Fall Into Learning

The fall season always reminds me of learning and my college days. Perhaps it’s the change in temperatures or foliage. More likely, I’m ready to burrow in and enjoy the nesting season (also known as the holidays)! Whatever the case, I love to uncover fresh ideas, new books, and interesting topics to research for future articles. I’m also working on new ways to help underrepresented life-science founders. I’m meeting more of them every day in the Bullpen (that’s another article this month). Many people I meet are also thinking about ways to develop themselves personally and professionally. Here are four learning approaches you should consider and some advice from a professional coach.

Access New Technologies

New tools and technologies are becoming available at a faster pace than ever. Part of staying engaged with the world includes learning about these innovations and testing how they can help us increase our skills, experience, and capacity. AI in the form of large language models is one tool I regularly explore in my work. Augmented reality (AR), extended reality (XR), and virtual reality (VR) offer new experiential training modes. You don’t have to be a programming expert to use these tools. They are becoming available in our desktop software (CoPilot for Microsoft 365) or via a web browser (ChatGPT or Claude by Anthropic). As MIT Square points out in this article, free AR and VR tools are readily available. [1]

An excellent example is in healthcare training. Training programs for healthcare professionals develop knowledge and skills, but understanding may take years of clinical practice. Age-related conditions are especially challenging to understand from the patient perspective. Companies like Embodied Labs [2] are working to change this paradigm. Their immersive training platform features first-person VR experiences that show the typical experiences of adults with age-related medical conditions. The training also gracefully incorporates social and cultural issues that affect patients. While critically useful for caregivers, immersive training will also help family members understand and support their loved ones. The company plans to develop immersion technology to help with therapy and wellness.

Recognize the Learning Experience

I’ve often noticed that learners in the laboratory desire their training experience to go smoothly during their practice runs. However, this is not the best pathway to the complete comprehension of a task or process. The introduction of structured challenges by the trainer (for example, a contaminated blank or a degraded sample) helps. Still, real understanding only comes when one has to wrestle with a problem with no obvious solution. In these instances, your best option as a leader is to help the wrestler work out the answer themselves. The subsequent deeper understanding of the applied analytical concepts can be very satisfying, and this learning approach also works outside the lab.

What’s the message here? When you feel frustrated or struggle in a situation, try disconnecting briefly to consider the source of this feeling. Are your expectations aligned with reality? Are the circumstances volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous? These are signs you should switch into learning mode. Ask yourself, “What is an excellent question to ask?” “Who has had this problem before?” Use the answers to begin understanding the scope and scale of the problem statement. Examine your assumptions. Test your hypotheses and set untestable ideas in a parking lot to preserve all ideas. Acknowledging that the situation is outside of your experience can put you on a productive learning path.

Find a Mentor or Sponsor

We often hear how important a mentor can be in professional development. The sponsor role is seldom discussed but is likely more critical to professional success. What’s the difference between these roles? Why might you choose one over the other”?

A mentoring relationship does not need to be formal or structured, but it should include an understanding that a development-focused relationship exists between the parties. A mentor provides advice and feedback, shares unwritten rules, and assists their mentees in creating and working towards a career vision. Mentees benefit from the advice and perspective of a more experienced professional. Mentor benefits, often overlooked, include a fresh look at work tasks and circumstances and a challenge to set ways of thinking about problems. A sponsor relationship can offer a more robust development lift. Sponsors are actively committed to their protégés success. They champion the protégée to others, enable access to their networks, and suggest new career opportunities. A sponsor benefits from the upward progress of their protégés and gains a positive reputation for supporting others.

The essential difference between the mentor and sponsor roles is both parties’ level of active commitment.?Sponsorship is a crucial driver of success for leaders in all fields and a missing critical element in advancing underrepresented groups to leadership positions. Kate Den Houter and Ellyn Maese of Gallup have noted, “Both mentoring and sponsorship have been recognized as particularly effective ways to leverage the organization community to cultivate employee’s potential.” [3] You can use this article to campaign for a formal program in your organization. Check the resources in your professional organizations, too; many offer these programs for members.

Check Your Mental Biases

Nothing gets in the way of learning faster than the unconscious assumptions we make. Mental bias (cognitive bias) can affect our personal and professional development, but we can mitigate its effect with conscious strategies. These biases arose during our evolution because we needed two systems in our brain – one for rapid response in survival situations and another for more deliberate problem-solving. These systems (described by Daniel Kahneman as fast and slow [4]) support our thinking today. The fast system is the source of our mental biases because it uses simple rules to create a situational model from the available information and our experience to respond quickly. Because the slow system takes more mental effort, we tend to use the simple rules of the fast system to make snap judgments. Those judgments come with cognitive biases and sometimes work against us, particularly in our development efforts.

Over 100 biases have been identified (Gibbons [5]), but they fall into a few common types, shown here along with examples and counter-strategies (adapted from Lovallo and Sibony [6]):

1. Action-oriented biases – cause us to take action sooner or with less thought.Examples: excessive optimism, overconfidence, and neglect of the competitor(s) in the situation Counter by: recognizing and listing the existing uncertainties, using structured planning and risk assessment tools to force recognition of alternative and adverse outcomes
2. Interest biases – lead us to consider, revise, or eliminate choices based on conflicting interestsExamples: misaligned individual or business unit objectives, inappropriate attachments to people or elements of the business, and misperception of corporate goals. Counter by: establishing the criteria to be used in making the decision upfront, encouraging challenges to ‘silo thinking’ through leadership and team membership
3. Pattern-recognition biases – cause us to recognize patterns even when none existExamples: confirmation bias, management by example, false analogies (incredibly misleading experiences), champion bias, and the power of storytelling Counter by: discussing the individual experiences that support a choice, creating different stories that fit the facts, comparing data from alternative examples
4. Stability biases – lead us to lack of action in the presence of uncertaintyExamples: anchoring to initial values, loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and status quo bias Counter by: reviewing the results of decisions over time for evidence of company inertia, establishing targets that are impossible to achieve without change
5. Social biases – cause us to promote options that foster harmony or reduce conflictExamples: groupthink or sunflower (follow the leader) management Counter by: looking for the absence of dissent, using tools to stimulate a broader range of comments and options, encouraging depersonalized debate

When you are aware of mental bias, you can take steps to reduce its impact on your thinking and development. I encourage you to read more about the fascinating role cognitive bias plays in common and uncommon situations by reading Dr. Kahneman’s excellent book, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” [4]

Develop Leader Skills

As a people leader, you have professional development needs beyond your domain or company expertise. Recognizing Marshall Goldsmith’s point, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” can be transformational in your leadership journey. It’s also an excellent book! [7]

In 2020, I sat down with Leader Developer and Executive Coach Melissa Sussman to ask how leaders should approach their development. Dr. Sussman was the principal of Insource Coaching, an executive and professional coaching service coaching mid to senior-level leaders through times of transition or in search of new directions. She’s currently a health coach in the Department of Veterans Affairs and an Adjunct Professor for the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University. She offers excellent advice for developing your leadership skills.

Q: During . . . times of crisis, what two pieces of advice would you give new or seasoned leaders?

“Let me see if I can show you my answer before I tell you. Take a moment and remember sitting on an airplane preparing to take off. The flight attendant stands in front of the passengers and provides detailed instructions on how to respond in case of emergency. The attendant holds up a sample oxygen mask and urges passengers to “be sure to secure your breathing device before you assist others.” In times of crisis, which is what we are facing during this pandemic, my advice to leaders is the same as the advice the attendant offers: Take care of yourself first. Leaders, you must take a moment and understand what YOU are going through first. What are YOU feeling during these times of chaos? Leaders must allow themselves the grace to process their own emotions first. To do this, leaders can reach out to their peers, a trusted mentor or coach, their family members, or friends. Once leaders have a handle on their emotional and cognitive response to the crisis, they will have more of themselves to give to their employees.

Once the leader has secured his or her breathing device – once they have processed all of what he or she is experiencing, now it is time to exercise what I believe to be the second most critical behavior to apply during a pandemic: availability.

In stressful times, it might be the easiest avenue for a leader to believe his or her employees are responding as a unit, each experiencing the other’s emotions; however, the challenge for leaders is to recognize that groupthink most likely is not occurring, and it’s time to attach THEIR breathing device. It is time to roll up the sleeves, clear the calendar, and spend some moments with each employee. Again, this will take some time, but it is time worth investing in.

Thankfully, we have virtual meetings in the form of Zoom, GoToMeeting, or Microsoft Teams… by the time this is published, there may even be more virtual meeting rooms, no doubt! And this is a GOOD thing during a pandemic. For years, I taught interpersonal communication classes, and the number one inhibitor of effective communication over the phone or through email was the inability to observe nonverbal behavior; no longer! Virtual meetings provide the opportunity for leaders and their employees to observe the nuances we may have missed ten years ago with phone conferences. Leaders must make themselves available for not only group meetings but also one-on-one check-ins to make sure they’re capturing the voices of each employee. Yes, it takes time, but the time you take now instills the bond you need to create, maintain, and sustain a trusting, productive working team for the future.”

Q: Sometimes, leaders don’t know how to begin conversations about what is going on with the business during crisis, and often, they avoid these conversations, which can lead to feelings of mistrust. How do leaders combat that?

“I cannot encourage leaders enough: be real. Your employees are astute enough to recognize inauthenticity, so lay it out there: be vulnerable, be honest, and be respectful of your team members. In addition to the increased communication, as described in the previous question, you will also want to communicate the facts of the situation. During times of chaos, I used to tell my supervisors to start their meetings with these statements: “Tell me what questions or concerns you have.” Next, “Here’s what I can tell you.” And last, “As soon as I know more and I can share, I will call us together immediately.” By making these three statements, you are acknowledging that you want to hear from them, you are sharing what you are able to share, and you will not let enough time go by for them to come up with their own stories to the current environment – that you will bring them together before that happens.”

Q: Some leaders may be thinking about going back to school. What advice would you give them?

“This is an excellent question. Much of my career was in academe, and I am a strong advocate for degree completion programs, and here’s why. During the 2008 financial crisis, I was working at a university as the director of an undergraduate degree completion program. There was an influx in nontraditional student enrollment because many found themselves suddenly unemployed and/or at a career path crossroads. Eventually, graduates from the program not only gained their hard-earned, long awaited degrees, but they emerged with the confidence they needed to re-enter the workplace and compete with those whom they were unable to compete with before. Following 2008, universities around the country ramped up their adult degree completion programs to accommodate those unique learners. Higher education became very creative and learners were introduced to accelerated programs, night programs, blended programs, and even online programs. Today, leaders have more programs and modalities to choose from than ever before, and my advice to them if they have not yet completed a degree is to go do it! Now is the time! Further, if you already have a degree or if you do not have the financial means to spend toward a graduate degree, consider a certificate program.

Certificate programs are desirable as they often require smaller commitments of time and money than pursuing a college degree. Professional development in the form of a certificate program enhances one’s resume and for leaders, allows them to walk their talk when encouraging their employees to work on their own professional development. Research certificate requirements for your current or desired field – you might be surprised at the number of options that exist for you that will enhance your resume and instill personal and professional satisfaction.

Whatever continued learning avenue you pursue, you are doing a good thing for your brain. You’re taking a crisis situation, such as the current pandemic, and channeling your efforts toward learning something new. When we learn new ideas, concepts, and strategies we build and strengthen connections between neurons in our brain – neuroplasticity – that result in stronger, more agile brain power! It really is a win-win scenario!”?

Conclusion

We’ve reviewed in this article how you can apply using new technologies, recognizing a learning experience, finding a mentor or sponsor, reining in mental biases, and developing leadership skills in your professional development plans. Don’t wait another minute to start strengthening yourself – your future self will thank you!

If you're interested in talking more about this, contact me here .

References

[1] Dr Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan and Dr M.Sivakumar, “Free and Open Source Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Tools.” MIT Square on Medium.com . Accessed October 11, 2924. https://mitsquare.medium.com/free-and-open-source-augmented-reality-ar-and-virtual-reality-vr-tools-d59d19d32a64

[2] Embodied Labs website, accessed October 11, 2924. https://www.embodiedlabs.com

[3] Kate Den Houter and Ellyn Maese, “Mentors and Sponsors Make the Difference.” April 13, 2023, Gallup.com , accessed October 11, 2924. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/473999/mentors-sponsors-difference.aspx

[4] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[5] Gibbons, P. (2015). The Science of Successful Organizational Change (First ed.): Pearson FT Press.

[6] Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2010). The Case for Behavioral Strategy. McKinsey Quarterly, 16.

[7] Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!” (Hachette Books, 2007). https://bookshop.org/p/books/what-got-you-here-won-t-get-you-there-how-successful-people-become-even-more-successful-marshall-goldsmith/8230849?ean=9781401301309