To create and reinforce a learning culture, you must be curious and engaged –and committed to self-improvement, says Gary Burnison. The more you learn, the more you will improve
There’s nothing like a crisis or a complex problem to accelerate learning. This is learning agility to the ‘Nth’ degree.
Officially, that’s defined as the ability and willingness to apply past experiences to new challenges. Or, as I like to say, it’s knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.
In a crisis, the need for learning agility is profound. Amid great uncertainty, you need to be hyper-focused on past experiences and synthesise and apply them to real-time, fluid conditions. But there’s an important caveat. What you knew yesterday got you to where you are today. However, today is only the starting point for tomorrow.
Achievements fade, progress inspires, but learning must endure.
The distance between your company and its competitors is not absolute; it’s relative. If you want to transform your organisation, you must grow your organisation through learning.
When you’re knee-deep in a crisis—such as one as unique and pervasive as the pandemic—it’s hard to find clarity. The best source of clarity is finding a close comparison. How does it compare with historic events such as the Great Depression or the financial crisis? How did you face major challenges in the past?
By running the ‘unknown’ of what you’re currently facing against the ‘known’ of previous crises, you gain perspective. You identify patterns to connect the dots.
LEARNING AGILITY: Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.
The #1 predictor of success
At Korn Ferry, based on 69 million assessments of executives, we know what breeds and leads to success. It’s learning agility. People who are learning agile will be far more likely to accelerate through the crisis curve. They are the ones who:
- Deal well with (and actually enjoy) ambiguity and complexity
- Move beyond the status quo and focus on reimagining
- Reflect and are insightful
- Embrace new things and different approaches
- Assume accountability and ultimate responsibility, and do so willingly—particularly when things go wrong or do not turn out as planned
With learning agility, you willingly turn off the ‘autopilot’ that keeps things comfortable. You don’t default to the same patterns, day after day. Instead, you find new and different things to do and experience.
To create and reinforce a learning culture, you must be curious and engaged—and committed to self-improvement. The more you learn, the more you will improve. And, you will bring the organisation along with you.
It’s a fact of leadership life: when you improve yourself, you improve your organisation.
After all, if you’re a static leader, the world will pass you by. You must become enlightened, particularly by soliciting feedback from everyone, especially those who are closest to your front line. It’s yet another reminder of how intertwined the Six Degrees of Leadership are: as you anticipate and navigate, you communicate and listen, all of which reinforces what you and your team learn.
The five aspects of learning agility
Self-awareness
You are reflective, understand your strengths and blind spots, and seek feedback and personal insight. This is ‘knowing thyself,’ which is the prerequisite to any learning and advancement. Self-awareness and honesty must go hand-in-hand.
Mental agility
This enables you to embrace complexity, examine problems in unique ways, make novel connections, and stay inquisitive. When you have high mental agility, you’re not only capable of working through uncertainty, you actually embrace and get excited by it. You’re curious, have a wide range of interests, and read broadly across a wide range of topics. You are comfortable with ambiguity and have the ability to identify parallels and contrasts.
People agility
When you listen first and are open to diverse viewpoints, you have people agility. This challenges preconceived notions by using your emotional intelligence to uncover your unconscious biases and address them. When meeting someone for the first time, you refrain from making snap decisions during those crucial first seven seconds. Instead, you suspend judgment and keep an open mind.
Change agility
You are continuously exploring new options. It’s never ‘this is the way we’ve always done things.’ You’re good at devising what-if scenarios and can go from idea to implementation.
Strategic agility
This is where all your agilities meet—applied to your organisational thinking and strategy.
Agility for what’s next
When you are learning agile, you are nimble and adaptable in changing environments. That’s why learning agility is one of the differentiating characteristics in people who are considered not only high performers, but also ‘high potentials’—meaning their careers likely have long runways.
As a leader, you’re not only developing your own learning agility, you’re also looking for this quality in the people around you, which means they will not stay with only what they know how to do and prefer to do. Rather, they will seek to get better, learn new skills, and adopt new ways of behaving and working.
The price of not having or developing these skills is simply too high. Recently, I was looking at the psychometric assessment (what we call the Korn Ferry Four Dimensions of Talent, or KF4D) for an executive candidate. The assessment showed this person was a very linear thinker and had low levels of learning agility. That indicated to me that this person would not be a fit for what we need to drive change.
Our firm is not alone in this. In every industry and sector, companies will be looking for highly agile leaders and team members to accelerate through the crisis.
Helping others to learn – and succeed
When people are given ample opportunities to learn, they will exercise and develop their own learning agility skills. It’s all about establishing learning as a pathway to success.
Ken Blanchard, with whom I’ve had discussions about great leadership, often tells a story about his early days as a college professor. His habit was to give his students the answers to the final exam on the first day of class.
Because of this approach, he often found himself in trouble with other faculty members. Ken defended his decision by explaining his belief that his main job was to teach students the content they needed to learn—not to focus on evaluating them along some distribution curve.
Ken held fast to his determination to spend the entire semester teaching the students the answers to the final exam questions..
It’s a concept he calls ‘helping people get an A,’ and Ken has applied it to work, as well.
The secret is giving team members the answers ahead of time by setting clear goals. Then provide direction and support to achieve those goals.
This is an edited extract from Leadership U: Accelerating Through the Crisis Curve, by Gary Burnison (published by Wiley).
Gary Burnison is a New York Times bestselling author and CEO of Korn Ferry, a global organisational consulting firm. He is the author of six leadership and career advancement books, including Lose the Resume, Land the Job, which The New York Times Book Review said, ‘breaks down every aspect of job hunting, explaining what matters and what doesn’t.’, and Advance: The Ultimate How-To Guide for Your Career. His most recent book is Leadership U: Accelerating Through the Crisis Curve. Gary is a CNBC contributor and is regularly featured in major media. He is all about helping others exceed their potential.
