. It is even more important that we not be set in our means for applying that knowledge.  Being closed to innovation puts anyone at a disadvantage.  No matter how much we’d like everything to stay the same, to have real predictability in our day, the inability to adapt and modify what we do is a death sentence for any organization.  Agility is critical.  Being able to adapt to a world that is changing so fast that life is a blur and being able to create when nothing is certain, these are key to our success.

This article takes a specific look at some ways a leader can make the organization a learning organization.  It is important to maintain perspective and as much as some of us want perfection, leadership is not nor has it ever been a safe haven for perfectionists.  We will all make mistakes.  We will all fall short.  If we have 5 tasks to complete and only complete 4, we must guard against feeling like the entire effort was a waste of time.  For those of us who look first at the negative and have trouble seeing the positive, failing on 1 out of 5 objectives can be hard to swallow.  But, that is an 80% success rate.  That would be an amazing feat for a Major League Baseball hitter, an NBA field goal shooter, or even a NASCAR driver. Think of a teacher getting 80% of his or her students into an Ivy League College or a dance instructor getting 80% of her or her students accepted into a prestigious Ballet Troup.  If you were a coach in the NFL, you would be setting all kinds of records having an 80% success rate.  The best ever was Guy Chamberlain and he had a 78% success rate.  The great John Madden only hit gold 76% of the time.  And the Vince Lombardi— “Winning isn’t everything…it’s the only thing!” only won 74% of the time.  But those success rates are phenomenal.

A great leader can put all of this into perspective. It’s not enough to just count the wins and losses.  Leaders must learn from every experience.  Don’t just pick apart the losses; Pick apart the victories as well. 

THE ARTICLE: Leadership and Learning:

      Learning is an essential aspect of building the confidence to lead.  With every action there must be an after-action review.  The purpose of the review is not to beat ourselves up over what went wrong but to learn.  If we had 10 tasks to accomplish and we were able to complete 7 at a satisfactory level, our after-action review will have us examining all 10 not just the 3 we see as not having been accomplished.  The reason for this is we want to learn from the 100% successes, the 90% successes, the 10% successes and everything in between. We can learn what we ought to keep on doing, what we need to improve, what we should do less of, what we should stop doing, and what new things we ought to incorporate into our processes.

      One part of the learning process that is critical for every leader is to learn about the people you lead.  What do they value and believe?  What motivates them to do their best?  What are their most comfortable behavioral traits?  Are they influencers, commanders, steady eddies, or compliers? Do they prefer working with people, things, or ideas?  Once  we know who we are working with we can do a better job of having those people involved in activities that will suit them best.  It would be a waste of time and energy to have a systems person trying to build a collaborative team as it would having a real people person go off into a room all alone to develop a system for implementing a new organizational structure.  It’s all about having the right people on the bus, in the right seats, engaged in the right activities.

      Each of us has a certain amount of talent.  There are some factors that we will never be able to overcome.  If my body type is short and stocky, the chances of ever becoming an NBA Center are essentially, for all intents and purposes, nil!  If I have a gravelly, nasal voice my chances of becoming an opera star are one in a zillion.  But beyond these so obvious handicaps, most of the talent we need to be a good leader is at our disposal.  We simply have to be willing to do the work necessary to develop the skills we will need. Leaders, in my humble opinion, are not born, they are made.

      In the next article we can start talking about how to turn an ordinary person into an extraordinary leader.  My approach may surprise many.  I do not advocate a formulaic approach.  I believe that each person has qualities that can be help them be effective leaders and they have certain aspects of their belief system and certain behavioral traits that can get in the way.  It all begins with knowing yourself, being yourself, and not trying to be something you are not.  By fully deploying our own strengths and then recognizing and utilizing the strengths of others we can go from being quite ordinary to quite extraordinary.

SUMMATION:

      Learning is critical to leadership and our learning needs to begin with us.  The bottom line is that what do or do not accomplish is about us.  It’s not about the world around us as much as it is how we deal with the world around us.  To be as effective of a leader as possible we will need to have an intimate knowledge about ourselves.  Too many people ignore themselves as the most critical component of the leadership act.  Knowing who we are and how we most likely to behave and knowing how who we are and how we behave impacts others gives us insight into the best way to effectively carry out the leadership act.

      Being a “good leader” is not affected as much by our nature as it is by our nurture.  Indeed, there are some essentials that are more biological, but we can all become better leaders through learning.  If we start with ourselves, we can move out into the world but starting in the world and trying to become more introspective can create attitudes and beliefs that are difficult to countermand. If you have ingrained in your mind that a group of followers is either incompetent or subversive, you will have an immediate prejudice that can prevent real achievement from taking place. If you are inclined to blame others for the where you find yourself in the world it will be difficult to navigate that world.  But, by grasping a real knowledge and understanding of yourself, you can turn an important corner.  You begin to see that you have amazing control over the world around you.  You begin to see that if you don’t like the way things are you can change them. And, as Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see!”

      Changing yourself as a leader has profound impact on the entire leadership act.  I am often reminded of a dear friend who was the CEO of a major US Corporation.  He relates the story of how he saw his role as being one of “shooting first and taking names later.”  He went to the office everyday looking for who fouled up yesterday, so he could make an example of the person to the rest of company. He said he went to work with his “Six Guns Blazing” and came home each night knowing he’d done his best to weed out the dead wood.  He instituted change after change based on all the best research on quality and productivity.  He told all of his managers and executive team members that he was holding them personally responsible for improvements in both.  But after months and months of efforts to improve the company, nothing seemed to work.  Then one morning as he was shaving, getting ready for another day of “murder and mayhem” it hit him.  The problem wasn’t everyone else!  It was the “Man in the Mirror!”

      This CEO began that day to try to undo the months and months of damage he had done to the company.  He began to look inside himself to see what he was all about; what made him tick.  He realized his misery over the past few years was his core values bumping up against what he thought he had to do to run a Fortune 500 Company.  He began to connect with his own values and beliefs.  He knew he really liked people and really wanted to trust them to do what they did best.  He realized that he enjoyed listening to them and allowing them to share what they believed in and hoped for.  He instituted a Delta Team; a team of employees that represented every aspect of the company’s operation. These Delta Team Members helped reshape the future of the company and maintained a constant vigil designed to ensure that the company never lost focus again.

      This leader had to first learn about himself.  Who was he?  What did he believe in? What was important to him?  And then he could start learning about the people who made the company work.  The proof of the value of this approach can be seen in the ultimate outcome for this company.  Over the next 10 years the company underwent enormous growth.  It became a company that people wanted to work for.  The company built a major learning center in its “home town.” And a few years ago, this CEO, leader of his family, and principle owner of the company sold the entire operation to an International Conglomerate for well over a billion dollars.  This now retired CEO found that all learning starts with “ME” and continues with “ME” for as long as we are learning, we are growing, getting better, and thriving.  The “me” of learning is not a selfish me but a connected me.  It is the “me” that is at the core of all we are.  Great Leaders Are Great Learners and the foundation of their learning always begins with a better knowledge of self.