How Successful Leaders Maximize Learning Agility

Companies spent more than $370 billion globally in 2019 on leadership development training (TrainingIndustry.com), it is easier than ever for leaders to access the latest information on leadership practices, and most leaders have honed their ability to quickly learn new concepts. Access to learning resources and the ability to develop new knowledge and skills is clearly not the central issue for why many organizations feel their leaders are not equipped to succeed in today’s workplace. The primary challenge for leaders is turning new knowledge and skills into habits in the midst of the speed and complexity of their leadership roles.

A leader’s success is directly tied to their ability to build strong relationships, influence others, coach, delegate, engage employees and develop talent. Today’s environment requires leaders to have a foundation of self-awareness and an ability to reflect on opportunities in real-time, shift perspectives for the greater good, and respond in a way that enhances relationships and achieves lasting results. The Applied Learning Cycle below provides a framework for leaders to accelerate their agility and development.

The Applied Learning Cycle

Goal

For the purpose of this learning cycle, let’s define a goal as any desired behavior change, perspective, or approach that wouldn’t otherwise happen without some kind of direct focus, commitment, and plan. Leaders set goals when they need to do something that hasn’t happened yet and isn’t likely to happen on its own.

Setting an effective development goal provides the benefits of clarity, focus, and accountability. A meaningful development goal acts as a magnet for maximizing one’s effort to achieve an intended behavior change.

Studies show that making progress towards meaningful goals is one of the major causes of the brain to release a neurotransmitter called dopamine. This chemical is often called the “feel good” neurotransmitter because it provides feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.  Making progress towards a meaningful goal will trigger a dopamine release which drives effort, productivity, and well-being.

Practice

Think of a time in your professional life that you learned an important lesson that has positively impacted you in becoming a more successful leader. Now consider where and how you learned this valuable lesson. As adults, most of our most important lessons were not acquired through participating in a training program; our most impactful lessons, growth, and learning come to us through experience. This is why leaders must be willing to practice integrating new knowledge, skills, and behaviors if they want to continuously evolve and learn.

An important first step is to establish a social support network to create positive accountability for practicing new behaviors. The American Society of Training and Development did a study on accountability and found that you have a 65% chance of completing a goal if you commit to someone. If you have a specific accountability appointment with a person you’ve committed, you will increase your chance of success by up to 95%.

Feedback

Receiving honest feedback helps a leader address blind spots and evolve their leadership behaviors in pursuit of achieving their desired goal. For a leader to truly receive honest feedback, they must be deliberate about creating a safe environment by actively giving permission and expressing openness and desire to receive feedback. The practices below will help leaders to minimize potential threats while encouraging others to provide them with honest feedback.

• Be Specific with Feedback Requests – If a leader asks general questions like “What can I do better?” it makes it difficult for the employee to understand what type of feedback is “okay” to provide. A more specific feedback request would be, “I am working on improving how I lead our team meetings. What am I doing that is getting in the way of our meetings being more collaborative?”.
• Ask for Feedback Often – As this becomes part of a leader’s regular routine people begin to feel safe about providing upward feedback.
• Avoid Defensiveness – If a leader is perceived as being defensive, they are making a statement to others that it isn’t safe to provide nor do they value constructive feedback.

Reflect

Research shows that a regular practice of reflection increases a leader’s capacity to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social skills, and learning agility. Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model is probably one of the simplest reflective models because it centers around asking three simple questions: What? So what? Now what? This practical approach provides a framework to assess past experience, make meaning of the experience, and decide what the experience means for future action. Below are some example questions for you to use to customize your reflection process:

What?

• What was the opportunity or challenge?
• What happened?
• What did I notice (five senses)?

So What?

• So what worked or did not?
• So what was confirmed?
• So what do I still not know?

Now What?

• Now what actions will I do differently or the same next time?
• Now what is the best way for me to move forward from this experience?
• Now what are my goals moving forward?

Great leaders are great learners! The Applied Learning Cycle - Goal, Practice, Feedback and Reflect - enables leaders to accelerate their learning agility. Even better is the fact that this process is free and available to all.