By David Slocum
For many leaders, the commitment to learning – both their own and that of their workers – is a given. But doing so in practice is a bit more difficult. From my teaching and reading at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, here are four big themes and three practical tips on how to improve learning and leading in your organization.
There is obvious value to embracing different experiences and perspectives and creating opportunities for our teams or organizations. The goal is 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, created the capacity to connect disparate elements. For example, he applied the calligraphy he learned in college to computer fonts that first appeared in early Apple Apple computers. Creativity is “connecting things,” he memorably said. And to connect things, one must learn these things in the first place.
Likewise, as digital technologies transform businesses and relationships, it’s clear that learning to navigate these technologies requires regular refreshing of technical skills and social practices. A lot of people have to rethink their formal professional training or education in business to be able to use social media successfully. That means leaders must relearn themselves and envision the proper training for others to learn these new trends and practices as well.
Reflecting on the complexity of learning for leaders – and the necessity of their learning to learn better – yields several other helpful approaches:
1) 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. We ritually talk about the value of “learning to fail quickly,” when describing how to nurture innovation and creativity. Too often, failing fast or often is a goal of creative projects or start-ups without full recognition of how learning needs to be built into that process. 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.”
2) Adaptive Learning
Learning quickly requires sensitivity to the different kinds of failure that leaders and other creatives experience. In other words, when focusing on failures, in particular, we need to adapt and learn from different situations. While intuitively obvious, it’s harder in practice. It means being open to learning regardless of the specific situation. For example, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson recently identified several different types of failure. She categorizes some as preventable in predictable scenarios, others as deviations from system specs, and the remaining as unavoidable failures that arise in complex scenarios. Based on these types, leaders and organizations can better enable learning by: (1) Getting past blame; (2) Establishing clear communications processes; (3) Instituting consistent modes of analysis of failures; and (4) Determining opportunities for experimentation.
3) Learning Organizations
Edmondson’s approach extends an important, two-decades-old emphasis on learning across the organization as a key to creating competitive advantage. In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, a groundbreaking call for openness to learning at every level of organizations. It focuses on how learning can create operational improvements and efficiency. Senge’s thinking was shaped partly by a fascination with “Total Total Quality Management” and continuous process improvement. For him, leaders were the designers, teachers, and 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. It’s about bridging the natural creative tension that exists between vision and current reality. It’s about supporting leaders’ efforts to build creative cultures and to collaboratively realizing organizational goals.
4) Learning to be Introspective and Self-leading
Analyzing and learning from the complexities of 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 who are already successful at analytical or creative work. Such high potential people are often unprepared to develop new capacities. 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. These are guideposts to leading richer and more successful lives (both professional and personal).
Continual and thoughtful learning may be a cliché. But it needs to be a concrete concept used by effective leaders. In his classic, On Becoming a Leader, management guru Warren Bennis explains 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:
- Look back at your childhood, adolescence and use your experiences to make things happen in the present
- Consciously seek the kinds of experiences that will improve and enlarge you
- Take risks, knowing that failure is vital and inevitable.
This is valuable advice for creative leaders to embrace as a basis for better learning – and leading.
Professor David Slocum is the Faculty Director of Executive MBA Program at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. Slocum designs, leads, and teaches executive training programs, and is a certified executive coach, with a focus on leadership and management of the creative and media industries. You can follow him @davidslocum on Twitter or at his blog.