Looking for Growth as a Leader? Carefully Examine How You Learn

Your Learning Habits May Be Shaping, or Sabotaging, Your Leadership

By Rodger Dean Duncan

Today, arguably more than ever, the leadership development to-do list involves a multiplicity of challenges:

• Learning the technical skills required in your chosen work

• Learning how to establish and maintain trust

• Learning how to communicate persuasively (including how to listen)

• Learning how to manage conflict

• Learning how to build effective teams

• Learning how to think strategically

• Learning how to engage people’s heads, hearts, and hope

Do you see a pattern here? Learning!

David Novak addresses that challenge in his book How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World’s Most Successful People.

He started life as a trailer park kid, living in 23 states before high school. At PepsiCo, he rapidly ascended the corporate ladder to become cofounder and CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations—Yum! Brands, the global restaurant icon (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc.) with more than 55,000 restaurants and more than a million employees. He credits active learning with getting him there.

Novak quotes Peter Drucker as saying, “The most pressing task is teaching people how to learn.” So, what can organizations do to make continuous learning an integral ingredient in their cultures?

In all his leadership roles, Novak says, he relied on three habits to encourage his teams to learn and grow.

“We used processes to uncover objective truth—to see the world the way it really was, not how we wished it to be,” he says. “Delusional people and teams don’t learn well, so we gathered deep data and information about our competition, about our own performance, and about where our customers were dissatisfied.”

In addition, he and his colleagues worked hard to eliminate “not invented here” thinking—the bias against ideas not developed by the team. When discussing a new idea, they would go around the room appreciating how it could work for them before addressing any potential weaknesses.

“But the most important thing we did was recognize people for their contributions to our learning environment,” he says. “We recognized them for developing innovative ideas and solving problems, for sharing their know-how with other people and teams, and for putting other people’s ideas into practice and improving upon them.”

Novak focused on helping people learn from their own upbringing—from their strengths and weaknesses, their unique perspectives, their blind spots.

“Like most active learning habits, you need to be purposeful and deliberate,” he says. “The approach I’ve used is to sketch my lifeline and make notes about the critical experiences. Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this a guided autobiography. You analyze important life events. What do they say about who you are and who you might become? How have they influenced your thinking and behavior?”