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Adult learning principles are crucial to the success of your program. If you understand how adults learn, then you can design programs that are better suited to participants and more likely to have the impact you want them to. While learning is a complex phenomenon and there are many things to consider, this article will focus on six of the most important learning principles:
- We learn when we are motivated to learn
- We learn what we are ready to learn
- Learning is more than simply increasing knowledge
- Developing new skills and habits takes time
- We get worse before we get better
- Learning is accelerated when we get feedback on our efforts
We Learn When We Are Motivated to Learn
Learning is a choice. We can choose to stay as we are or we can choose to adopt new ideas and skills. It is tempting to stay as we are because it requires no effort or risk. That is why we choose to learn only when we see value in doing so and when we believe that value is worth it. In other words, we choose to learn when we are motivated to do so.
There are times in a manager’s career when he or she is more open to learning than usual. These times typically coincide with a period of change or new challenges, such as transitioning to a higher level of leadership. If you can schedule your development initiative to coincide with these opportunities, do so!
However, this will not always be possible, so you also need to know how to structure other programs to make them more motivational. You can do this using a combination of challenge, choice and connection. If you want to know more about how to motivate managers to learn, see my posts Three Ways You Can Use Challenge To Spice Up Your Program, How To Harness The Power Choice and X Ways To Use Developmental Relationships.
The way in which you select the content of your program can make or break your initiative. Trying to teach managers how to run, while they are still coming to terms with how stand up—let alone walk—is bound to fail.
We Learn What We Are Ready to Learn
According to the seminal work of educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky, you need to ensure that the content and skills that you are teaching are neither too hard nor too easy for the group of learners you are working with. You need to build on their current expertise and take them just one step further. Vygotsky calls this the “zone of proximal development”. It is also referred to as simply the “learning zone”. This concept is evident in the methods typically used to teach physical skills, such as martial arts or swimming.
The implications of this principle are twofold. Firstly, at a “whole-of-program” level, you need to select objectives and content that help managers to build on their current approaches to leadership. Secondly, within your program you need to carefully sequence your content and activities so that each thing that you do builds upon what has gone before.
Learning Is More Than Simply Increasing Knowledge
One of the most common mistakes made by well-intentioned people trying to help others become better leaders is that they confuse the transfer of knowledge with real learning. Knowing what good leaders do is not enough to make someone a good a leader themselves. You must also be able to do what you know and do it well.
As Henry Mintzberg noted, this faulty thinking is grounded in the academic model of learning, which is deeply embedded within our society. Universities and business schools are a great source of trustworthy knowledge, but they were never designed to help people develop new skills and habits. Rather, there seems to be an assumption that if people know what they should do, then they will automatically do it. If this were true, all of our well-informed New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking and save money would be a snap. Furthermore, our armchair expertise in sports would allow us all to be elite athletes.
Leadership is about what you do, not just what you know. More precisely it is about what you do habitually and well. Therefore, learning to lead is about making lasting changes in behaviour, not simply increasing one’s knowledge about leadership.
Developing New Skills and Habits Takes Time
Because leadership is about what you do, not just what you know, learning to lead has more in common with learning a musical instrument or developing sporting prowess than it does with attending a course or reading a book. Developing any set of skills and transforming them into habits takes time and practice. Similar to when you first learnt to drive a car, your initial attempts will be somewhat clumsy and ineffective. Even when you start to get the hang of things, you still need to concentrate on what you are doing. Finally, after much practice, you find yourself performing the many tasks involved in driving a car with very little conscious awareness.
This idea isn’t new, but the emerging field of neuroscience gives us some fresh insight into why we learn this way. When we do something that is unfamiliar, our actions are guided by a part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. Such actions take a great deal of concentration and drain our mental energy. However, if we repeat the same action several times, we start to form a new neural circuit in a different part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Once this circuit is formed, our basal ganglia allows us to perform the action with very little conscious thought.
We Get Worse Before We Get Better
While learning to drive provides a useful analogy for the stages involved in learning to lead, it fails to capture one critical element. Your managers already have an established method of leadership. You not only want them to learn something new, you want them to change some aspects of what they are already doing.
This problem is somewhat akin to being a golfer and seeking the help of a professional coach to correct a slice. The coach will watch how you swing, see what needs correcting and then show you a new way to swing the club. However, if you play a game in which you use this new swing, you are likely to play worse than you normally do, at least for a while. This is because you are replacing a habit with conscious action. It takes some time before you become skilled enough in your new swing that your performance is as good as it was when you did things the old way, and longer still for you to play better than you used to.
The implications for your program are twofold. Firstly, you need to provide some “practice fields” in which managers can experiment with new skills in safe settings. These may include practice exercises with other participants, using an external coach or even visualization. Secondly, you need to let managers know that their performance is likely to drop before it gets better. This way, they are less likely to rush into applying their new learnings in mission-critical, real-life situations. They are also less likely to become disillusioned and throw in the towel the first time a new technique doesn’t work for them.
Learning Is Accelerated When We Get Feedback On Our Efforts
American football coach Vince Lombardi once said feedback is the breakfast of champions. It is through feedback that he can reinforce what his players were doing well, while also correcting anything that the players can improve.
The same holds true when developing leadership prowess. Through in-the-moment conversations, you can solidify learning and deliver personally relevant guidance to each manager in your program.
Before giving feedback, you need to ask each manager to demonstrate their competence. This may be as simple as asking a question to see whether they have understood a concept. However, because leadership is about what you do, not just what you know, you may also want to introduce some activity that requires them to use and demonstrate their new skills in action. Typically, you would start by observing individual skills in structured practice exercises before asking managers to combine skills within a more complex simulation.
The challenge then lies in coming up with ways that allow each manager to be observed and receive feedback on their efforts. You may like to use on-the-spot techniques such as spotlighting and peer feedback, or you may choose to make a video recording of a group simulation and then replay it to the group.
The Seventh Essential Principle
Are these the only six adult learning principles worth knowing? Of course not. However, they are six of the most important. If you could add just one more, what would it be? Sometimes it helps to limit your choices and force a single answer. If you have several in mind, share the one that you believe makes the most difference to a successful leadership development program.
If I were to add a seventh, what do you think it should be and why do you think that?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
If a principle is a tendency to prefer something over something else (the positive opposite) then we also learn when we are not motivated and so on.
When I have asked people when have you learned the most? They almost all of them mention catastrophies as a very powerful source of learning. Flight simulators are designed to help you train in catastrophies as well as under normal circumstances. The whole concept of the learning organization started in a world wide oil-crisis.
What is your experience?
I agree that motivation is critical to learning and that the worry/fear sparked by a crisis can be a powerful motivator (see The Psychology of Fear In Leadership Development).
However, I do not see crises as the only window of opportunity to motivate leaders to learn. People are also motivated when they move from one role to another (see Transition Programs: A Neglected Window of Opportunity) and there are things that you can build into any program design that will help motivate learners (see 3 Ways To Motivate Learning).
Cheers
Shaun
Do you know that the best companies almost never uses the word motivation? (Jim Collins: Good to Great)
They seem to choose to live in a permanent self induced crisis of Big Hairy Goals. If you look closely at Peter Senge’s ideas on Personal Mastery and Shared Visions you can see they are very similar to Big Hairy Goals.
I think it is connected to a smart detail in human development: We develop competent solutions and learn to master them so well they become habits. They represent a huge investment of energy, time and effort. We often forget this kind of hard learning, because it is common for us. It is often called adaptive learning and equals single loop learning.
We seem to remember the special times where we learn fast in quite extreme situations. It is called generative learning and equals second loop learning, where you have to break your habits and develop new habits.
Catastrophies sends us into deutero learning, where we have find completely new sets of solutions and learn the new habits fast.
We need them all, but it is never a good idea to sit and wait for the catastrophy. You need to create controlled crisis, which is what you can see people in extreme sports doing all the time.
You can see Karl Weicks ideas on how to benefit from the unexpected in Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty.
If you take Theory U, the first step in profound learning is to give up your habits and habitual thinking. Changing roles forces you to change your habits.