How Leaders Learn - Future Ready Leadership

“Leadership isn’t taught, it’s caught.”

These words from Warren Bennis, the man widely regarded as the “Father of Leadership Studies,” reflect a simple but profound truth.

While there are as many possible developmental pathways for emerging leaders as there are emerging leaders, evidence shows that experience is by far the most effective starting point for the developmental journey. Successful leaders are more likely to grow out of experience than from learning that comes entirely from classrooms and executive education programs.

But experience, while vital, is only the first step. In order to turn your experiences into actionable leadership insights, you first need to translate them into practical learning. Here is a simple four-step process you can use:

Reflection: Experiences are raw and unfiltered. As we saw in the earlier Reflective Practice Module, reflection is your opportunity to revisit your experiences from the vantage point of time, ask yourself questions about what you have learned and consider your own role in the events and outcomes.

Hypothesis: The next step is to use your reflections to form a preliminary explanation (a hypothesis) of what you’ve learned from your experience. Then, write the hypothesis down, in short and simple form. A sentence is much better than a page! Remember, at this point, you’re operating from very limited information that’s all coming from a single source – yourself – so think of your hypothesis as a jumping off point for further investigation, rather than the endpoint of your learning.

Testing/Prototyping: The next step is to test your hypothesis in action. Testing involves taking the preliminary ideas you’ve embodied in your hypothesis and trying them out. Prototyping is an easy, low-risk and effective way to do your testing. Prototypes are small scale and inexpensive models that were originally developed by product and experience designers to help them iterate, test, learn and improve.

Working with prototypes gives leaders opportunities to test their hypotheses, as well as clear and direct ways to share their ideas with other people. When possible, input from experienced leaders can be an invaluable source ideas and input to further strengthen your prototype design.

Pototyping for Leadership Success is a resource you can use to help you design a successful prototype. Then, complete the exercise on page 4 of the workbook.

Feedback: Since both leadership and learning are social phenomena, the involvement of other people in the process of shaping and developing your leadership is essential.

Once you’ve:

reflected on your experience,
formed a hypothesis about how you can learn from it
developed a prototype to test whether or not acting on your hypothesis brings about the desired improvement in your leadership

the next step is to get feedback from trusted peers, outside advisors, and above all, experienced leaders. Legendary leadership thinker and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith describes a particularly effective approach to asking for and giving feedback as “feedforward.”

Done this way, feedback can be an unparalleled opportunity to strengthen your ideas about how to improve your leadership as well as your effectiveness at implementing them. Here are a few tips on how to make this powerful tool work for you:

Start by asking for the feedback.
Make your questions as clear and specific as possible. In deciding what questions to ask, ask yourself “what information, knowledge or perspectives will most help me to enhance my leadership impact by strengthening my idea, improving my implementation or contribute to my growth as a leader?”
Listen carefully and with an open mind to what you hear. Not more, not less. This is not the time to defend or justify your ideas, explain how you arrived at them, or educate the person who is offering you feedback.
Be sure to thank the person who has generously volunteered their time to help you – regardless of whether or not you liked what they had to say!
Afterward, reflect carefully, and with an open mind, on the feedback you’ve received. It’s important to focus on feedback that can be genuinely helpful to you. Only you can decide which feedback to act on, and which to set aside.

Dive Deeper:

Here is important research into the how’s and why’s of effective feedback. Leadership-is-a-contact-sport-by-Goldsmith-Morgan

Remember, feedback is an opportunity to gain valuable insights into how we impact the world today, so we can learn new ways to elevate and amplify our impact tomorrow.

At its most useful, it is part of an ongoing and iterative process of growth, not a “one and done.”

Your Turn:

Think about a significant experience you’ve had that has contributed to your growth as a leader. Then, complete the exercise on page 4 of the workbook.

Micro-Lessons for Shaping Leaders