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The idea that you should tailor your programs to the unique learning styles of your participants is nothing more than a myth.
The problem is not with learning styles, per se, but with the misguided notion that teachers and trainers should pander to these styles. This notion is underpinned by a belief that matching your approach to your learners’ preferred styles will help them to learn more effectively. Sadly, despite its popularity, research does not support this belief.
One reason the idea gained traction is that (as Shaun pointed out in his article Learning Agility Explained) society is reluctant to admit that some people are simply better learners than others. We prefer to believe that if someone is not learning, whether at school or in the workplace, then it is because we haven’t discovered—and catered to—their preferred way of learning. For an amusing satirical account of this view, read the article Parents of Nasal Learners Demand Odour-Based Curriculum.
This does not mean that understanding learning styles is a worthless exercise. As Kolb highlighted, people do have a tendency to prefer particular types of learning activities. However, deep learning requires people to engage with a range of learning activities outside of their preferred style. Therefore, you need to include a range of activities in your programs.
Nor does it mean that you cannot increase the odds that learning will occur. However, you do this through better participant selection, better program design and better delivery, not by pandering to people’s preferred learning styles.
Notes
Leaders teaching leaders is perhaps the most widely known form of peer learning. Put simply, peer-to-peer learning seeks to develop people’s capabilities by connecting them to the immense depth of wisdom that already exists within your company. Having leaders teach other leaders is one way to accomplish this.
In the ‘leaders-teaching-leaders’ model, senior leaders take time out to teach courses and workshops on various aspects of leadership. This is the approach pioneered by GE at its John F. Welch Leadership Development Center in Crotonville. Using senior leaders in this way harnesses their expertise for generations to come, and it helps ensure that senior managers support your initiatives. Furthermore, it helps embed the company’s vision and values throughout the organization, while ensuring that learning remains grounded in the realities of your workplace.
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
—Ralph Nader
Of course, the leaders-teaching-leaders model is not without its drawbacks. Senior leaders often struggle to find the time needed to do the job and do it well. In addition, not all great leaders are also great teachers, and they may be reluctant to invest additional time in learning how to teach and develop their charges. Finally, relying too heavily on in-house expertise can engender an insular view of leadership and the organization, which can inhibit top management’s ability to lead the organization in changing times.
If you do want to make effective use the the ‘leaders-teaching-leaders’ approach:
- Make it part of a balanced range of strategies for developing leadership
- Appoint a person or small working group to oversee and steer the whole project
- Design a structured way of organizing objectives, content and activities, so that each leader-teacher (and their charges) can see how their contribution fits into the overall program
- Choose leader-teachers who excel in some aspect of their leadership, and have them share their expertise within that particular area
- Have leader-teachers and other senior leaders meet to ensure that everyone’s session communicates a consistent message regarding the company’s vision and values
- Provide leader-teachers with prompts, resources and advice that they can draw on when designing their own sessions
Is it better to pay for managers to attend open-enrolment courses, or is it better to organize an in-house leadership program? The honest answer is yes.
Advantages of In-House Programs
In-house leadership development programs are generally more economical than open-enrolment options. It is cheaper to bring in a single consultant to work with 24 managers than it is to send 24 managers to an open-enrolment course.
In-house programs can also be tailored to your company’s needs. Case-studies, examples and exercises will appear more relevant, and you can include activities that simultaneously develop leadership while also addressing key organisational challenges.
In-house programs also allow managers to develop a common language with their peers. Participants are more confident that what they learn in the program will be valued throughout the organisation, increasing the likelihood that the program’s teachings will be successfully and thoroughly implemented.
Advantages of Open-Enrolment Courses
Generally, we find that people who attend our open-enrolment programs are more motivated to learn because they see the value and relevance of the course. This is not always the case when large cadres of leaders are coerced into attending in-house programs. Leaders will learn far more when they are ready and motivated to learn.
Open-enrolment programs also expose leaders to perspectives outside of their own industry. This, in itself, is developmental. The ability to see, adopt and respond to multiple perspectives of the world around you is critical to nurturing mental complexity, which in turn, is linked to successfully progressing to higher levels of management.
Finally, if your needs are limited to a small number of leaders who want to focus on a particular area of leadership development, then an open-enrolment course may ultimately prove the more economical option.
Notes
HR and L&D executives understand that increasing someone’s knowledge is quite different from getting them to make lasting changes in their on-the-job behaviours and it requires a different model of learning. Boyatzis’ intentional change theory offers such a model.
Richard Boyatzis is a professor in the psychology and organizational behaviour departments of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He became well known as one of the founding fathers of the behavioural competency movement that continues to permeate organizations today. This article focuses on his subsequent work on how people can make lasting changes in their behaviour. He initially called his model self-directed learning theory but adopted the name intentional change as the model continued to develop.
The model contends that we are more likely to achieve sustainable change when we actively seek to make five discoveries:
- Our ideal self: the person and leader we truly want to be
- Our real self: our current nature and how this compares to our ideal self
- Our personal learning agenda: the things we need to change and do to close the gap
- Opportunities for experimenting with and practicing new behaviours
- Those who can help, support and challenge us as we work on changing our behaviour
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Boyatzis’ model offers a great deal to HR and L&D professionals charged with developing leadership in their organizations. It picks up on two fundamental foundations of behavioural learning: motivation and practice. Drawing on the earlier work of his Case Western colleagues on appreciative inquiry, Boyatzis applies the motivational pull of a desirable future (dreaming) to personal rather than organizational change. He also borrows the notion of identifying (discovering) and creatively using (designing) existing strengths to move you closer to the leader you want to be in the future. And, as Tamara pointed out last week, this focus on strengths is intrinsically motivating.
However, in my mind, it is the focus on experimentation and practice that sets intentional change apart. As we are fond saying, leadership is about what you do, not what you know. If you want to learn how to competently execute a new set of behaviours—be it playing the violin, improving your putting or being a better leader—you must devote time to practice.
Peter Drucker once said that the surest way to succeed is to know what you are good at, and then position yourself into roles where it is your strengths that are in demand. Strength-based development builds on—but goes beyond—this idea.
Step 1
The first step in strength-based development is to help your leaders know what they are good at. There are a number of ways to do this, ranging from informal reflection to psychometric testing and even 360-degree feedback. These can all be useful, but the emerging field of positive psychology offers you a new and unique path: character strengths. The Values In Action Inventory is a research-based measure of 24 virtues that are universally valued across the globe. Furthermore, it is inexpensive and easy to administer. You can read more about the Values In Action Inventory here.
Step 2
Once your leaders know what their strengths are, you can begin the second step, which flies in the face of our traditional ‘deficiency approach’.
‘A problem-centered intervention isn’t the entire answer to a successful developmental experience.’
Robert Kaplan
In fact, research shows that it is easier to develop your strengths than to develop your weaknesses. This suggests that someone who is naturally organized will get more out of a book on time management than someone who is not, or that someone who is good at public speaking will take more away from a course on how to present well than someone who goes weak in the knees just thinking about stepping up to the podium. Your aim in this step is to help people move from being good at something to being great at it by honing their natural talents until they truly shine.
Step 3
Of course, there are times at work when we all need to do things that require skills beyond our natural strengths. We all need to round out our skills, which can necessitate shoring up our weaknesses. The third step of strength-based development offers us a new and more motivating way to do this. Once your leaders have identified a weakness to work on, simply ask them how they can use their strengths to achieve their developmental goal. We all like to use our strengths. After all, it is our strengths that have got us where we are today, and they are a wealthy resource that people can tap to help them in any endeavour.
At Toyota Academy, you can find a distinction between adaptive learning and generative learning. Adaptive learning is about coping, which is the first stage of the three steps in organizational learning. Adaptive or single-loop learning is very useful in continuous improvement because it merely improves upon a set of solutions that are already functioning well.
Second-loop learning requires a different approach because it involves new ways of looking at the world. Generative learning provides this approach and lets you enter deutero learning as well. Both are necessary in strategic planning processes.
Human extensions
In organizations and societies, learning is always connected to human extension, the process of enabling us to do things with our bodies and minds that were previously impossible. All the tools and methods we apply in our organizations are human extension, and they represent sizeable investments in human development, both as individuals and as communities.
Adaptive learning improves performance using an existing set of functional solutions or human extensions. A set of functional solutions include aspects of physical and mental (language) activity, virtual and social solutions, and often solutions for training and research and development as well.
So moving to a new set of human extensions is a massive task compared to continuous improvement.
Moving to generative learning
Generative learning is very different from adaptive learning in that it works best when we leave behind all existing assumptions and try to reinvent an organization. It is very useful in situations that demand an entirely new set of solutions.
New solutions are based on many different kinds of expertise, so you have to be the expert in what is best for your organization and the people within it. However, even with that expertise, you probably won’t be able to simply enforce adherence to these new solutions. The best way to persuade others to subscribe to your vision is through inclusive dialogue.
In most organizations, this is a highly unusual approach to learning, so it requires a very conscious approach from top management and especially HR. But after having successfully navigated their first generative learning process, many people view it as one of their greatest achievements. Most of the literature on organizational learning highlights generative learning.
Principles in generative learning
There are some Galilean shifts involved in generative learning:
- The whole defines the parts; each person must understand the whole in order to understand their own role within it
- Language is used to create new worlds, not to describe them
- Learning is a social process achieved through communication
- Spoken and detailed stories are the most effective method of learning
Get started!
If you want to try generative learning, try to implement Appreciative Inquiry in all the meetings and conversations in your organization. Introduce a new way of looking at the world that is in complete contrast to the principles of the Enlightenment, which is at the heart of continuous improvement:
- Good science is written, not spoken
- Good science is global, not local
- Good science is timeless, not fixed in time
- Good science defines and uses words in an unambiguous way
John F. Kennedy started a generative learning process by saying: ‘This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.’ The United States of America did not have the set of solutions that could meet this goal when he said it. But they did it.
My last article about the four lessons HR and L&D professionals can learn from the military sparked a flurry of emails requesting more information on the notion of learning agility. So here it is.
The basic idea is this: while it is true that people develop into better leaders over time, some people are inherently better learners than others. These agile learners learn faster and learn more than most of their colleagues. This is quite different from the ‘Pollyanna-ish’ notion of learning styles, which implicitly suggests that we can all learn equally well, provided we are each taught according to our own, preferred learning style. The concept of learning agility does not assume that great leaders all show the same competencies and traits, but rather asserts that a key asset of great leaders is a better ability to adapt to the shifting demands of leadership than others.
By now, you may be asking yourself what separates an agile learner from the rest of the pack. This is a relatively new field, but some of the initial research suggests that it is a combination of one’s cognitive abilities, personality and motive profile.
Cognitive Abilities
Traditional measures of cognitive ability, such as IQ, are useful predictors of both learning propensity and leadership potential. In fact, IQ tests were originally designed to predict children’s subsequent success at school. Yet, the cognitive abilities associated with learning agility are more specific and more dependent on your style of thinking than on your IQ score. Agile learners are insightful, analytical and able to see things from a variety of perspectives.
Personality
Learning agility is associated with one of the ‘big five’ personality traits, openness to experience. Agile learners are curious people who adapt their thinking and their behaviour in response to their emerging understanding of the situations they find themselves in. They are committed to personal growth, they believe in their own ability to learn how to lead well, they are courageous enough to take personal risks and they are confident enough to take setbacks in stride.
Motive Profile
We all have inner needs or desires that drive how we act. These include the need to be in control, the need to achieve well and the need to have harmonious relationships with others. However, the relative strength of each of these needs varies from person to person, and this variance accounts for much of one’s habitual ways of acting. For example, if a person has a high desire to be liked and a low need for power, they are likely to act in accommodating rather than assertive ways. Learning agility is higher when the desire to learn and improve coexists with—but outstrips—the desire to achieve.
When you have limited funds to invest, you want to put your money into the people most likely to show a decent return on your investment. By systematically assessing the learning agility of potential participants, you can make more informed investments. You can also enhance the impact of any initiative by spending some time nurturing the learning agility of whoever is attending.
Further Reading
Bandura, A. (1997), Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, Freeman.
Branden, N. (1998), Self-Esteem At Work, Jossey-Bass.
McCall, M. (1998), High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders, Harvard Business School Press.
Lombardo, M. & Eichinger, R. (2004), ‘Learning Agility As A Prime Indicator of Potential’, Human Resource Planning.
Snyder, M. (1987), Public Appearances/Private Realities: The Psychology of Self Monitoring, Freeman.
Spector, P. (1982), ‘Behaviour In Organisations As A Function of Employee’s Locus of Control’, Psychological Bulletin.
What do Microsoft, ANZ and the prestigious law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques all have in common? They all have senior HR professionals who see retaining talent as a key challenge for HR as the economy continues to recover in 2010. Discover how you can improve retention in your organisation through the targeted training of managers.
The number one reason people cite for leaving an organisation is that they found their boss’s approach to leadership wanting Research also reveals that both the emotional outlook and the skilful actions of managers contribute to employee turnover.
At the emotional level, managers need to master their own moods and act as emotional magnets, drawing people towards them. They can do this by learning how to be more optimistic, developing their personal resiliency and expressing genuine happiness at work. Yet, studies show that joy is the least expressed emotion at work.
At the hands-on level, managers need to get out of the office and talk to their staff. Conversations are the path through which managers show appreciation, correct little problems before they become big ones, and draw out employee’s inner resources. Sadly, research shows that many managers fail to hold such one-on-one conversations or at the very least, fail to hold them well.
Therefore, if staff retention is a hot issue for you, it makes sense to invest in training their managers, with a particular focus on the role emotion and conversation play in effective leadership.
Related Courses
Executive Renewal
Hard Conversations
Notes
Action learning is a structured way of learning from on-the-job experiences. It is a popular form of development that can be used either on its own or as an adjunct to forms of learning. Yet, research shows that many action-learning initiatives fail to deliver the desired effect. This does not mean that you should abandon action-learning, but it does mean that you need to be careful about how you use it. Here are five ways to get more from your action-learning initiatives.
- Use learning teams. Learning is more likely to occur when leaders work in teams and when these teams are comprised of people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Such teams allow leaders to learn from the breadth of other group members’ experiences.
- Select projects carefully. From a developmental perspective, you need to select projects that will stretch and challenge your leaders. It is also important that you select projects that address a real and significant challenge your organization currently faces. Easy or frivolous projects are of no value to the learners involved or to the organization.
- Involve senior managers as sponsors. A little attention from senior managers can help motivate, guide and develop the members of each learning team, each of which should have a single sponsor. The sponsor identifies a range of real and pressing problems that the team could take on as their project. Once a single project is selected, the sponsor then ensures that the team is crystal-clear about what must be achieved.
- Build theories. Put simply, a theory is a set of beliefs that in turn guides our actions. For example, if you believe that too much sunlight causes skin cancer, you will take action to avoid overexposure to sunlight. People form theories on how to lead well from a range of sources that include personal experience and accessing (reading, attending courses, etc.) the theories other people have formed. Action-learning needs to involve the team in building a collective theory about specific aspects of leadership that are relevant to their project, mixing what members know about formal theories in that area with their own theories based on personal experience.
- Include reflective structures. Connecting theory with experience is the crux of action learning and this requires structured reflection. These structures should encourage both individual (e.g., learning journals) and collective (e.g., debriefing or dialogue) reflection. Furthermore, they should be used to explore experience through a range of lenses (e.g., the task itself, group processes within the team and the actions of individuals).
Military academies have an impressive record of producing outstanding leaders. This stands in stark contrast to the developmental efforts of many civilian organisations, with Australian research showing that less than 15% of what is learnt in a typical training course is transferred into new workplace behaviours. So what can you learn from the military? Here are four key lessons:
- Be selective about whom you develop
- Connect learners to trustworthy, practical knowledge
- Include strategies that help learners turn new knowledge into new behaviours
- Help learners to change who they are as both leaders and people
The first of these lessons is reflected in the highly selective nature of admissions at military academies. The remaining three lessons were found within the U.S. Army’s Be-Know-Do model of leadership.
Lesson 1: Being Selective
Investing in leadership development is like investing in the share market in that you are far more likely to get a return on your investment when you are careful about whom you invest in. Just as some companies are likely to show higher share returns, some people are far more likely to develop their leadership prowess than other people. This is due to a combination of:
- A desire to learn (perhaps in response to challenges in the workplace, life stages or an intrinsic desire to be more than they are today)
- A threshold of leadership potential (such as general intelligence and interpersonal ability)
- Learning agility (including openness to experience, adaptability and self-awareness)
The lesson is that, wherever possible, you should have managers apply to take part in your in-house development programs and that you should use sound methods to select only prime candidates from those applicants.
Lesson 2: Include Trustworthy, Practical Content
Most managers learn how to lead on the job through trial and error. They form beliefs about the organisation, about the people within it and about leadership in general based on a small sampling of personal experience. This is somewhat akin to letting people believe that smoking is safe based on the personal experience of one smoker who happened to live to the age of 82. Sadly, leadership programs that peddle the latest management fads muddy these tenuous beliefs even further, as many of these fads have little, if any, grounding in evidence.
At the other extreme is the isolated world of academia, which despite being more reliable can also be too theoretical and obtuse for managers to put to any immediate and practical use.
The lesson is that you need to ensure that your programs connect learners to knowledge that is both trustworthy and practical.
Lesson 3: Help Learners to Develop New Behaviours and Habits
As any sports enthusiast can attest, the world is full of armchair experts. However, there is a big difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it (and do it well).
“The gap between knowing and doing remains a weak link in most of our lives”
Dan Millman, No Ordinary Moments
Leadership programs are more effective when they help learners to bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Imagine for a moment that you wanted to learn how to juggle three balls. You can read and digest the instructions for how to juggle in just a few minutes. However, this does not mean you can now juggle. Learning to do something requires strategies that are different from those used to simply acquire new knowledge about how to do it. Behavioural learning uses strategies such as modelling, practice, review and refinement.
The lesson is that within your program, you need to show learners what to do, allow them to practise doing it and give them feedback on their efforts so that they can refine their future attempts. These initial efforts need to be supported by post-program strategies, such as coaching and action-learning, which help your learners transfer their new skills into their approaches to leadership within the workplace.
Lesson 4: Challenge Learners to BE More Than They Are Today
Leadership is not just about what you know or the skills that you possess. It is about who you are as a person and the sort of leader you choose to be. While lesson 3 highlighted the need to bridge the gap between knowing and doing, lesson 4 highlights the need to close the gap between doing and being. This involves helping leaders evolve their identity, their values and their perceptions.
This form of personal development is not a new idea; it is already central to the military’s process of developing future leaders. In fact, it provides a common thread between the outdoor challenge programs and t-groups of the mid-twentieth century and ties into our obsession with emotional intelligence[3. See, for example, the content and the developmental process outlined in Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2004). Primal Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.] in the 1990s and authentic leadership in the 2000s.
“There is more in us than we know. If we can be made to see it, we will be unwilling to settle for less.”
—Kurt Han, Founder of Outward Bound
However, researchers have only recently started to explore the empirical links between leadership and identity.
The lesson is that you should help leaders to discern who they are and to redefine who they want to be as part of any serious effort to develop their ability to lead well.
Notes
