Want to become a better leader? Then Learn, Share and Teach it!

In human history, learning was most of time done by establishing a peer-to-peer relationship in which one individual of the group learned from the other. This relationship could be between a mentor and a mentee, but most of the time was just among individuals of the same social group that shared something they discovered or learned through their own experience before. We were all part-time teachers and part-time students, learning through life.

We were all part-time teachers and part-time students, learning through life.

The specialization created professionals that specialized on teaching, while others spend most of their years as students. However, many professions are still based on the mentoring principle, in which a peer (an apprentice) learns from another peer (a mentor). Most of the time, the mentor also learns something in this interaction, by repeating and reformulating her knowledge and discovering something new thanks to the questions the apprentice asked during the interaction.

I believe that the same is true to our practice of management and leadership. I implement to myself and include in my training programs a qualified repetition of a learning point or skill that can be done through peer-to-peer training. This is what I call the LST model of learning leadership reinforcement. LST stands for first Learn, then Share, and then Teach something that you want to get really good at. This allows us to internalize the knowledge or practice much better than other classical training models. Let’s use a particular example to illustrate the LST model.

The first step is learning. You can be with a peer and not learn anything. For learning to happen, you have to identify the gap through self-awareness. For example, a leader that I worked with got a feedback that she was not being a very good listener. So she started the LST process by the first step: active learning. After some introspection, and some conversations to gather further feedback, she thought that listening could be something that she should improve. She then look for some peers that she thought excel on this dimension and invited them for lunch or a coffee to talk about this and learn how they manage to be such a good listeners. She also follow some small online courses to gather some additional techniques that could help her in that path.

The progress was coming, even if it was not linear. She sometimes still got frustrated after a meeting or a particular interaction in which she realized afterwards that she did not fully listen because she got distracted. But she also realized that by simply identifying the fact that she did not listen as well as she would wished, she was already improving. Before, there were many instance in which she was not even realizing that she was being a poor listener. That is the time in which the reinforcement process can start, and the second phase of LST can kicks in.

The second phase of LST is Share. Sharing in this case can be simply exchanging about the way she is making progress with other peers. This obviously need a psychological safe environment, but it also works sharing with people you trust - even if they are not in your organization. Some companies are also creating peer2peer exchange programs to facilitate leaders to share their practices and their learning points. This allows people to reinforce and refine their practices with different techniques and different insights they learn along the way, or by simple repetition and internalization of the practice. In the case of the leader I worked with, she shared her progress and frustrations in a peer-to-peer program that her organization created to boost the leadership skills of their leaders.

The third step of the LST is to teach the skill you acquired. Now it is time to reorganize the knowledge you gain on the particular skill or competence to be able to explain to others how to develop it. That helps seeing different approaches and understanding the path you did, and checking how others will understand it and walk through it. This also allows you to find the main key elements that are really important in the process, and reinforce your confidence on keeping nurturing those elements. In the case of listening skill, the leader I worked with prepared a little one hour training session that she shared with her team on how to become a better listener. The feedback was very positive, including some interesting feedback that allowed her to improve her practice by introducing another perspective from a colleague that come from a different culture. She kept doing the little seminar in the peer-to-peer program helping future colleagues to do the same.

This helps the organization to create a learning culture of growth and development, which has been largely proven to lead to better organizational performance.

Neuroscience shows that repetition is key to memory reinforcement and knowledge integration. The LST mode qualifies this repetition that is slightly different each time, helping everyone to learn better, and making this new skills last in their memories. This also helps the organization to create a learning culture that helps everyone to growth and develop themselves, which has been largely proven to lead to better performance.

I would love to hear your thoughts about how to learn and reinforce the leadership skills leaders are learning through P2P initiatives. Please, leave your comments below and share this article with your network.

________

Adilson Borges is the Chief Learning Officer at Carrefour and the Immediate Past President of the Academy of Marketing Science. Adilson is also the IRC Professor of Marketing at Neoma BS. Before that, he held various positions and worked as a consultant for different organizations in Brazil, Europe and USA. He's is passionate about marketing, learning, decision making and behavioral science. Adilson enjoys sharing his personal thoughts here on LinkedIn. All statements and opinions presented in his articles or posts only reflect his personal opinion.

Follow Adilson on Twitter: @aborges_mkt