How did that transition from non-mastery to mastery take place? First she became aware that shoes and socks existed and could be put on and taken off. She saw the benefit of having that happen ("I can go outside and not hurt my feet"), and became aware that she couldn't do it herself. So she got curious (her natural state) about how it works. She watched other people take off and put on her shoes and socks over and over. She tried it herself with support and direction, seeing what worked and didn't work (backwards and upside down - not working; frontwards and rightside up - working). She tried it alone, working through frustration and setbacks. She got it right.
This is basically how people master stuff, whether they're 2 or 60. And unfortunately, it's not how leadership training usually works.
Most leadership training consists of the following: 1) Herd a bunch of people into a big room. 2) Have somebody stand up in front and tell them what they ought to be doing and why, with a lot of "motivational" language. 3) Have a discussion or case study about the thing they're supposed to be doing. 4) The end.
All those critical steps that kids go through about becoming motivated to learn to do something differently; watching someone else do it; trying it yourself in a low-risk environment, so you can make mistakes, reflect and improve...none of those necessary steps usually happen.
Think about it this way: becoming a better leader (or manager, or pipefitter, or ballet dancer) requires wanting to learn, then acquiring new behaviors and putting them into practice. We know intuitively that you can't become a prima ballerina just by listening to somebody else talk about great ballerinas and how they danced, or by getting an inspirational talk about the glory of ballet. You have to want to learn to dance, then you have to see the movements, try them, and try them again and again in ever more demanding and complex ways.
Teaching people to lead is no different. Becoming aware there are more effective ways to think and behave as a leader is just the first step (and, as I noted above, it's where most leadership training stops). Then you have see how thinking and behaving in those ways will be personally beneficial to you as the learner. Then you have to see what it looks like in action, through a live demo or a video, or through reflecting on and deconstructing your own experience of seeing it done right. And finally - and this is what almost never happens in leadership and management training - you have to have the chance to try out the behavior in a low risk situation: you need to practice. I'm not talking about a group discussion or a case study. If you're trying to learn to delegate, for instance, you have to practice thinking through a real situation and then practice having the delegation conversation. Then you need to plan how you're going to take that new behavior back to work, and you need to actually go back to work and have the conversation.
If we provide leaders and managers the opportunity to learn those skills in roughly the same way we all learned to put on our shoes -- perhaps we'd be as capable of leading as we are of getting dressed in the morning. In other words, pretty darn good. Let's try that.
And please - I'd love to hear your leadership training stories - good, bad, and ridiculous...
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Check out Erika Andersen’s latest book, Leading So People Will Follow, and discover how to be a followable leader. Booklist called it “a book to read more than once and to consult many times.”
By the way, we actually teach leaders and managers like this at Proteus. Find out more here.
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