Developing the Learning Habit

Elizabeth Lank, MBA INSEAD

Independent specialist in organisational learning (www.think.plus.com) &

Alison McGrath Peirce, MBA Kellogg

Consultant in executive development and founder, Magma Learning Group

 

 

Abstract

 

In an earlier article published in the April 2009 edition of Business Leadership Review, the authors made the case for what they called ‘Leadership Development 3.0’, which can be summarised as a stronger integration between leadership development and the daily work of leaders as well as a better connection between leadership and organisational development. In this follow-on article, they articulate the personal qualities that are most valuable for 21st century leaders and shift the perspective on leadership development from an organisational mandate to an individual one. Whereas their first article examined the organisational investments that could result in more effective leadership, this article examines how individual leaders can take responsibility for their own learning. The authors use their own experiences working in the field of leadership development to frame a model for a leader’s learning map, which they align to the leadership qualities they identify as most relevant in today’s turbulent business environment. 

 

 

 

‘Yes we can!’ A tide of enthusiasm and support for Barack Obama put him in the White House and was a perfect demonstration of a leader with the personal qualities to engage others in a meaningful way. Then the hard work began, of leading transformational change in arguably the worst economic climate of recent times, with the strongly-held views of different constituencies making consensus almost impossible on any of the new President’s major campaign themes, be it health, education, military spending or climate change. It is still early days for Obama’s presidency and the jury is still out on whether he will achieve what he (and his supporters) had hoped to achieve. But one of the personal qualities that is undoubtedly being put to the test now is Obama’s ability to learn and learn fast. For us, the world’s fascination with the recent American election shines the spotlight once more on leadership, both in terms of the personal qualities it takes to carry people with you and then the hard slog of facilitating change – be it personal, institutional or societal.

 

We have previously written about an emerging new pattern for leadership development,[1] that fundamentally shifts the practice of executive leadership development away from focusing only on the individual executive, away from educational events at remote and/or expensive locations, away from strictly academic content with little support for execution, and - equally significant - away from the exclusive domain of professionals within Human Resources departments. We would now like to paint a more detailed picture of what we consider to be the core personal qualities for 21^st century leaders and then provide top level practical guidance relevant to any leader in any organisation, namely the set of approaches to their own learning and personal development available to them at any time. These approaches should enable them to develop themselves and their organisations in a thoughtful and cost-effective way. These views, drawn heavily from our own experiences, are consistent with the overarching parameters we identified in what we called ‘Leadership Development 3.0’, where we made the case for a much stronger connection between leadership development and effective strategy execution and business performance.

 

 

The Qualities of an Effective 21^st Century Leader

 

So much has been written about leadership that one almost hesitates to offer a further view on the topic. Yet we feel that the late Russ Ackoff, one of the most influential management thinkers of our time, was right when he said that we are going through a “change of age”, where a whole new way of thinking – and a whole new way of leading – is essential to be able to move the world forward.[2] If he was right, then it is important to look at leadership with fresh eyes. We do not presume to have any brilliant new insights on the topic but we would like to share our reflections on what has struck most powerfully in terms of leadership capabilities, from both our experience of working with leaders in many different types of organisations and from the research we have done in recent years on the topic. Having highlighted the personal leadership qualities that seem to be the most effective in today’s tumultuous, networked, knowledge-based economy, we would like to then describe the set of learning approaches that we believe are at the disposal of all leaders, 24/7, to enable them to constantly enhance and improve their leadership capabilities.  Although there is much that organisations and leadership development functions can do to develop leadership capability (as we argued in our earlier article), we believe that the people best placed to seize learning opportunities as they arise are leaders themselves. 

 

 

The ‘ABC’ of Leadership for the Internet Age

 

One cannot have a meaningful dialogue about leadership development without identifying the capabilities that one is aiming to develop.  Of course the specific development aims will differ for each individual but we feel some consistent themes have emerged over recent years, thanks to the experience, research and reflections of many inspiring business leaders, academics and consultants. These are the qualities that seem to be emerging as especially critical in the world in which we now live, and we have conceptualised these as follows:

Authenticity tops our list and is highlighted by many management thinkers.  It is no longer enough to simply be a good corporate citizen, leaving one’s ‘real self’ at home.  The ability to bring one’s whole self to work, showing integrity and honesty in all that one does, is an essential leadership quality. As Bill George put it in his book True North,

 

“The test of authentic leaders’ values is not what they say but the values they practice under pressure.”[3]

 

Adaptiveness follows, namely the ability to adapt one’s style and approach to the particular audience or circumstances of the moment. This is nicely summarised by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in their book Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? as follows:

 

“Having observed and understood the situation, effective leaders adjust their behaviours. They adapt without ever losing their sense of self.  They are what we call authentic chameleons.  The chameleon adapts dramatically to its environment or context without ever ceasing to be a chameleon.”[4]         

 

The third characteristic we would like to highlight is agility. With the speed of change and unpredictability of today’s world, leaders need to be constantly scanning the immediate and longer term horizon for changes that are affecting or could affect their businesses.  Rob-Jan de Jong (www.vongolo-consulting.com), a Netherlands-based consultant who specialises in helping leaders develop a future orientation, likes to say that this is similar to the skill of avoiding a car crash: the sooner one spots the danger, the quicker one can react.  As Rob-Jan puts it, being more future-aware enables you to “extend the time between the point of surprise and the point of no return”, giving you the possibility of acting to gain a more favourable outcome. In today’s unpredictable world, agility now matters more than long term planning skills.     

 

Moving on to the ‘Bs’, we cannot ignore the continuing importance of an in-depth understanding of the business that you are in.  Whether it is the generic knowledge that applies to every business, such as finance, sales or marketing knowledge, or the specific knowledge that applies to your industry or sector, this remains an important leadership capability.  As Ram Charan puts it in What the CEO Wants You to Know,

 

“Business acumen requires understanding the building blocks of money making.”[5]

 

However in recent years there has been a growing understanding that one of the best ways to ensure maximal business acumen is to make sure that the team you build around you has the right mix of knowledge and skills.  This leads us on to our next characteristic of balance, by which we mean both balancing the team around you to complement your own skills as well as finding the optimal balance between work and personal life that keeps one happy and healthy as a person.   The final leadership capability which we would highlight in this section is that of business alignment, i.e. the ability to engage others in the chosen direction for the business, such that they bring their full energy and talent to a common purpose.  Gill Ringland, Chief Executive of the St. Andrews Management Institute (SAMI) consulting firm (www.samiconsulting.co.uk), has just completed (with two co-authors) the manuscript for a book to be published in 2010 on achieving business renewal following the current economic crisis.   She comments as follows:

 

“There are leaders on particular issues and areas of insight at all levels of the organisational structure.  Leadership is scattered more widely within organisations than the formal hierarchies would suggest. The challenge for senior leaders is to channel all of that energy and expertise in a common direction.” 

 

It is now largely agreed that the ‘command and control’ model of leadership, with senior leaders thinking and everyone else doing, is no longer fit for purpose in today’s business world.  Today’s labour force might be better viewed not as conscripts, but as a group of volunteers, able to move to another organisation at any time. Volunteers need to be inspired rather than instructed. 

 

Our final category starts with customer-centricity (or what one might call ‘stakeholder-centricity’ in the non-commercial world).  Today’s leaders have more tools available to them than ever to listen to their customers – or, using their horizon-scanning skills, to anticipate their needs.  However there is no substitute for direct contact, as Ram Charan points out.  

 

 

 

“ ..the best CEOs don’t rely on clinical data alone.  They know that if they become removed from the action, they may miss important changes in the marketplace.  Many of them make special efforts to observe and talk directly with the people who use their products and services.  Sam Walton is the quintessential example of a CEO who never lost touch with customers.  Even when he was running a $30 billion retailing empire, he regularly visited stores to see for himself how things were going.”[6]

 

However the relationship with customers is only one set of relationships in the increasingly complex eco-systems of which organisations are a part.  Suppliers, partners, contractors – these relationships are all crucial to successful organisational outcomes and leaders must be skilled in collaborating successfully with these other stakeholders. This raises all sorts of new challenges such as how to influence without direct authority.

 

…collaborative working is much more of an art than a science. Moving between tasks and relationship building, balancing individual motivation with organizational agendas, building consensus, handling conflict….all of this requires the skills of a consummate diplomat, an expert project manager, a visionary leader and a marriage guidance counsellor all rolled into one.”[7]

 

 Related to this is the challenge of effective co-ordination and integration. Here we return to Russ Ackoff, who made the point that the new age in which we find ourselves requires systemic rather than analytical thinking. Rather than breaking down organisations into component parts and measuring each part on its specific targets, Ackoff argued that leaders (and business schools) should focus far more on how the different parts of the organisation interact.

 “The performance of  a system depends more on how its parts interact than on how they act independently of each other. “[8]

 

It is only those interactions that produce the final product or service for the customer.       

 

The nine capabilities that we have highlighted strike us as particularly important today.  And from a systems thinking point of view, it is how those capabilities come together in one person that is both unique and potentially powerful. It would be unreasonable to expect every leader to be equally skilled at all nine.  We do however believe it is worthwhile to consciously strive to improve in all nine of these areas, whatever your leadership role.  And that improvement process is, at its heart, a learning process. That is the area we would like to turn to next.    

 

 

The Leader’s Learning Map

 

In our earlier article we looked at ways in which more formal leadership development processes might become better integrated with the day-to-day work that needs doing.  One of the major thrusts of our initial article was the opportunity to use the recession as a reason for developing managers in situ, to capitalise on the notion that a crisis is one of the most effective leadership classrooms.

 

With our combined experience of working with leaders and their teams across more than fifty organisations, we have found that the most effective leaders take active responsibility for their own learning. In the same way that professional athletes review every game, actors reflect on each performance and surgeons debrief every major operation, leaders need to get into a conscious learning habit – day in and day out.  Chris Argyris and Donald Schön made a strong case many years ago for ‘double-loop learning’[9] and for reflection-in-action.  Learning specialists such as David Kolb[10] or Peter Honey and Alan Mumford[11] developed tools to help individuals assess their preferred learning styles.  We felt that in addition to these helpful conceptual models and assessment tools, there is a need for practical, down-to-earth guidance for leaders who need to make decisions day-to-day on how they spend their time – already a very precious and scarce resource. 

 

We therefore reflected on the learning tools and approaches that strike us as most valuable in this context and have developed the map that is outlined below. The in situ learning approaches are grouped around the ‘ABC’ capabilities, to keep the most crucial leadership capabilities at the forefront, as a reminder of the desired outcomes. 

 

  

 

We will go through each of the six learning approaches in turn, explaining what we mean by them and highlighting where they might be especially helpful.  Many of these approaches happen quite naturally in the course of a working day, others require more conscious effort to make them happen. It is our feeling that most leaders do not put ‘learning’ on their daily to-do list as they are focused only on completing the business tasks at hand.  By being explicit about these different approaches, it is our hope that more leaders can be encouraged to see learning as an essential part of the day job rather than a ‘nice-to-have’ extra.  

 

Reflection time

Protecting time for reflection is one of the most valuable habits a leader can establish.  It can be argued that one of Jack Welch’s greatest accomplishments at GE was the introduction of the GE WorkOut Process – a formal methodology to review, reflect and resolve problems. In many organisations, there is little or no time set aside to review the learning points from a major product launch that has just been completed or a marketing campaign that has ended – the leader and their team are simply rushing on to the next task.  This is wasteful as the lessons learned might save valuable time or money or increase customer opportunities in future – so in effect a potential benefit is being thrown away. In practice the closest thing many leaders have to protected time for reflection is often long train or airplane journeys – and even then they are usually busy with paperwork.  By putting reflection time in their diaries at appropriate and regular intervals, and doing so with relevant team members when appropriate, there is a much better chance of improving the leader’s next action.  Reflection time enriches all nine of the ’ABC’ capabilities.  

 

Formal Education         

Formal leadership education, such as business school executive programmes or in-house management development programmes, clearly have an important role to play. They are often expensive both in terms of time and money but can build the foundation of business knowledge that is needed to be an effective leader.  Unfortunately they are probably too often the only conscious investment that leaders make in their own personal development, ignoring the other five more cost-effective approaches that we are outlining here. Equally regrettably, most business schools continue to offer a compartmentalised rather than a holistic (or systems) approach to corporate growth and development. We believe that going forward, successful executive education programmes will routinely stipulate that participants bring one or more current issues from the office to work on in the context of the education programme and that the participant will be given input and feedback as part of this. Even if the programme provider doesn’t require it, the firm paying the bill should mandate that this be done internally in exchange for the investment in the professional’s continued development. There are some business school programmes that offer coaching and individual problem solving, but this still tends to be the exception rather than the norm.

 

On-the-job learning

Learning on the job is usually the most powerful way of learning – whether from successes or failures. Learning is an inevitable consequence of experience, even if it happens sub-consciously. The opportunity we see here is for leaders to supplement the automatic learning that happens as they gain experience with conscious, targeted on-the-job learning.  For example, if you feel you are not close enough to the issues on the front line of your business, why not spend a day, a week or a month working alongside your front-line staff, as many senior leaders have done?  If you run a retail business, spend a week at the check-out till.  If you run a logistics company, accompany a driver on his daily route.  If you feel you don’t know a country’s market issues well enough, spend two weeks in situ (rather than two hours) with the country team.  Another possible structure for learning is to form an action learning set with a small group of colleagues, using the skills and experience of the entire group to help each member better address their own work challenges.  There are many other possibilities – the imperative is to pro-actively design the learning you need.

 

Active experimentation

We have already highlighted the unpredictability of today’s world. Leaders have to deal with a great deal of ambiguity and uncertainty and in some cases the speed (and quality) of their decision-making suffers as a result.  Today’s world calls for more active experimentation, testing and learning rather than developing grand plans and business cases that have to be torn up almost as soon as they are written.  This ‘test and learn’ approach applies to business decision-making but also to leadership development.  If you think you could improve your communication skills, why not get some coaching and then test a new approach on a friendly audience. If it works, integrate the new approach into your way of working.  If it does not, try something else.  Small experiments, with rapid feedback, make for very efficient – and low risk – learning.      

   

Feedback and coaching

Active experimentation requires some feedback to know whether the experiment has worked.  Feedback is valuable in many settings, in order to know whether you are being as effective as you can be. As the expression goes, ‘perception is reality’, and if you do not know how you are perceived as a leader, you cannot influence that perception.  360 degree feedback tools and psychometric assessment tools can be valuable aids here.  Coaching is another very effective learning tool that has gained wide acceptance as a good way of enhancing one’s leadership ability, in a flexible and time-efficient manner. Feedback and coaching are especially valuable to enhance the ‘As’ in our capability framework. The importance of being able to give feedback cannot be overlooked in management development. Managers comfortable giving candid, spontaneous feedback maximize the impact of time spent with their staff and colleagues.

 

Coaching others is also a very valuable learning process.  To quote American physicist Frank Oppenheimer, “the best way to learn is to teach”. In his book Leaders as Teachers, Edward Betof, former vice president of talent management and chief learning officer at Bechton, Dickinson and Company, postulates that if firms are not using corporate leaders “to inspire, mentor, coach and train others,”[12] then the individual executives as well as the overall organisation are failing to reach their full potential.

 

Information-gathering and horizon-scanning

This format of learning takes conscious effort and time but is especially valuable to aid agility, business acumen, customer-centricity and collaboration.

Techniques include:

·         joining a learning consortium of companies or a professional association to  hear what other organisations are doing.

·         subscribing to market research reports or commissioning specific research for your own company. 

·         participating in relevant on-line webinars or downloading interesting podcasts. 

·         going through a regular scenario planning exercise to be mindful of emerging shifts in the marketplace.  Often this element can be addressed by simply asking the “what if” questions that run counter to the conventional wisdom in your firm, sector, or culture. 

 

The current global financial crisis profoundly underscores the need for these processes. Each of these activities require protecting some time in a busy day or week to find and absorb information that will help you make better decisions.

 

 

The Learning Habit Checklist             

 

We see these six learning approaches as the core of the personal learning toolkit that empowers leaders to continuously enhance their own capabilities.  For every aspect of their own capability they would like to improve, there is a simple checklist to run through in order to identify the most appropriate tool or tools for the job:

 

 

 

We suggest that running through this mental checklist should become a reflex, a habit – only then will learning be a fully integrated and conscious aspect of what you do each day.

 

Developing the Learning Habit

 

As one way of emphasising the importance of developing a learning habit, we like Warren Bennis’s assertion that “leadership is one of the performing arts”[13]. We can see the connection between leadership and acting, for example.  Good actors, in addition to the innate qualities with which they are born, have professional training in their craft; they learn their lines; they rehearse; they listen and respond to feedback; they read their audience; they work hard at the interactions with their fellow actors. Leaders are like theatre actors: their performances are always live without the safety net of another ‘take’. Therefore leaders’ ability to learn on the job, all the time, is one of the best ways to ensure their ongoing success.

 

Actors accept the value of rehearsals and the importance of feedback.  Similarly, no professional athlete would suggest that coaching or post-game reviews are a waste of time. Health care professionals understand that people’s lives depend on them constantly updating their knowledge and skill. Yet many business leaders treat their own personal learning and development as something they don’t really have time for, do not really need and (in some cases) don’t really want. We believe every leader should develop a learning habit, out of a sense of responsibility and care both for the people and businesses they lead and for themselves as individuals. The unrelenting and constantly accelerating pace of change compels all of us to make ongoing adjustments to what we do and how we do it.  As we have tried to argue above, it does not have to be expensive or time-consuming, just a daily habit undertaken in a myriad of ways.  For the leaders who are entrusted with the future of today’s organisations, we are convinced that integrating the learning habit checklist into each day’s ‘to-do’ list will reap valuable rewards.    

 

 

To comment on this article, please contact Mark Stoddard, Associate Editor, at: m.stoddard@mbaworld.com

 

 

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