Grogan Coaching & Consulting » leader-teacher

Learning to Be a Leader-Teacher

Mike — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:19:00 +0000

In the last post I made a case that too many business leaders ignore the vitally important skill of teaching, coaching and guiding the development of future leaders. They may feel they lack the skill to teach others, or they feel that experience is after all the best teacher. Or they may simply be focused on other demands of leadership.

The problem is, ignoring the pro-active, intentional development of future leaders has many detriments:

Thin Depth Chart – What happens if a key “player” leaves or is incapacitated? Companies that depend too heavily on their top executives are vulnerable in the event of a sudden change.
Higher Costs – Acquiring talented executives in the “free agency market” is expensive. Proven leaders will justifiably demand bigger paychecks and benefits.
Negative Mood – What is the impact on those with aspirations to rise up in the company when that company hires outsiders for the top jobs? Mostly, it’s a negative impact that will lead those with the best potential to leave, while others may simply act out their resentment in other ways.
A Culture Resistant to Change – It really does not work so well for leaders to say, as my old football coach liked to declare, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Employees look to their leaders as role models. If those leaders are not themselves learning and teaching, then why should the employees invest in learning and change? A system that is not learning and growing is stagnating and declining. Which do you prefer?
I contend that even without natural teaching abilities, executives and managers can become effective leader-teachers. There are two facets of developing as a leader-teacher, Being and Doing. While there are many techniques (i.e., ways of doing) for teaching and coaching, the most power comes from your essence, your intention, your way of being.

Some ideas on Being…

Be a Beginner. My first attempts at snow skiing were miserable. Somehow, cold, bruised, wet and incompetent left me eager to exit the sport. I gave it another shot a couple years later when a buddy dared me. With better equipment, better conditions and a bit of friendly coaching, I made rapid progress and was bitten by the bug. Similarly, few people in business are child prodigies who instinctively know what to do. Most learned the hard way. Encounter future leaders where they are today, where you were earlier in your career, and work from there. Think back to your own early challenges when you tripped and stumbled. Have compassion, for them as leader wannabes and for yourself as someone who may not yet be a skilled teacher and mentor.

Be Curious. In the first place, curiosity will help you become a better teacher as you search for and experiment with new processes, approaches, and methods. Ask other leaders. Ask coaches. Ask your mentors. Ask those you are teaching. Equally important is finding genuine curiosity about each person you teach. Allow yourself the wonderment (and yes, sometimes frustration) of the unique blend of talents and eccentricities in each individual. Be curious about how to understand their perspective on the world, how to unlock their potential, how to get through.

Be Patient. Learning new skills takes time and practice. We know this about taking up a new sport or hobby, but in business we often forget this truth. This does not mean you must be infinitely patient. If the person you are teaching refuses your advice and support, fails after many attempts, or simply lacks the ability, there comes a time to call it quits.

Be Positive. The way many people house train their pets is to yell and scold them when they do something wrong. Turns out, this is bad training technique. While the technique might control some behaviors, it does it in a mood of fear and dominance, which is not constructive, especially with people. Animal, and human, behaviorists understand you get much better results by rewarding and recognizing positive behaviors. Even when faced with negative results or other mistakes, you can offer positive expectancy, i.e., “I know you can do this.”

Be Transparent. Followers often see their leaders through idealized glasses. When the leader speaks, everyone listens. When the company needs to make a strategic decision, the leader acts with clarity and conviction. The truth is that leaders are often not decisive, clear or effective. Or if they do something with apparent ease, it may be because they have handled similar situations many times. All of this is great material for the teacher-student relationship. When the leader-teacher reveals her past mistakes and conflicted thoughts it provides a powerful perspective to the student. Too many business books and case studies ignore or over-simplify the emotional elements of a decision, or the shades of gray that had to be considered, or the inner flip-flopping that occurred behind the facade. In real life, students need to see and understand the hows and whys in order to get the most powerful learning.

While the BE’s are of utmost importance, there are a few “DO’s” to consider as well:

Do Make Time. It’s kind of like being a good parent: you may not have available all the hours you would like to spend with the kids, but you can largely make up for that with good quality time, being completely present with your children when possible. Likewise, managers blossom when you join them in their world.

Do Ask Questions. It’s unfortunate and ironic: When you are old enough to have acquired experience and wisdom, the younger generation of workers tend to ignore that wisdom as old-fashioned or irrelevant. So rather than tell your protégés how to do things correctly, spend a disproportionate amount of time asking them how they plan to do something, or why they did what they did. As Covey says, seek first to understand. By listening you might: a) learn something new (yes, it is possible); and b) you make them more amenable to eventually listening to your perspective.

Do Encourage Experimentation. These days, with the pace of change, it’s understandable that managers want to avoid mistakes – their own and those of their direct reports. But if you think about how you learned, it was mainly from doing things, making mistakes, correcting things on the next attempt, and iterating your way forward. Guess what? That’s exactly what is needed by the next generation of leaders. So rather than preventing mistakes by disempowering underlings with burdensome processes and micromanagement, give them some rope. You can surely afford a few small losses if it produces powerful learning and helps boost leadership confidence in the long run. They need to feel psychologically safe to make mistakes, admit those mistakes, ask questions and share their views. This element of culture is a far more compelling environment for quality workers than one where people are punished for mistakes, and shushed when they offer a contrary point of view.

Of course, there is plenty more to think about and apply in becoming a better teacher. But these ideas should get you started.

See One, Do One, Teach One

Mike — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:06:00 +0000

In case you hadn’t noticed, the pace of change today is staggering. Businesses cannot survive using yesterday’s strategies and tactics. Heck, even today’s thinking will become obsolete very quickly. This does not mean you have to adopt every new fad that comes along. But if you are not regularly reinventing how you do business, you are doomed to eventually fall behind.

Looking at the other side of the coin, perhaps the best hedge against a rapidly changing global marketplace is to adopt for yourself and your organization the mantra of continuous learning.

The word “learning” may conjure up visions of classrooms, teachers and homework where the learning formula seems mostly about memorizing information for long enough to pass a test. For a business – and most other professions – learning must have a component of enabling action. Information alone is useless unless it generates new ways of thinking and acting – better products, better service, reduced costs, improved efficiencies, etc.

One simple way to think about action-oriented learning was depicted in a scene in the long-running NBC series ER. This was back in the day when then-unknown George Clooney was a regular. There was a scene where a young, impatient resident was reminded of the medical learning mantra: see one, do one, teach one.

In the medical model, a resident first learns to perform a task, say, heart surgery, by watching an expert. (OK, there’s a lot more to it, like reading text books, studying related fields of knowledge, etc. But at some point, the resident watches LOTS of surgeries.) Eventually the resident is allowed to do one, that is perform the surgery herself under close supervision. After she has done enough of them, she may become part of the faculty and eventually teach other aspiring surgeons. It’s a nice complete circle, and it describes the progression in life toward mastering subject matter.

This learning model does not always play out fully. For example, business professionals will sometimes disparage academics by saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

If there is any merit to the criticism of teachers it is that success in academia requires retention of conceptual knowledge and rewards the ability to read, study, debate, and excel on tests. But many teachers do not have to apply their knowledge in “real life.” They seem to graduate from seeing it to teaching it without having the in-between phase of doing.

There is nothing wrong with this model per se, and many teachers thrive within this model and effectively impart and guide learning. But in some subjects, the lack of doing can undermine true learning. Imagine a shop teacher, for example, teaching from a text book without demonstrating expertise with the tools. Similarly, it falls flat for some business leaders when a business school professor with little experience outside the ivory walls presumes to teach leadership.

The business community also has a significant gap in the learning hierarchy. Many (most?) owners and executives spent years observing and learning how to perform the essential moves of running a company. But while they succeeded in the see-one and do-one phases, they often shirk the teach-one element. As a consequence, they may not have a good pool of managers ready and willing to step into leadership roles.

I have a client who is a talented senior executive in a large company. She recently complained to me about the slow progress of one of her department heads. She was especially frustrated at breakdowns and disconnects in their communication. Fortunately, I was able to help her see that for her, leadership and management have become easy and obvious. But her underling is still in the do-one phase. So vast is their difference in experience – and perhaps in natural talent – that it is difficult for the seasoned, accomplished pro to relate to the “rookie,” and vice versa.

Of course, not every business person has the natural aptitude or desire to be great managers and leaders. And some things in business are almost impossible to teach. Imagine Wayne Gretzky trying to teach an up-and-coming hockey star how to anticipate where the puck is going to be before it gets there. This is instinctual knowledge that may not be transferable, even by the greatest teachers.

Still, unless there is a lack of natural ability or motivation, future leaders need good teachers, and a masterful executive should have some skill in teaching and mentoring.

I know there are some business executives who will argue that teaching is not a strength of theirs. Further, some will argue that they learned without a mentor in a kind of trial-by-fire fashion, so they expect that others should also learn that way. While experience is indeed the best teacher, it is also a slow and sometimes expensive teacher. Some of my clients ask me to work with new managers. Although it’s not said explicitly, I know part of the motivation is to help these rookie managers avoid catastrophic mistakes, the kind of mistakes that might lead to lawsuits or mass mutiny. It is also understood that timely coaching can help a new manager recognize and recover more quickly from the inevitable mistakes that come with the territory.

Certainly a Darwinian approach will sometimes produce future leaders. But in these times of accelerated change, companies are often impatient to get leaders so fast that experience can’t keep up. A company can also turn to the free market for proven, accomplished leaders, but this can be expensive. Bringing in an outsider has the added downside of potentially demoralizing the internal candidates who wanted or expected a promotion. Finally, if a company’s leaders are unwilling or unable to teach and coach, they can bring in outsiders to provide this help.

But ultimately, the most holistic and cost-effective approach to develop future leaders is for today’s leaders to make teaching a high priority. Even if teaching does not come easily to a business leader, most leaders can become better teachers if they’re willing to learn.

As someone once said, “A leader’s legacy should not be judged by the results they generated so much as by the number of leaders they produced.” In the next post I’ll offer a few guidelines for becoming a better leader-teacher.