For many leaders, the commitment to learning – both their
own and that of their workers – is a given.
We all recognize the value of learning, after all, embracing different
experiences and perspectives and encouraging opportunities for our teams or
organizations to learn more about our work or ourselves so we can perform more
effectively. Yet in an age of ongoing
change and disruption, how do we learn most effectively? Beyond our ready willingness, what do we
focus on in order to become better creative leaders?
We may cite various familiar examples to orient our own approaches
to learning. Steve Jobs, for instance,
relied on a constant curiosity that provided learning and, in turn, the
capacity to connect disparate elements, like applying the calligraphy he
learned in college to computer fonts used first in Apple computers. Creativity is “connecting things,” he
memorably said, and to do so requires learning them in the first place.
Likewise, as digital technologies have transformed
businesses and relationships, it seems fairly straightforward that learning how
to navigate them requires the regular refreshing of technical skills and social
practices. To empower us all to use
these technological tools and platforms more effectively, we might highlight
the dramatic re-working of various formal professional training and educational
practices, from internal organizational training to external schooling. Underpinning this re-training for others,
leaders must themselves learn about how training should be designed and
customized to maximize the learning of others.
Reflecting on the complexity of learning for leaders – and
the necessity of their learning to learn
better – yields several other helpful approaches.
- Learning (to Fail) Quickly
No one running a business today can afford to encourage his
or her workers simply to fail. Leaders
must balance the benefit of learning with the sometimes very real costs of
inevitable failures. Too often, failing
fast or often is parroted as a goal of creative projects or organizations
without a fuller recognition of how learning needs to be built essentially into
that process. We ritually talk about the
value of “learning to fail quickly,” in other words, when describing how to nurture
innovation and creativity. More apt,
perhaps, is the way creative industry consultant and coach Charles Day puts it:
we should leave out the middle two words in order to emphasize the more
fundamental priority of learning quickly.
- Adaptive Learning
Learning quickly requires sensitivity to the different kinds
of failure that leaders and other creatives experience in business. In other words, when focusing on failures, in
particular, we need to adapt and learn differently from different situations. While intuitively obvious, such a need for
adaptability ultimately is about a general openness to learning regardless of
specific situation. For example, Harvard
professor Amy Edmondson recently identified several different types of failure,
such as those that are preventable in predictable scenarios or systems, deviations
from system specs, and the unavoidable failures that arise in complex systems
or scenarios. Based on these types,
leaders and organizations can better enable learning by (1) getting past blame,
(2) establishing clear if varied reporting and communications systems
processes, and (3) instituting consistent modes of analysis of failures, and
(4) determining opportunities for experimentation.
- Learning Organizations
Edmondson’s approach to enabling learning across different
types of failure extends an important, two-decades-old emphasis on learning
across the organization as a key to creating competitive advantage. In 1990, Peter M. Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice ofthe Learning Organization, a groundbreaking call for thoroughgoing openness
to learning at every level of organizations about operational improvements and
efficiency. For Senge, whose thinking
was shaped partly by a fascination at the time with “Total Quality Management”
and continuous process improvement, leaders were the designers, teachers, and
finally stewards of learning. As such,
they need to be in service to the learning of others as well as the
organization as a whole. This service is
powerful and far-reaching: learning across organizations is not so much about
problem-solving as bridging the natural creative tension that exists between
vision and current reality – and supporting leaders’ efforts to build creative
cultures and collaboratively realizing organizational goals.
- Learning to be Introspective and Self-leading
Analyzing and learning from the complexities of their
organizations is essential for creative leaders but it is not enough. Equally necessary is introspection and making
self-reflection an ongoing leadership practice.
This is often particularly challenging for those already successful at
analytical or creative work: such high potentials are often unprepared leaders
who must develop new capacities at the speed of business. One powerful approach to connecting
reflection to action is the authentic leadership thinking of Bill George,
former CEO of Medtronic and author of True North. In this and other works,
George calls upon leaders to identify their core beliefs and values, as discoverable
in their own life stories, as guideposts to leading richer and more successful lives,
both professional and personal.
Continual and thoughtful learning may be a cliché in life
but it needs to be a concrete and very real driver of the work of effective
leaders. In his classic, On Becoming a Leader, management guru Warren
Bennis captures well how knowing the world and knowing the self serve as cornerstones
to a foundation for successful leadership. Distilling so much of others’ insights on
learning for business leaders, he recommends three active, ongoing steps:
1. Look back at your childhood,
adolescence and use your experiences to make things happen in the present;
2. Consciously seek the kinds of
experiences that will improve and enlarge you; and
3. Take risks, knowing that failure
is vital and inevitable.
Valuable advice for creative leaders to embrace as a basis
for better learning – and leading.
