Leaders are Learners

The best organizations today are learning organizations.  With the highly turbulent environments in which we find ourselves today, organizations can't afford to make the same mistake twice.  In fact, organizations today can't afford to make the same mistake that other organizations have made before.  If anyone has learned something that will benefit us today, we need to know about it and learn from it.  As the philosopher, George Santayana said, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

One factor that both aids and complicates this matter of organizational learning is the plethora of information available today.  It's not like there's nothing available on the Internet.  But sorting through the maze and finding the nugget that is useful can be a daunting task.  It is clear, however, that the process of collecting intelligence can not be merely a passive activity now.

Most effective organizations have figured out that they need to become proactive "learning organizations."  General Electric is a classic case.  CEO Jack Welch was not only a personal advocate for learning and change as evidenced by the famous GE CAP (Change Acceleration Process), but he has established a renowned leadership and learning center at Crotonville and brought in outstanding behavioral scientists to staff it.  This isn't about sitting around on the carpet and becoming wiser people.  As their former vice president of corporate leadership development, Steve Kerr, said "Learning is defined as a change in behavior.  If people don't act differently [as a result of learning] we've wasted the shareholder's money."

Unfortunately, not all organizations have discovered the benefits of hiring a director of learning or a chief learning officer.  Even well intentioned organizations can be notoriously misinformed about the learning process.  One organization I worked with deliberately decided not to have a learning officer using the rationale that "they didn't want a learning officer-they wanted everyone to be a learner."  But now, without a learning officer, this organization is lacking systems, structures, procedures and mechanisms to support learning.  Instead of everyone being a learner, few if any are actively learning.

Obviously, a learning organization requires leadership that values learning and change.  As organizational psychologists we often get the chance to see leaders who claim to have twenty years of learning and experience, but who, in reality, have about one year of learning and experience repeated twenty times.  For those leaders, the process of creating the learning organization starts as a personal activity.  They must first become learners.

Harvard professor David Garvin has suggested four critical skills that leaders must possess to become effective learners.  The first of these is openness to new perspectives.  Even as researchers, we must accept the provisional nature of knowledge.  When I was playing football in high school, the state of theory on human performance advised us to take lots of salt tablets and no water.  Now, just the opposite is true.  According to psychologist Norman Mackworth, "the best we can hope for from theory is that it should hold together long enough to lead us to a better one."

The second requirement for effective learning is an awareness of one's personal biases.  For example, I happen to be a hugely intuitive person and am blessed with the ability to come up with solutions to problems that others find intractable.  Because of this ability, I am also cursed with an inability to attend to details.  It's not that I wouldn't like to be better at details;  I don't even see them.  Leaders need to be aware of their preferred styles and structure learning to fit their style.

Third, leaders need to expose themselves to unfiltered data.  Many senior executives are completely detached from the realities of their own organization because the information they receive has been filtered, packaged, and "spun" by layers of bureaucracy.  Learning for these leaders can markedly improve when they expose themselves directly to the front lines and learn from the raw data that the "troops" are seeing.

Finally, leaders need to develop a sense of humility.  As Garvin states, "They must recognize they do not have all the answers.  They must acknowledge that superior insights lie elsewhere."  In many cases, the answers are available within their own organization, but not in the corporate suites.  And increasingly, the answers lie outside their organization.  In either case, a learning officer and a learning environment are essential for survival in today's rapidly evolving business environment.

Comments (1)

1. Helpful Article Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on 11-05-2009 17:15 Thank you for the informative article.

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