We are beings that evolve through learning. Everything we do, and where we are at this point in human evolution, is based on our natural state as learners. And we never stop learning. We are constantly learning all our lives. In leadership learning is valuable in two ways: Do we actually help people to learn during our interactions? Most of our working time is spent in a series of recurrent activities, either based on an clear agenda, or based on agenda messed up by someone else, making it a 24-hour workday! 🙂 So, if we are not aware of what’s happening, we may end up tired, out of energy, and frustrated that we did not achieve anything of what we had planned for—in which case our job aspirations are not fulfilled because we did not have time to focus on our important, long-term, personal, valuable and impactful plans. I wonder on whom should we be upset? I hope your working days don’t look like this, but if they do you need to stop, think and plan for a change. What is your job aspiration and how do you intend to change the world from where you are? And if the most important opportunity you have is growing your leadership, which can then multiply by growing the others around you, what would require your attention next? Someone said that we are constantly underestimating what we are learning from people around us. I know some people who read approximately 7,000 books in their life. This is quite a lot. But even though it’s a lot, let’s do some math: you’re with your colleagues a minimum of 40 or 50 hours per week, and if you’re an avid reader, you may read about 10 hours per week. So, in terms of learning, if we simply analyze the quantity, you’re spending more time learning from people in your office than the potential avid reader is learning from reading books. This is a particularly valuable achievement one leader can have: a great context to grow others around you most of the time. I would like you to imagine (or maybe you already know) those babies who are learning how to walk. This is a very complicated learning process. They do not have any know-how in terms of the process, and very little practice with standing vertically. But they learn to walk because they really want it. And they learn with joy and playfulness. They are experimenting. They try, make an error, learn, and try again. Now, imagine that a bunch of consultants come in to talk to the baby. They write on flipcharts, show some slides to explain the muscles, joints, equilibrium and vertical positions to the baby, and then deliver a process flow on the ‘steps’ to be done for the outcome: baby walking. Would it help? Would the baby learn how to walk any faster? What do you think? Let me share with you some relevant points as conclusions to the above story: I learned about this from Molly Gordon, to whom I am grateful. The metaphor of babies learning how to walk revealed to me how difficult learning in fact is, and that this is continuously happening over and over again for all of the babies around the world. It was evocative of leadership to me—that is, it showed me that we should be aware of what we should stop, start, and continue doing so as to help the people around us learn. In a recent study on LinkedIn about the most valuable skills for 2019, the top 3 were: I wonder what makes the people around you learn these skills. Do you need them as well? What is the most recent learning experience that you had, as a leader? More than just problem solving and providing answers, asking the right question is key when learning something new. As leaders, we mostly focus on finding answers, either by thinking something over, talking to others, reading, or searching on Google. 🙂 But sometimes a question is more valuable than an answer because if you manage to ask the right question you will challenge the thinking of another person and, potentially, open them up to reflection. Let me give you an example. I was reading a book called More Time to Think by Nancy Kline. One of the questions that I found in the book was ‘If you knew that you are intelligent, beautiful and wise, what thoughts would you dare to have?’ When it comes to discovering how and when you best learn as a leader, and knowing who you really are, I found this question particularly good for thinking more deeply. When you learn, you need to challenge your role, no matter the seniority that you formally have. You may need to become a novice and acknowledge that you don’t know it all. You explore, ask questions, and begin to feel comfortable with discomfort in this sense. This is a great achievement. Most of the executive teams that I’ve worked with avoid or minimize the time spent on learning together. They consider it as lacking value and believe that they are “losing their time” instead of making money! What they are declaring is paradoxical because, the best teams I’ve ever worked with are also the teams that spend a lot of time learning together. The key word here is ‘together.’ In general, we don’t want to learn when we have to; our wish is to continuously learn with focus and dedication, both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal learning is the classical way in which we learn: it is about acquiring knowledge, and increasing know-how, new skills, new information. It is also called functional learning. The better part of this is the know-how that you need to acquire and being aware that you need to learn. The other part is vertical learning: this is a deeper and more complicated form of learning, because it is about yourself. It raises the question why we
You may or may not know that mentorship of disciples is the oldest learning path in the world. The term ‘disciple’ comes from the same word as ‘discipline.’ More specifically, the disciple executes all that the master asks of them. The reason for such behaviour is the complete faith in the mentor’s knowledge, skills and abilities and not out of fear. The disciple is committed to you—no matter what. And it is only disciples who can one day become masters themselves: only they are the disciplined ones. For thousands of years knowledge and skills have been passed from one generation to the other: from masters to disciples. It is interesting that one-on-one learning has lasted for so long. I also realized that it’s better to learn something one-on-one before going public. There are strong examples, such as father-son teaching, and teacher-student relationships. This is how you gain personalized knowledge and build trust in what you learn. You also have the opportunity to learn in your own time and at your own pace. The mentor-disciple relationship is the most effective way of learning. The state of discipleship entails a bond that forms between master and disciple. The relationship goes beyond mutual respect, admiration, dedication or duty. Yes, it entails trust and understanding, but that is not the whole thing. It is only one facet of the complex relationship between master and disciple. Let’s pause here. Think about people that you admired your whole life. What makes them special enough for you to admire them for so long? What can you learn about yourself when you reflect on that? How do you feel when you think of that? Do you have someone who fills the role of a mentor in your life right now? Switching roles, do you have any disciples? How do you approach them? What are their intentions in regards to learning, mostly when you are around? Can you observe whether they behave differently in your presence? Disciples are not around us all the time. It should be someone who is ready to invest a lot of time and energy in the learning process, to really ‘sweat it out’, and has the ability to absorb and assimilate lifetime teachings, instead of simply acquiring a new skill that will soon be forgotten or never used. It should be someone ready to do something different. The relationship between mentor and disciple is based on the respectable character of both sides, and the ability to conduct themselves in a moral and professional manner, with complete faith in one another. If you think about this type of relationship, in what way do you see it relevant to you and your leadership role? So far, we talked about the fact that not anyone can be a disciple. You probably guessed that, likewise, not everyone can be a master. A master is a great leader. This implies conscious efforts on all aspects of your career no matter how open or closed your business environment is. And the single most important role of a leader? To help people grow. This can only be achieved once you managed to help yourself grow. A master leader creates learning opportunities from any interaction, discussion, challenge, success or failure. They always put learning first and results second. There are three steps towards becoming a master. (These steps are taken from Robert Green.) Apprenticeship: This step is when we learn the basic elements and rules of something new. We do not feel yet as though we know the territory, because we are still outsiders. We do not yet see the full picture, just parts of it, and we cannot really connect those parts together. Our powers are limited. It requires a lot of hard work, effort and sweat to get past this phase. Only the ones who are determined and have a sense of purpose can go through an apprenticeship successfully. This is a phase where we do not feel at all comfortable; Creative-Active: On this step we start to see the connection between things, and we expand our understanding of the play area. We are going ‘inside the system’ so we can have a view of what the system looks like. This comes with a new power: the ability to create and play with new elements; Mastery: This step is about clarity. It happens when our degree of knowledge, experience, and focus is so deep that we can now see the whole picture with complete clarity. If we consider painters, do they become great just because they have a great technique or because they ‘see’ clearly how the picture should look like when it’s complete? This is why the artwork of masters touches us to the core; the artist has captured something on the essence of reality, and created something that is about all of us. That is why the brilliant people, such as scientists, can uncover new laws of physics, and inventors or entrepreneurs can hit upon something that no one else has imagined. What I hear a lot these days is that we don’t have enough time to deepen our learning. On the other hand, if we look to the past, there have been very few people who became masters in something at one point. What happens when we do not master anything? We become slaves: to time—as it passes, we grow weak and less capable than we may realize. In his book Mastery, Robert Green offers a great description of this journey. In fact, without mastery, we are in a dead-end career. We become captive to the opinions of others. Rather than the mind connecting us to reality, we become disconnected and locked in a narrow chamber of thought. The human, who depends on focused attention for its survival, now becomes the distracted human who cannot really focus on anything. One final point. When the disciple becomes the master and teaches the lessons once again to pass them on, the gains become exponential. The learning that takes
The reason that behaviour becomes so important in leadership roles is the fact that you are more visible: you meet and talk with more people and you are exposed to a wider, more complex interpersonal environment. Not to mention the fact that you are becoming an example for others: you walk the walk and talk the talk. This is the part that you cannot change much as a leader. The only thing that you can manage is your behavior, if you are willing to spend the time learning about yourself and decoding said behavior. As people, we only understand what we see rather than what we do not see. What does seeing each other mean? It means that, more than registering each other physically, we notice and observe behaviour, or the way in which people act or conduct themselves. This is how others come to see you as a leader: through your behavior. When do we become aware of the importance of behaviour? Usually only when we behaved in an inappropriate manner. Or, when we meet someone who is really challenging us, and it feels that whatever we are doing or saying, it’s not okay. We feel it so obviously at that point, we know that behavior counts! Let me share with you a few leadership situations where your behavior matters a lot: Let’s stop here, and think about the impact of your behavior on situations, people and contexts, together. Can you share with me one specific behaviour that you’ve shown in your leadership role that you remember? What was the context? Was your behavior appropriate? Did you feel good after? Behavior is the result of things that we know and don’t know about ourselves and others. About yourself: In a discussion with someone, you behave in a certain way based on your beliefs—about the other person, your experience together, what you know about them, what you previously did in a similar situation, if you think that you can or cannot solve something together, your emotional state etc. The more you are aware of this and the more you learn about why and how you behave in a certain way to accomplish what you hope to achieve, the better you can behave as a leader in the future. If you’ve made it to a leadership role, you have what it requires to be a leader. I wonder: in your role, how do you perceive the behavior of other leaders and how you behave in response to that? The more you realize how complex the causes of other people’s behavior’s are, the more you can learn to listen to what people are not saying to see things that are not shown, and to understand the multitude of elements guiding people’s actions. The iceberg model is a good way to understand this. In the above picture, what is visible (the tip of the iceberg) is the behaviour itself. That is all that you can see with the person in front of you. What you do not see, however, is the larger, hidden part of that person and that interaction. They may not be aware of this either. Outward behavior and action is just the visible part of who we are, but it is based on our hidden experiences, fears, values, believes, know-how etc. My hope is that by knowing this you can realize just how complex human behaviour is. This may help you decide if you want to jump to conclusions regarding someone’s behaviour, or slow down and attempt to understand it. Your behaviour very much depends on how much you know about yourself and how willing you are to align yourself with your intentions by choosing the most appropriate behaviour style based on what those intentions are. This requires that you find who you really are. Image by Tumisu from Pixabay