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Leadership and Learning
The space between us
All that has been discussed so far, in the previous two articles on “Coaching as a Critical Leadership Capability”, is based on the belief that leadership can not be understood as something that you give to or exercise over another person or group. Neither is it something that exists in your head, or that is achieved by the force of your will. Rather, I would like you to consider the possibility that leadership is what is created in the space between people when they connect and engage together with respect and trust to achieve common goals. If this is the case, leadership is something we co-construct together by our behaviours. This is the style of leadership that Ralph Stacey (2007) is talking about when he defines leadership as, “participating in interaction with others in reflective and imaginative ways”.
Once you start to think about leadership in this way, coaching must become an integral part of the way you lead and interact. It can not just be sidelined to formal, timetabled meetings. This is not to say that there is no value in sitting down more formally with people from time to time to give them your full and undivided attention. Instead, I am arguing for a mix of formal and informal coaching, where the necessary skills and behaviours are an integral part of your leadership style.
Coaching in the moment
Never underestimate the power of coaching in the moment. Thirty seconds spent talking together during a critical incident, where you remember to ask questions rather than issue instructions, is coaching at its most impactful. Or consider a situation where you get someone to change their mindset from describing an intractable problem, to flipping it over and turning it into a “how to” statement which contains a goal that can now be worked towards. That is the power of coaching in real time.
A leadership toolbox
To achieve this simply and consistently, you first need to master a few basic tools and skills, all of which I will set out and explain in this and subsequent articles. These include:
o Helping people to learn in a robust manner and to apply that learning in the work environment
o Providing appropriate support and challenge
o Learning and applying the key skills of: Rapport building, listening and attending, questioning, use of silence, focusing, summarising and giving feedback
o Goal setting and problem solving skills
o Applying the key values of respect, empathy, genuineness and empowerment
o Understanding the difference between “push” and “pull” coaching styles, and having the flexibility to use a variety of styles in response to a given individual or team’s needs
o Having an awareness of a range of frameworks that can help guide and structure coaching discussions, without ever applying one single model inappropriately, habitually or uncritically
Helping people to learn
Learning is a key human activity and an essential process for organisations. If both people and institutions do not learn at a pace equal to or greater than that of the change in their environment, they are in danger of becoming superfluous to requirements. This is a law that has been evident since Darwin, and it means that an essential element of leadership is that of helping people and organisations to adapt, grow and learn. In this view, leadership, enabling learning and successfully navigating change are all synonymous.
If the job of a leader is to facilitate learning and change in the pursuit of organisational goals, this begs a very simple but important question: How do people and organisations learn? Until we understand this essential process and how it works, we have little chance of being able to support and enable it.
Learning to cycle
One of the clearest and most effective explanations of the learning process, for leader and coach alike, was produced over thirty years ago by an American academic named Kolb.
Kolb’s simple but powerful first premise was that in order to learn, especially within an organisation context, we need to have a concrete experience. No experience, no learning. The problem is that experience comes in two categories: passive and active.
Passive learning
Passive learning, which is the predominant style of learning provided by our formal education system, normally means that someone else had gone out and engaged with the world on our behalf. They have gone through all the confusion and sensemaking, and have struggled with the messy stuff of life so that we do not have to. They then take the learning they have gained, distil it and pass it on to us in a simple, east to swallow medium. The most commonly used media of this type include books, lectures, seminars, films, on line learning programmes, etc.
Passive learning has advantages in that it is simple and easy to package and everybody can be given the same dose. We have most of us, however, heard the joke about lecturing: It is the quickest means of getting information from the lecturer’s notes into the students’ notes without having to pass through the minds of either. If we look back to the passive learning we were subject to throughout or educational career, we will realise the truth of this, little of it has left a real or lasting trace.
Active learning
Active learning is messier and more challenging; it means being fully engaged in what you are doing in a mindful way - not taking things for granted. It normally takes more effort, but it also creates more energy, more motivation and greater personal reward. It means being ready to try new things and being prepared to fail. Active learners are more aware of their own shortcomings and are specific about what they want to achieve. They set themselves a series of targets and are clear about when they are and are not reaching them.
Cycling to learn
Having an experience does not of itself mean that we will necessarily learn effectively. We have all heard the stories of managers who have had one year’s experience twenty times. Some of us grow as a result of our experiences, others of us just keep bumping into the same obstacles time and time again.
To fully learn, says Kolb, we need to go round the remaining three steps of the learning cycle, and in helping us do this leaders and coaches can be invaluable.
Once having actively engaged in a challenging work experience, individuals need to be encouraged to reflect. They must be supported in the hard work of thinking through and reviewing what happened, initially in a non judgemental way. They need to take the time to put the mental handbrake on during their busy day and to replay back what happened in their mind looking at what went well, what went less well and what they would do differently in future. They need to describe, compare and contrast, looking for patterns and alternatives, and this is much easier to do if it is done speaking out loud to an interested and engaged third party.
After having suspended judgement and reflected, the learner then needs to come to some conclusions and make sense of what has happened. This stage is about explaining, defining, evaluating and judging. The learner needs to apply or develop theories and principles that will support applied solutions and courses of action.
Pragmatic leaders often feel uncomfortable that they should be required to articulate robust theories about what works in practice, theories that stand up to close and sustained scrutiny. If we do not have a body of theories about how the world works, however, we have to solve even the simplest problems from scratch each time and we are unable to learn from our successes or failures.
Indeed, all managers and leaders have an abundance of theories that guide how they work. Unfortunately, for many these are unexamined and unarticulated theories that have not been subject to close scrutiny. They are more like habits, habits that have been picked up from who knows which other managers, who knows when. The one thing that we do know, however, is that many of them will have passed their sell by date.
This is why an important part of the role any leader is to ask challenging questions and to be intolerant of woolly and imprecise thinking. People need to be able to articulate what they are doing, why they are doing it, on what basis they believe it will succeed and on what experience and understanding such a belief is based. This is the real stuff of coaching.
As any self respecting leader will tell you, theories are no good without action, so the next step has to be to put these ideas into action as soon as possible to see if they work. Ideally, this should be in the spirit of active experimentation. If you do something differently the world will give you a different experience on which to reflect and your learning will be enriched. If, on the other hand, you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.
In summary then, learning from our actions involves:
o Undertaking some actions
o Recalling them
o Reflecting and questioning
o Trying to understand
o Coming to conclusions and having insights
o Preparing to do something differently
o Beginning some new actions
An important part of coaching and leadership is to ensure that this way of thinking and behaving is fully embedded in the organisation.
Factors that we can encourage individuals and teams to take into account whilst following this process include:
o Establishing effectiveness criteria for themselves
o Measuring their effectiveness
o Identifying their own learning needs
o Planning their personal learning
o Taking advantage of learning opportunities
o Reviewing their learning process
o Listening to others
o Accepting help
o Facing unwelcome information
o Taking risks and tolerating anxieties
o Analysing what other successful performers do
o Knowing themselves
Kolb’s learning cycle is an essential coaching tool and one that, despite its simplicity, merits close attention and study. Applying it with both discipline and spontaneity will greatly enhance your leadership and coaching skills.
There are, of course, many other tools in the coaches toolbox and we will be exploring a number of these in a practical and pragmatic manner in future articles.
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