Dispatches from Mayo: Are You Pushing Your Colleagues to Grow?
Note from Art: My next few posts will be brief insights gained as a result of my observations and experiences at The Mayo Clinic.
From Dr. William Mayo in his description of the three conditions essential to the future success of the Mayo Clinic:
“#3 Continuing interest by every member of the staff in the professional progress of every other member.”
I love that Dr. Mayo recognized the critical nature of learning and development as a part of the core values of this remarkable medical institution. There’s no denying the importance of this action-oriented value for learning from and developing others, and there’s no deferring it to another department. It’s right there for everyone to see, ponder, think about, act upon and support.
In thinking back on the cultures I’ve been part of or those that I’ve had the occasion to support as a consultant, I truly haven’t observed more than a handful that had their own form of focus on the development of everyone, as articulated so succinctly by Dr. Mayo. Interestingly, the organizations that did seem to get this, even if they didn’t describe it in quite the same way, were (and are) leaders in their markets. Somehow, when people seek to learn from each other as well as take collective ownership for promoting organization-wide learning and professional development, good things happen.
While all organizations have their faults and warts and I suspect an institution that has 40,000+ people show up for work everyday has more than a handful, Mayo continues to be the brand of choice when we truly need help. Walk the halls and talk to and share stories with people supporting their family members here, and the message is the same over and over again: We’re here because it’s the best. We’re here for answers. We’re here again because of how they helped us the last time. It’s consistent and never-ending.
While there’s no claim of causation or even correlation between the value described above and the performance and reputation of Mayo, I see and hear the values at work in every encounter. (More on this in an upcoming post.)
Too often, we push the development of others off to a department or worse yet, to a third party training organization that has no basis in understanding the culture and no authority to support the teachings through coaching and on-going learning. This is lousy management. Similarly, instead of encouraging learning and knowledge sharing, much of our built-up knowledge remains cloistered in silos. Again, poor management.
If you have the privilege of leading others, consider what Dr. Mayo’s 3rd condition for sustaining success means to you, your team and your organization.
It’s time to take the important people development responsibility back from whatever department purports to own it, and work to knock down knowledge barriers and other fences that keep people from sharing and learning from each other. You might just be building the foundation for your own high-performance culture.
Leaders Teach
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth
For the past few Septembers, it has been my good fortune to remake a journey of my youth in pursuit of education. My role is different now as the teacher instead of student, but the excitement that I have for the experience is the same.
I love the nervous energy that surrounds starting a new class. New faces and voices…an engaging topic and a fresh start for everyone.
From the moment that I step off of the train and start the mile or so walk from the station to DePaul’s downtown Chicago campus at State and Jackson, I can feel the adrenaline start to kick in. It’s partly excitement over the upcoming class and just a bit of the joy of a momentary return to my youth. I’m very aware that I trudged these same steps as a graduate student a quarter of a century ago. They feel familiar and there’s some comfort in that familiarity. Fortunately, our minds struggle with time gaps…and to me those mad dashes across the loop to make class on time were just yesterday. Weren’t they?
I teach because I love learning…and believe me, if you take your job as a teacher seriously, you learn a great deal in the process.
In particular, if you pay attention to your students, you learn a remarkable amount about the times we are living in, about current culture and you learn from the creativity that comes from fresh minds unbiased by decades of experience. Their perspectives are “Why Not?” instead of those scarred by time that say, “You can’t” or “Watch out.”
I’ll opt for the endless possibilities of youth versus the countless limitations learned through experience.
I also teach because I feel a need to pay forward the many great lessons and experiences that I gained from the leaders in my world.
I’ve long believed that the best leaders are teachers. Not lecturers, but teachers. As teachers, they challenge us to think, to explore, to experiment, to learn and to keep trying.
Good leaders encourage us to find joy and energy in the journey of discovery and they remind us that the satisfaction from finding the answer is momentary and should quickly be replaced with more searching and more learning.
The best leaders…like teachers let us fail to learn. They offer encouragement when needed and tough-love when it the situation demands it. They teach us to be accountable to ourselves…and to set exceeding high standards for our own performance.
Great teachers and great leaders challenge us to reach and strive. They might step in if we’re about to fall off a cliff or to cross the street without looking, but they’ll wince and stand by as we fall and skin our knees or as we settle out our playground disputes.
Leaders teach and someday in the future, the student becomes the teacher and the cycle starts anew.
Are you a teacher?
Back to School!
We delivered our oldest son to college on Friday and our high school senior survived (barely) the annual “first day of school picture” in our backyard this morning. I am busy preparing class materials for my Fall MBA courses and it feels like summer is officially over regardless of what the meteorological calendar says.
I love “Back to School” time every year. There’s a palpable level of excitement in the air tinged with just a bit of sadness about the end of vacations, beach reading and weekend barbecues. It’s also a time where education is (or should be) the focal point in many households as students and parents get ready for homework, tests and projects. And while we all know that education and learning have no season, our reliance in the U.S. Midwest on an arcane but not unpleasant long summer break (versus year-around school interspersed with shorter breaks in many other regions), makes the return to school all the more dramatic.
One of the things we often lose as busy working adults is that sense of excitement about learning. It’s easy to let years and even decades slip by and focus on everything but our own self-development. Sure, we attend mandated training in our company and possibly even the periodic seminar to earn the Continuing Education Units (CEUs) mandated by our professional certifying organizations. Unfortunately, neither of those formats creates the exhilarating sense of learning and discovery that we may have had at some time earlier in our lives, but lost along the way to becoming responsible adults.
As a hiring manager for many years and now as a leadership development trainer and consultant, I’ve talked with hundreds of people about their continuing education, and I am always surprised when people struggle to describe anything substantive in this area. Somewhere earlier in my school career, I remember an educator banging the drum repeatedly that “learning is a life-long process,” and I believed him.
It’s my observation that the most capable and most successful individuals are constantly seeking knowledge, relentlessly working to expand their skills and often driven by some inner-sense of the need to learn through exposure to new ideas. If you fit this description, quit reading and get back to what you were doing. If you have to go back decades to recall the last course you took or the last time you read a book that wasn’t on the fiction best-seller list (nothing wrong with fiction best sellers, but diversity is good), here’s a list of activities to help you rekindle your love of learning and your pursuit of knowledge:
- Join a local book club (contact your library for ideas) and gain from the perspectives of others and the rigor of having to stay on task with your reading assignments.
- Start and lead a book club at your place of work—you might even get the company to pay for the books!
- Spend some time researching the state of the art in education and certifications for your profession. If you end up feeling hopelessly outdated, it’s time to take the next step and choose a workshop, a certification program or even another degree program.
- If you hate the idea of physically attending class, investigate on-line opportunities. The number of programs delivered on-line is growing daily and the flexibility is great for busy people.
- Consider a program outside your core field of expertise. In the Chicago-area, Northwestern, University of Chicago and DePaul all have some remarkable humanities and literature programs that are designed for and filled with doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals from every other possible vocation. If you don’t want the rigor of a degree investigate certificate options or possibly even just auditing a course. Individuals that I know that have gone through these courses credit them for helping open their eyes to a whole world of ideas that they didn’t know existed.
- More reading. Put down the trade journals for a while and pursue something in the history or biography sections. It’s remarkable what we learn from studying what others have already gone through.
- Executive Education can be exhilarating. I go to Kellogg to recharge and I always leave a program with ideas to help improve my performance and my business. Exec Ed is big business and big $, but many companies support the initiative.
- Take advantage of tuition reimbursement dollars from your company. Most organizations never spend what they’ve budgeted in this area. You can help solve this problem.
- Seek out a mentor. Depending upon where you are at in your career, this can be an enlightening experience. If you are beyond the “seeking” phase, consider becoming a mentor.
- Teach a class. A wise person indicated that if you want to learn about something, sign up to teach a class about it.
- Volunteer to lead an initiative in the community. Some of the best leaders and project managers that I know are found on the teams and programs in schools and churches.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The brain is a lot like the body…use it and it stays fit and ready for action. Allow it to atrophy and everything becomes a struggle. You have a remarkable capacity to learn. Whether you use it or not is up to you.
The concept of the Learning Organization is well established and widely acknowledged as a requirement for realizing and sustaining success. Senge described the need to not only create organizations that learn and adapt, but to realize those that become generative and to create their own futures. Your ability to consistently add value to your organization is in large part related to your active pursuit of new ideas and new ways of looking at the world.
What’s on your mind today?
Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World
Somewhere between the world I grew up in and the world that we are living in today, everything about working, leading and learning began to change. It’s increasingly a virtual world, and everything about communicating, interacting and developing relationships feels a bit different than it used to. While many/most of us are compliant with the changes in communications (telex to fax to e-mail to IM, web conferencing etc.), I wonder how many of us are truly working to become competent at living and working in this world.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the changes in how we live, learn, earn and engage, and I’m working hard to adapt.
- A valued colleague sends me a note expressing frustration over the challenges of leading remotely. I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time on this valuable topic. Stay tuned.
- I delivered a webinar and I realized that I have to get better at communicating without interaction. I’ve set a schedule to begin doing some of these blog posts as podcasts as a means of increasing my comfort and competence communicating to an invisible audience.
- I signed up to teach an on-line course expressly for the purpose of discovering what it means to “teach” on-line.
- My kids don’t use their phones for talking. If I want to reach them, I send a text message and get a response practically before I’m done typing. (I saw this coming a few years ago when I asked my youngest son why he never calls friends on the phone. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Why would I want to talk with one person when I can be on-line with all of my friends at the same time.”)
- An article at Fast Company indicates that in the next few years, technology will obliterate the need to travel. (Hmmm, I’m suspicious of the word obliterate.)
- I am busy working on an on-line content strategy to augment my own face-to-face seminar/workshop activities.
The common thread in all of these items is the shift in how we work, lead and learn. Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more virtual everyday, and those of us that are old enough to remember life before fax machines and e-mail will be well-served to quit fighting the trend and start learning how to become competent and comfortable communicating to no-one and everyone at the same time.
It was just a few years ago that I received my first request to fund an employee’s pursuit of an on-line degree. I am a staunch advocate of the importance of the face-to-face network developed at school, especially for MBA students, and while I approved the request, I recall challenging the value. Since that time, I know of dozens of professionals that have had great experiences earning degrees on-line. I still question whether there is any chance that you can develop a close network in that manner, but hey, this is the era of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, where it is seemingly more about contacts than close relationships. (I’m still suspicious of that premise.)
One of the critical leadership skills of our time is developing comfort and competence at leading distributed teams. There are still some firms that insist on their managers and leaders being housed within a line of sight, but they are showing their lack of understanding of how the world is changing. The literature on leading remotely seems to offer superficial guidance from people adapting old models to new situations. I suspect that as time moves on, the profession of leadership will evolve to take into account the very distinct skills and approaches needed to lead effectively while never coming into personal contact. (As a side note, I deal with many people on the receiving side of remote leadership. At best, the leader to employee relationships they describe are superficial. We haven’t figured this one out yet. )
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The difference between compliance with new technologies and new styles of communicating and competence at leveraging these tools and styles for results is significant. Deriving value from virtual leader/employee relationships or on-line learning is a very different task for all parties involved than it was in the almost bygone era of face-to-face. It’s time to quit fighting the changes and learn how to master the new opportunities to engage. I still struggle to see how these new methods will replicate the richness of face-to-face communication, but that’s my problem to deal with as the world keeps changing. In the meantime, if you are looking for me, don’t call…I’m busy learning how to communicate all over again.
From Imperial Court to Learning Organization
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy
Today’s post was stimulated by a great article in the July/August 2008 Harvard Business Review, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, where Professor Amy Edmonson of Harvard Business School outlines the differences between organizations that focus on execution as efficiency—doing things better and faster than your competition versus execution as learning—focusing on learning and adapting faster.
In brief, Professor Edmonson compares and contrasts the approaches used in the traditional industrial age model of motivation and performance evaluation processes versus those required for today’s knowledge-worker dominated organizations. The approaches required for success in the two models are dramatically different.
In the Execution as Efficiency model, Professor Edmonson indicates that leaders provide answers, employees follow directions and optimal work processes are designed and set up in advance. In the Execution as Learning model, leaders set direction and articulate the mission, employees discover the answers and work processes are highly fluid, adapting at the speed of organizational learning.
Practical Applications: A lot of Executive Talk, but…
When it comes to driving change, words and actions must match. Few organizations are immune to the massive forces constantly reshaping the world around us, and few organizations can afford to live solely by the Execution as Efficiency model. We live and work in a world increasingly dominated by knowledge workers, and while one part of an organization may be dominated by an efficiency orientation, other areas, marketing, sales, research and development, must move towards a learning approach or face dire consequences in the marketplace.
In my own experience working with organizations that have grown up with an emphasis on efficiency but are talking about the need to become more flexible and adaptable, it is often the people doing the talking that are serving as the barriers to change by failing to revamp outmoded systems and processes.
Five Barriers that Get In the Way of Developing a Learning Organization:
- The Imperial CEO and Royal Executives: A class system that puts undue weight on the import of executives. Instead of the executives serving the organization, it seems like the organization exists to serve the executives.
- Strategy by Edict and Set According to the Calendar: Every year at about the same time, the organization stops and waits while the royal court sits behind closed doors working out the new organizational structure and lofty statements that provide the masses inspiration to work hard until they receive fresh inspiration next year.
- Strategy by Default: “We have a strategy, and it’s to sell more,” is a commonly heard phrase in this tuned-out environment. Another is, “Strategy is for the big boys, and we’re too small to worry about anything other than doing our jobs.”
- People as Expenses: the words coming from the mouths of executives might be saying “People are our most important asset,” but the systems supporting the identification, development and retention of talent are saying, “People are our biggest cost.”
- The Functional Structure: specialization works in some areas, but in general, the silo structure of many/most orientations is the greatest impediment to shared learning. While the phrase, “we’re all in sales” is commonly shouted by salespeople frustrated with the lack of organizational support, the fact is that, “marketing is truly too important to be left to just the marketing department.”
What to Do If Your Organization Needs to Learn:
- Take the royalty out of the royal court. This culture shift has to start at the top—the non-CEO Chairman of the Board and the other independent board members have to step up and overthrow the caste system and monarchy that pervades so many executive environments.
- Recognize and act on strategy as a process that involves everyone. (I’ve posted on this one seemingly a thousand times, so I’ll spare you the details and direct you to the Strategy category on this blog.)
- A robust execution process with plenty of accountability and constant evaluation of performance and consideration of lessons learned is the fastest way to pump up organizational learning.
- Make the identification, development and retention of talent the job of every manager or supervisor in the organization. Challenge HR to create systems to support these activities and start living up to the notion that people are your greatest assets.
- Break down the walls by at least moving towards a strong matrix or a project environment for major initiatives. Cease and desist with throwing initiatives over silo walls, and build a project culture with the charter to execute and to educate the organization on lessons learned.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
It’s time to quit talking about becoming a learning organization and start knocking down the time worn conventions, institutions and processes that stand in your organization’s way. In an ideal world, this change starts at the top with an insightful leader or leadership team that understand what it takes to move from an efficiency orientation to a learning focus. In reality, a lot of this change will need to be driven by leaders in the middle that clearly see what is happening in the external environment as well as what it takes to win in that environment. If necessary, let the royals executives posture and play while you go about the business of changing the business one initiative at a time.
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