Why I Love September for the Back-to-Learning Feeling

It’s funny how the cycle of our earlier lives carries through into our later years. For my entire life, I’ve loved the back-to-school time of the year. I still focus my post-Labor-Day schedule on kicking off new workshops, teaching at least one undergraduate or graduate course, and defining my fall writing project. In some years, I head back to school, typically for an executive education course at Kellogg.

Time to Think Creatively

In my corporate life, I parlayed this back-to-learning season into early September group sessions at the executive and manager levels with strategy work and various group meetings where the opportunity was to think big and to challenge ourselves to think differently. We spend a lot of time every year working on operations and operational improvements. Still, we need more time to adjust our altitude to see the big picture in our industry or peer over the horizon in search of trigger events that might change everything.

Four Approaches to Stimulate Leader Learning

1. Read A Book That Isn’t on the Business Bookshelf

For one organization, our executive offsites in September were guided by a book carefully curated by two team members. It didn’t have to be a business book (thank goodness!), but it had to challenge us to think about our business and work as leaders. The lessons from history and literature are more powerful and interesting than almost every book that gives us the answers to achieving success in ten concise chapters.

2. Look Beyond Your Industry and Learn

One of the more creatively productive exercises I led involved challenging our group members to look at different, successful organizations outside of our industry and try and decipher what they were doing that was working and how we could learn from them. Our goal was never to emulate but to think about analogous approaches that fit our culture and business model. These exercises were exciting when group members engaged in personal shopping or site visits of the organizations they were studying. In a few cases, we wrangled a senior executive from the target company to share their insights.

3. Listen Harder to Employees and Commit

In one organization, we used this time of year to listen harder to employees. While leaders are on the hook for always listening, we created various events and activities where executives got to hear first-hand what was working, what wasn’t, and what their ideas were for improving. The catch for these sessions was that the executives had to decide on the spot about supporting the change initiatives as long as the employee groups took ownership of them. This was a bit like GE’s “Workout” process.

4. Create a Green Room

And, what was possibly my favorite approach ever and one I advocate for my clients, our team hit upon the idea of creating what we called a “Green Room” (the walls were green) to curate ideas over a long period. This was stimulated by the Ridley Scott Ted Talk “When Ideas Have Sex.” The approach is outlined in this article of mine: Leaders—Are You Coaching Your Teams for Creativity? 

The Bottom Line for Now:

There’s no season for learning and no time like the present to stimulate creativity. Yet, leveraging our traditional back-to-school time of year is an opportunity to tap into that energy, excitement, and slight nervousness that so many of us have when we think about returning to school. Happy learning! 

Art's Signature

 

—

Free learning event: Check out the Leadership Caffeine Jam Session on 9/8/23 at noon central, where our focus is on How to Develop Your Executive Presence with guest co-host Joel Garfinkle.