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Let’s stop
pretending that it’s easy for leaders to learn; it’s not. A number
of organizational barriers and our expectations of leaders get in
the way of effective learning.
First, learning
for leaders is typically carried out in executive education programs
far removed from the realities of organizational life. This makes
it difficult for the leaders to transfer new learning to the organization
without setting off the corporate cynicism alarm. Second, leaders
are hired as leaders because they are expert decision-makers who
can consistently apply their experience and intellect to the organization’s
problems and quickly resolve them. Leaders are hired for their ability
to perform, not for their ability to learn, change, and grow, but
the very ability to learn increasingly sustains performance for
leaders over the course of their career. However, to put top-performing
leaders into learning situations where they must suspend judgment
and be vulnerable goes strongly against the grain—to put it bluntly,
it’s not what we are paying them for.
One additional
impediment to learning for leaders is that their role requires them
to spend most of their energy focused outside the organization:
on shareholders, the finance community, and the press. They are
preoccupied with managing the image and health of the company, and
often cannot effectively use internal resources for learning. Let’s
look at each of these barriers in turn, how they came to be, and
how leaders can surmount them and learn collaboratively.
Executive Education for
Leaders
Executive
education plays a vital role in leadership learning. Typically,
when leaders need to refresh their knowledge, they are sent to executive
retreats where academic experts regale them with the latest management
theories. Most of these retreats are held at reputable universities
and provide high-quality learning opportunities. Many programs now
add experiential and case-based group work to the traditional “sage
on the stage” lectures from experts. Yet, the insights that the
leader experiences at the retreat session have no fertile ground
to take root in back in the organization. Back at the office, workers
often perceive the new ideas as just the latest program-du-jour.
The worst case is that subordinates feign excitement over the new
ideas or programs in the after-retreat meeting, and then leave the
room shaking their heads and muttering about how out of touch their
leaders are with the real issues of the organization.
Why does
this happen? The new practices are not consistent with the current
work practices of the organization. John Seely
Brown of Xerox PARC says the fault lies with lack of embeddedness
of what leaders learn at executive retreats. This, according to
Brown, is a result of our educational background, where knowledge,
in order to be validated by testing, must be abstracted from practice
and presented in a classroom-type environment. But, paradoxically,
the act of abstracting the knowledge results in an inability to
transfer the knowledge back into the work context.
Team Learning and Learning
Anxiety
This question
of embeddedness is increasingly addressed in organizations through
collaborative learning activities among teams. Some of the methods
that teams have used successfully to learn together include after-action
review, peer seminars, critical thinking exercises, and discussion
forums. However, leaders in the organization seldom engage in these
team-based activities and, if they do, communication is often stifled
due to workers’ fear of being seen as incompetent by their leaders.
Leaders are also unwilling to expose their lack of knowledge to
subordinates in a team-learning situation. Chris Argyris, the organizational
learning guru, would attribute the failure of team learning when
it involves leaders to defensive routines—ways that we protect ourselves
from new learning due to the risk of exposing ourselves to threats.
It is frustratingly true that the people we most need to be good
learners—our leaders—find little incentive and great risk in engaging
in embedded team learning activities.
To explore
this conundrum further, we need to look at what MIT Professor Edgar
Schein calls “learning anxiety.” Learning anxiety occurs when
we set out to learn something new, and realize that we are risking
our sense of competence, our identity, and our status with our reference
group. How does learning anxiety manifest for leaders? First, any
appearance of incompetence will be doubly bad for a leader, who
is supposed to be an authority. Second, a leader’s self-confidence
may be affected as he discovers that he must experience a temporary
incompetence to learn any new skill. Also, if one leader within
the organization does risk becoming a learner and acquires new capabilities,
she may be seen as being out of step with other leaders in the organization,
of not “being with the program,” and may lose her group identity.
Leaders as Lone Learners
The above
scenarios seem to point to only one conclusion: leaders, if they
are to learn at all, must learn in isolation. Let’s look at a case
in point: that of George M.C. Fisher’s tenure as CEO at Kodak. Fisher
came to Kodak in 1993 as the first outsider ever to run the company.
He was seen as a savior at Kodak; a leader who would wave his magic
wand and duplicate his successes with Motorola, a high tech semiconductor
and equipment manufacturer, at Kodak, the film giant. Fisher moved
quickly to draw on his high-tech networks and pull in outsiders
to help Kodak move from film into digital photography. Most of the
ideas he had were good, and many are taking root today, but in 1997
consumers were just discovering AOL and Amazon.com—they weren’t
ready to print their photos at home, to process them online, nor
to send them via email or post them to family websites. What Fisher
ran up against was the leader’s worst scenario: the sunset technology—film—was
making all the profit, and the new technology—digital—was the hope
of the company’s future. He spent much time mediating between the
two camps in a difficult situation. To make digital a success, resources
had to be taken away from the film group, which cut into today’s
profit. If he continued to invest in film, Kodak would lose its
chance to lead in tomorrow’s market. When Kodak ended up in a price
war with archrival Fuji, bad went to worse for Fisher’s strategy.
In hindsight,
no one can truly criticize the decisions Fisher made; it was a messy
and difficult time for Kodak, and the painful transition needed
to be made. From the perspective of learning, however, one wonders
where George Fisher could turn for new knowledge and learning. Clearly,
executive education was not the answer – no one had a good theory
to cover this scale of transition to a new technology with unknown
potential. Since he had been placed on a pedestal at Kodak due to
his successes at Motorola, surely Fisher was not inclined to ask
his executive team for advice or engage in joint learning with them.
It seems the only outlet available for him was a consultant or an
outside coach who could bring perspective and new knowledge in.
You can see how solitary such a path would be, especially when the
corporation reaches a crisis point. Yet, in most cases outside the
executive seminar, consultant and coaches are who most leaders rely
on for learning.
Executive Coaching for
Leaders
There has
been a tremendous interest and growth in the executive coaching
phenomenon. The buzz is more than just buzz, however: coaching is
an effective way to learn. Also, executive coaching gets around
many of the obstacles outlined above:
learning anxiety:
because the leader only has to expose her not-knowing one-on-one;
lack of time:
the executive can have his coaching sessions according to his own
calendar
embeddedness:
the coach will only work on those issues which are workplace-specific
and relevant.
The recent
case of GE’s push into e-business and use of upward mentoring supports
the feasibility of coaching for executive learning. When GE began
their push into e-business, CEO Welch realized that none of the
senior executives knew anything about the Web. He supported the
development of a corporate-wide “upward mentoring” program enacted
to assist 1000 GE senior executives. These leaders spent 3-4 hours
a week with ebusiness mentors, typically 20-somethings who grew
up with the Internet, who taught them to use the Internet and analyze
competitors’ websites. GE cites expanded market share and increased
customer loyalty as signs of the success of this executive coaching
program.
Many of the
best organizations are now combining executive coaching with executive
education seminars as their leadership development strategy, but
this is still not a complete solution. We are still playing into
the myth that leaders are limited to individual learning, which
they will only lose if they enter a group-learning situation. As
the new ways of working: collaboration, Internet technology, supply
chain integration, and boundary-spanning become the daily norm for
business, we must move to support our leaders in learning collaboratively
so that those skills can carry over into these new ways of working.
Leaders Learning Together
Collaborative
learning methods for leaders can take place both external to the
organization and internally. External groups can provide the needed
objectivity and safety that leaders often require in order to let
down their defenses and learn. Internal groups, on the other hand,
offer the advantage of more embeddedness and a higher initial level
of shared knowledge.
One leading
example of an external collaborative learning approach for leaders
is Leaders Circles, a method
developed by Carter McNamara. The function of the Circles is to
address specific problems of the leader members on a rotating basis.
Each meeting involves a focus on one member’s quandary or a problem
that they are working with. The other members of the group, all
leaders of organizations themselves, then offer feedback, advice,
and resources to assist the focus member. At a subsequent meeting,
the focus member will report back to the Circle on how she took
action based on the advice and resources offered by the group. Each
Circle evolves as a fully customized vehicle to address the concerns
of that Circle’s members. While the Circles, as cross-organizational
structures, cannot fully address the embeddedness question, they
do bring leaders together on a practitioner level. Accompanied by
skillful facilitation and trust-building over time, the Leaders
Circles appear to be an effective collaborative learning method
for leaders. In founder McNamara’s words: “The primary goal of the
Leaders Circles is to meet the ongoing needs of circle members.
This requires members’ authentic involvement in their circles to
express their needs and how their circles can help them to meet
these needs. Achieving this authentic involvement requires members’
ongoing mutual support to engage wholeheartedly and take responsibility
for their development in their circle. This full engagement and
responsibility produce each member’s highly individualized outcomes.
Members’ deep learning occurs as a by-product of their authentic
involvement and in whatever form needed by each member.”
As mentioned
above, collaborative learning for leaders, internal to the organization,
faces a number of hurdles. One possible approach is building a leadership
community of practice. This community would be a network of people
who share a practice, in this case, leadership, and can derive benefit
from sharing knowledge. Here, there would need to be a very skillful
community design and facilitation in order to avoid competitiveness
and to really open up the exchange among leaders. When the community
is young, and to build safety and trust, invite outside speakers
who can speak to general leadership issues, and then engage the
group in discussion. Later, as the group develops, joint learning
projects can be proposed that will deepen the level of sharing.
Clear guidelines that separate what happens in the community from
daily work may help the leaders see the value of learning together.
If the community truly develops trust over time, it may organically
evolve to a more applied learning situation with the organization’s
business, like the Leaders Circles, but there should still be a
focus on learning jointly about leadership itself, rather than just
another meeting about the company’s problems.
The Blended Solution
Like every
successful learning strategy, learning for leaders combines approaches
customized and specific to their needs and abilities. Because of
the expectations we have of our leaders, team learning on a daily
basis is not realistic. We must honor the excellence that our leaders
bring to the organization, but also create opportunities for them
to continuously learn in ways that benefit both the individual and
the organization.
To review,
three general approaches to learning for leaders have been presented
here.
Executive education
retreats were found to be good for exposing leaders to new ideas
and theories, but often the new learning cannot be disseminated
to the organization because it lacks embeddedness with real work
practices
Executive coaching
has been a very effective method for leaders’ development, as it
frequently results in behavioral change and new self-knowledge,
and addresses the issues of learning anxiety and lack of time for
formal programs
Certain collaborative
learning methods will work for leaders. Externally, Leaders Circles
is a method for allowing peer learning among leaders, customized
to the members’ needs. Internally, leaders could benefit from leadership
communities of practice that focus first on formal presentations
and move over time to joint projects on leadership
If these
three approaches can be brought together, in full recognition of
the kinds of constraints leaders face as learners, organizations
will find that they are developing a more in-touch, responsive,
and curious leadership cadre that will model and support continuous
learning throughout the organization.
Dori Digenti is an author and consultant helping organizations
develop collaboration, learning, and network strategies. She is
principal of Learning
Mastery and facilitator of C3 LearnNet.
Reach her at digenti@learnmaster.com.
VDD093001GR
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