The Leadership Edge: Why Continuous Learning Separates Good Leaders from Great Ones
I recently joined a country band. A talented pedal steel guitar player wanted to move from a solo act to a band and was looking for musicians. I’m a drummer in a rock band and was looking to add a country band, so we paired up. As we were playing a bit and getting to know each other, he mentioned he was interested in adding some rock to the setlist. As I was trying to figure out what he might be interested in, he made this statement:
“I don’t listen to any music.”
Mind blowing.?
He is a musician who let the music world pass him by. His music knowledge doesn’t extend beyond 1979. He is a really talented pedal steel player, who can sing, play drums, bass and electric guitar. He can play anything from George Strait, Jimmy Buffett, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix…but ask him about REM, the Foo Fighters, or Blake Shelton and he’ll have no idea what you’re talking about. Point him to a Spotify playlist and he won’t know how to start. He has no idea what Spotify is.?
He has endless talent but limited knowledge because he stopped learning. He failed to stay in a cycle of continuous learning.?
Exercising Learning Muscles
If you stop intentional learning, you will start to atrophy those learning muscles. Your sense of curiosity will stagnate, your knowledge will be limited, and worse, your mind will not be toned and ready for the next big lift.?
I’m in the technology world. In any stage of a technology career it is very easy to sit back and think “this is my job and all I need to know.” Let’s say you’re a software engineer using Node.js and React. That’s your world and you’re great at it….but if you stopped exploring the tech world around you, failure and struggle will be in your future.?
Let’s take an extreme example. In the 70s and 80s, COBOL was the hot skillset. COBOL on mainframes ran the world. Hundreds of thousands of jobs available, at a time when the engineering pool could also be measured in the hundreds of thousands.. It would be very easy for a COBOL engineer to sit back and think “this is my job and all I need to know.”?
COBOL still exists today with an estimated 20,000 jobs worldwide available. Can you imagine being a top tier mainframe engineer with decades of experience, who never looked beyond the needs of the current job, who now needs to pivot for the first time to a serverless system driven by AI??
Stay curious. Stay engaged with the world around you. Stay in that continuous learning cycle. When big shifts happen in your industry, you want to be mentally toned and ready to shift with them. Don’t let the world pass you by because you find it too hard to dive in and learn something new.
It Isn’t Strength Training
When I say continuous learning, I’m not talking about getting your Masters and a PhD. It could mean that, but that’s heavy lifting - you can’t work full time and do this kind of learning on a regular cadence. You’ll burn out. I’m talking about the steady state of leaning into the world around you. It doesn’t even need to be work-related. Just learn something. Exercise those muscles!
Look - you could run on a treadmill, play pickleball, or snowshoe - and it’s all a cardio workout. The same rules apply for continuous learning. The act is almost more important than the content. Want to learn how to maintain your motorcycle yourself? Great. Want to learn how to write both a proper limerick and haiku? Fantastic. Want to learn about the wave-particle duality of quantum physics? Perfect.?
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BTW - I recommend all of those.?
Bake Innovation into the Culture
If you work on a team - leadership position or not - your steady diet of knowledge will be noticed by those around you, and many will be driven to follow. Some will start learning the same things you drop in conversation. They’ll be driven by curiosity. You’ll drop a little knowledge bomb and they’ll want to rabbit-hole it a little bit. They may spend two minutes on the phone right away checking it out, or they may spend two days at home diving deep. Either way, you’ve just prompted learning.
Others will be driven by their competitive nature, especially if they are your peers and the knowledge you brought is directly related to your work. The competitive ones around you will want to keep pace and then try to push beyond your knowledge.?
Now, think of a team that is settled into the status quo versus a team that is hungry for new knowledge. One team will just continue doing what they have done in the past. The other team will innovate. That’s all driven by curiosity and a desire for continuous learning.
Connecting Dots
Innovation comes from thinking outside of the box. That ability comes from having a lot of varied data points in that big brain of yours. It’s like the best one pot, slow cook meal ever. You spend years adding a variety of ingredients, set it on simmer and wait. When a new challenge hits, rather than stumbling, or just doing the same old thing you’ve done in the past….you stop, an idea clicks, and you mutter the words people may start getting tired of hearing: “Wait. What if we…”
It Starts with Curiosity
If you are not yet in the mode of continuous learning, start now! It really can be as easy as spending five minutes a day just following through and getting answers to questions you pose to yourself all time - “Huh. I wonder how that works.” or “Why did they do that?” ?It won’t take much time and you will start to move from the quick hit learnings like understanding the history of the game Go, to exploring game theory.?
If a blank sheet of paper causes you a little angst and you have a hard time motivating, here are a few softballs to get you going. Many of you will already know these, but if you don’t, then spend a few minutes checking them out.?
Stay curious. Stay engaged with the world around you. Always be learning.?
Thanks for reading. Drop a comment and let us all know what you learned recently! What’s next on your list??
#Leadership, #CareerGrowth, #ContinuousLearning #Curiosity #Innovation