MANAGEMENT / LEADERSHIP SPECIAL ...............How Leaders Need to be Lifelong Learners, Too

How Leaders Need to be Lifelong Learners, Too



Execs need to develop new responses & capabilities to stay ahead of the curve

Leaders need to continue learning throughout their careers. This has become ever truer in the modern world, which is as complex and ambiguous as it ever has been and even more volatile and uncertain. It, therefore, is necessary for leaders to continue developing new responses and capabilities. Years of leadership research have shown that it is indeed possible for senior executives to learn new capabilities. Their personalities do not change, but they don't need to.

Despite being armed with greater access to knowledge and training than ever before, executives still need to be able to integrate that knowledge into their behaviour.

There are 3 steps to doing that.

You must begin by identifying a need for improvement.

Next, you must achieve an initial competence in the new skills.

Most of us have been here before. When learning to ride a bike, this was the point at which we took off our training wheels and realised that we couldn't balance. We then had to master staying upright. This requires a tremendous attention, practice and persistence. Finally, you must reach a stage at which your new competence is unconscious, rather than conscious.
When practice makes perfect, it's exactly like riding a bike: Once you know it, you always will be able to do it without thinking. My research during the past 25 years has led me to identify four major obstacles: The Knowing-Doing Gap Today's executives tend to know much more than they act on. Knowing something doesn't guarantee that you can implement it. Executives sometimes confuse understanding a concept with implementing it. When they understand a concept, when the whole thing makes a great deal of sense, it seems as though that box has been checked -at least until they get a strong feedback that their behaviour doesn't really measure up.
Insufficient Investment

Too often today's senior executives underestimate how much effort is required for them to learn new leadership knowledge in a way that will be helpful. They are quickly satisfied with a vague understanding, so often they underinvest in developing a more granular understanding of a concept.

If it's not in your head, you can't use it under real-time conditions. If you want the knowledge to be in your head, you must take notes and review them. Insufficient Persistence

If you want to behave differently from a habitual response and more consistently with a new objective, you need to intercept the habitual response before it is produced, search your mind to identify a more appropriate response and produce that more appropriate response -all of this in real time and under pressure.

Insufficient Support

When executives manage to become conscious of their shortcomings and invest enough time and energy to develop and practice new behaviours, often they are tripped up by their environment.

(Writer is a professor of management practice at Insead.) 

JEAN-FRANCOIS MANZONI

NYT News Service

ET140624