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THE CORE OF A PERSONAL LEARNING STRATEGY

Recognizing and Transforming Crucible Experiences

WE’VE BEEN LOOKING at the work of expert performers and how that can translate to the highest levels of leadership. But what do eminent performers’ experiences have to do with your own crucibles, and what you learn from them? Everything. Leaders in industry, government, and the social sector need all the things that athletes and performing artists do in order to reach top form. They need a deep and thoroughgoing grasp of method. They need ambition to fuel them over time and setbacks. They need instruction and coaching, whether it comes from a teacher, a mentor or a coach, a team, subordinates, or a spouse. And they need feedback over time—from all of the year’s business quarters, not just the most recent.

But even that’s not enough.

For leaders in business, government, and the social sector, the stage shifts constantly. The demands on leaders’ attention are growing exponentially, and they have to assimilate new information daily. Meantime, the rules often change midgame as the cast of collaborators and competitors turns over continuously. For leaders to prosper in such an environment, not just to survive, my interviews suggest that individuals need a playbook that helps them decide how and when to adapt, to distinguish what’s urgent and strategic from what’s transient yet annoying, and to guide their own process of learning and growing.

This chapter will translate my research findings about crucible experiences into a systematic and replicable process for creating a Personal Learning Strategy. I will show how a PLS can take what science has learned about the path to expert performance and shape it to fit the reality of contemporary business and to the diversity of individual attributes and aspirations. Although a PLS draws from the wealth of competency-based courses and workshops organized by human resource departments and business schools, it is much more than a checklist or a menu of potential assignments.¹ Rather, it is something to be owned and enacted by an individual, driven by his or her personal vision, tailored to his or her learning style, aimed to extract insight from the broadest possible range of experiences (off-the-job, especially in crucible situations, as well as on-the-job), and dedicated to achieving meaningful results.

This process begins by exploring the internal beliefs and motivations and the conscious competence that can make one an adept or even, ultimately, an outstanding leader. The real work begins with deep reflection on why you want to lead and to what end? This requires you to be honest with yourself about your aspirations, beliefs, and desires. From there, we’ll address the sources of motivation. By shutting out the din of other people’s expectations, you can get a glimpse of your most energetic and ambitious self—and this, in turn, will help sustain you in the face of fatigue, setback, and all the thousands of small cuts that will discourage you from learning and growing.² Finally, you’ll reflect on the contexts and the ways in which you have learned the most important lessons of your life. In other words, what does it take for you to learn important things? How do you learn best? We’ll take an excursion through the most prominent learning theories to help assess your learning style.

Let’s begin now with the critical question of why you want to lead in the first place.

WHY LEAD?

As a young man, John W. Gardner had no ambition to lead, much less to manage. Yet when he passed away in 2006, his accomplishments included serving as secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson (despite being a registered Republican), presiding over the creation of the Public Broadcasting System, founding two successful public action lobbies (Common Cause and the Independent Sector), presiding over the Carnegie Corporation, and serving as a Marine Corps officer in World War II. What kindled his desire to lead?

Finding himself in a small management job at the Federal Communications Commission during World War II, he recalled, “I began to get quite impressive praise for my management skills. And it wasn’t even on my map! I mean I didn’t even respect managers. But apparently some qualities were there waiting for life to pull those things out of me.” Gardner deeply believed that life was a tug-of-war between what “was” and what “was possible” and that the principle human challenge—his challenge—was one of continuous renewal even in the face of what might seem to be implacable opposition and constraint. As he put it, “The need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”

There is no point in trying to assess people’s abilities without first finding out what they care about. The same goes for trying to assess things such as “leadership potential” or “creativity” out of context. One has always to ask, in relation to what? Thus, before we address motives and skills, we start by asking, Why do you lead? Why does a person seek out, or accept, the burden of leadership? A Personal Learning Strategy begins and ends with why as the central question and with you as the central character. You alone can answer these questions. The vessel you are creating will hold your aspirations and your passions and provide a shield that defends you from the fears and inhibitions that learning inevitably summons up. (See the box, “Why Lead?”)

Let me illustrate the importance of why for both leading and learning with a story someone once told me. A disciple asked his teacher, “Guru, why do I not see and feel god the way you do?” The guru had no instant answer for him. But the next day, as they were going for a dip in the holy water of the Ganges, the guru found a strange way to answer his disciple’s question. As the disciple bent toward the water, the guru forced his head down and did not let him up, leaving him to struggle and gasp for breath. When he finally let him up, the guru asked his disciple, “Do you want god the way you wanted to breathe under the water?” The disciple had his answer.³

How many of us want to lead or to learn as badly as we want to breathe? What follows are three exercises designed to help you understand why you want to lead.

THE MOTIVATION TO LEAD

Now that you’ve begun to answer questions about why you want to lead, let’s examine your more fundamental, perhaps even unconscious, motivators.

Outstanding leaders acquire their qualities through practice, but a leader’s aspirations—his or her vision of what could be, despite what is—are fueled by intense personal motivation. Talent is important, without a doubt, but as we’ve seen, raw talent is not enough. Motivation is an enduring factor that can accelerate or inhibit your improvement as a leader. Thus, understanding what motivates you—what influences the way you think and behave in the most fundamental ways—will make it easier to identify and exploit the right learning opportunities for yourself, particularly crucible experiences. Likewise, understanding how and when you learn best helps sustain your motivation to grow and learn as a leader.

Motivation is not the same as aspiration. Aspirations, such as those we explored in the preceding exercise, are images of the way things ought to be and, if we apply ourselves, how they will be. Although these images provide data that is valuable in exploring your motives, they are not the same as motives.⁴ Motives are predispositions or background desires—often opaque because they are not routinely examined—that lead us to act in particular ways. Needless to say, furious debates in the field of psychology have flourished for decades as to whether we can ever truly understand individual motives, much less change them. However, I come down on the side of using all available means to explore one’s motives for insight into why we behave the way we do. Thus, rather than argue that we are slaves to passions we cannot discern, I argue that our motives are very real and analyzable, that they do indeed influence the way we think and behave (and thus we ought to examine them closely), and that they quite often temper the aspirations we set for ourselves.

Indeed, many psychologists who study individual motivation, most notable among them being David McClelland, his students, and his colleagues, believe that what distinguishes leaders is not their behavior but their inner motivation—in particular, the way they think about leadership.⁵ In other words, statements about aspirations provide valuable detail and a clearer sense of context, but similar aspirations can be arrived at by different paths. For example, a personal aspiration may prominently feature you as an admired leader, a perennial face on the cover of BusinessWeek. You can, however, get there any of a number of ways: building a company through hard work and dedication, unleashing extraordinary efforts from ordinary people, or finding uncharted accounting techniques with which to pump up your company’s share price.

Likewise, a statement of aspirations may give only a modicum of insight as to whether an individual can realistically achieve them. This caution is important on two levels. First, even when you take the time to create tension between where you want to be and where you are, there is no guarantee that you aren’t coloring your aspirations in such a way as to reflect what’s socially acceptable or desirable versus what you really want. For example, although MBA students love to quote from articles that venerate participative, group-oriented leadership styles, I’ve often seen those same students after hours reading dog-eared copies of such bibles of individualism as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Second, you may envision yourself behaving in a way in which you are really not disposed to behave. Though one of the central premises of this book is that human beings are mutable—they can change their behaviors and even the way they think—never would I argue that change is easy or straightforward. If you find great pleasure or comfort or reduced anxiety by staying in the background, working in isolation on something you understand, then it’s going to be difficult to step into the limelight, point in the direction of unknown territory (no matter how attractive it might appear), and link arms with people you don’t really know.

That’s why it’s important to give serious thought to what truly motivates you to perform. Unfortunately, the most effective tools for exploring your motives demand textbooks’ worth of explanation and skill in interpreting individual results that are well beyond a book focused on learning from experience. But as I’ll show in the upcoming section on learning styles, there are many useful assessments and inventories available through human resource departments, management development consultancies, college textbooks, and even online that you can tap into for more detailed insight. Even the popular personality profiles like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior (FIRO-B) can provide a wealth of insight into thought styles, values, and motivations.⁶

Here’s an exercise that I have found to be a useful starting point when assessing your underlying motivations.

How You Think Influences How You Behave

One of the most widely used and, from my perspective, the most usable assessments of individual motivation was developed by McClelland and his team to shed light on the connection between the way people think and the way they behave. Behaviors, like any outcome measure, may be relatively easy to document and observe, but the real leverage for change comes from examining the patterns of thought that lead to behavior, even when those patterns are not immediately obvious or easy to articulate. Through systematic analysis of stories collected from thousands of people around the world, McClelland’s team concluded that some 80 percent of the stories consisted of some combination of three social motives:⁷

•   Achievement—a concern with excellence or doing things well and efficiently, expressed in stories by competing with the self or with the performance of others, by doing something unique, or by advancing one’s career. Common characteristics among those motivated by achievement include preference for individual work, responsiveness to individual goals and incentives, willingness to undertake moderate risks in tasks/goals, difficulty in dealing with people (low emotional intelligence), and a tendency to seek and need hard, quantitative feedback.

•   Affiliation—a concern with friendship, expressed in stories by wanting to be liked or accepted or to participate in social situations. Common characteristics among those motivated by affiliation include preference for working in groups, responsiveness to group goals and incentives, low willingness to undertake risks in tasks and goals, many friends and high levels of emotional intelligence, discomfort in leadership roles, and a tendency to see feedback as personal—an evaluation of liking or disliking.

•   Power—a concern with influence and influence relationships, expressed in stories by powerful actions, arousing strong emotions in others, or being concerned about one’s reputation, prestige, or position. A person’s orientation for power can be one of three types: personal, institutional, and interactive.⁸ Those who are oriented toward personal power want to direct others, and this need often is perceived as undesirable. Persons oriented toward institutional power want to organize the efforts of others to further the goals of an organization; they are not, however, likely to share power with subordinates. People oriented toward interactive power derive their influence from others—for example, the team or organization they lead. Common characteristics among those motivated by power include very high emotional intelligence, willingness to take moderate risks in influence situations and either high or low risks in task situations, verbal facileness, a preference for qualitative feedback, and ability to persist in a goal for lengthy periods without feedback or with negative feedback.

McClelland’s prescription is simple: if you desire to be a leader, you have to think like one. To the extent that you are motivated by a need for affiliation or achievement, you won’t think the way power-oriented leaders do.

Of course, changing the way you think is no easy chore, but David Burnham prescribes a very distinctive pattern of thinking and a systematic process for shaping thought patterns that, according to his published research, lead not only to desired actions but also to results predicted by the theory. At the heart of that process is a form of deliberate practice that would look familiar to students and teachers of music, chess, or any of a number of complex, highly intentional pursuits—most emphatically in terms of approaches like the Suzuki Method. In this case, deliberate practice revolves around crafting stories that contain statements and directions that are consistent with the core ideas about interactive leadership.

The most important thing to notice about this description of Burnham’s approach is its attention to conscious documentation and articulation of thought in the drive to change behavior. In crafting stories—writing and rewriting one’s own as well as deciphering others’—you are compelled to render visible (if only in the minds’ eye) how you think. As Michelene Chi and others have found in research that asks experts to verbalize their thoughts and their associations, and as Donald Schon found in his transcripts of experts’ interchanges with apprentices and students, speaking one’s thoughts is not an easy thing to do, particularly when so much of the activity of leading (or architecting) is conveyed through gestures.⁹ Nonetheless, it can be inordinately productive when one tries to uncover the assumptions and symbols that influence the conclusions we reach—and, often, the actions we take.

Verbalization and documentation help us get help, too. Psychiatrists encourage patients to externalize their thoughts and fantasies in order to uncover logic and associations that could lead to deeper insight. Professionals of all sorts, including automotive designers, conduct design reviews that generally involve talking about pictures and assigning to inanimate objects the desires and intentions of their designers. Many is the time, in my capacity as a consultant, I have sat in on a design review and heard an engineer talk about “what the car wants to be,” when, in fact, he is describing what he wants the car to be.¹⁰

The benefit of verbalization and documentation is what it contributes to achieving conscious competence—that is, the ability to notice what you are doing as you do it and, if you desire, to alter it, experiment with it, and assess whether it fits what you are trying to achieve.

DISCOVERING HOW YOU LEARN BEST

Throughout this book I have argued that learning is a critical part of leading, particularly leading for a lifetime. Adaptive capacity is all about learning, and each time I have mentioned it, I have been careful to draw the link between an individual’s ability to adapt and his or her ability and willingness to learn. Moreover, the ability to engage others in shared meaning rests heavily on understanding how others learn.

Most people have a sense of how they learn. Some learn by hands-on experience, others by trial and error, reading, observation, or some combination of these.¹¹ Most of us are at least aware that another person’s learning style may differ from ours—and that those differences require us to exercise some flexibility in the way we teach or attempt to impart information and technique. Seems obvious, but ask yourself seriously, How much do I understand about how I learn or about the differences between my most familiar or comfortable mode of learning and the ones others rely on?

I personally learned the answer to that question after trying to teach my daughter to ride a bike when she was six. I began by wheeling her to a nearby playground with a big empty basketball court. My explanation, from my perspective at least, was simple and straightforward: “Hold on to the handlebars, keep your feet on the pedals, keep the pedals going at a nice, even speed, and pick out something like that bush off in the distance to ride toward. Just focus on that bush. Don’t worry about anything in-between.” Ever the dutiful child, my daughter nodded in understanding, gritted her teeth, and focused on the bush. Clutching the back of her seat, I gave her a gentle shove. Off she went—for about ten feet. She stopped pedaling, the front wheel wobbled furiously, and down she went, scraping her knee in the process. Once the tears subsided and I convinced her that she really ought to get on and try again, I repeated my instructions, with even more emphasis on the pedaling part.

Another shove and … twenty feet later, crash: another scrape, more tears, and a kick to the seat for good measure. My wife, who up to this point had been watching quietly from the sidelines, asked whether she could give it a try. “Sure,” I said, not convinced in the least that she’d do any better. Looking our daughter in the eyes, she said simply, “Look, I am going to run alongside you, holding on to you and to the bike, and when you feel like you’re ready to ride by yourself, you tell me and I’ll let go.” Off they went, slowly crossing the basketball court. Periodically my wife would ask, “Do you feel it?” For the first minute or two, she shook her head no. Then, inexplicably, on the fifth or sixth try, my daughter declared, tentatively, “I think I’ve got it, Mommy.” My wife let go and off our daughter went, a little wobbly and hardly straight, but riding by herself.

The moral of the story? I have a keen professional interest in learning, yet I still missed three very basic principles: first, my daughter doesn’t learn the way I do; second, unlike my wife, I didn’t vary my teaching style to match my daughter’s learning style; and third (something I didn’t realize until after this episode), I don’t actually learn the way I teach. This last point might seem obscure, but it’s important to formulating your Personal Learning Strategy.

It turns out, I’m not alone in the misperceptions I had about learning. Espoused theories of learning, to borrow Chris Argyris’s term, frequently give lip service to the importance of matching learning environments and technologies to differences in learning styles. Theory in practice, on the other hand, operates on what philosopher Paulo Freire characterized as the banking model of education: deposit facts and methods in a student’s head, and she will store them there until she needs them.¹² To this day, most primary, secondary, and even postsecondary educational institutions subscribe in practice to the banking model. When I taught at several major universities in the first fifteen years of my postdoctoral career, I routinely lectured to students, assigned them hundreds of pages of reading on a weekly basis, and expected them to repeat back to me the things that I had said or some other sage had written. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I knew that I didn’t like to read hundreds of pages; I even remembered, with no small amount of chagrin, the dozens of reading assignments I’d skimmed while in college myself because I couldn’t help but doze off after a few pages of turgid academic prose. Yet here I was, adhering to convention, depositing facts and methods in the heads of my students with the assumption that if they listened, read, and took copious notes, they would learn. I knew that that wasn’t the way I learned. But it was the way I taught—at least up to that point!

The point is that when it comes to developing a Personal Learning Strategy, being clear about how you learn and how you learn best is essential. Such clarity will allow you to leverage the resources available to you, whether they are structured classes and workshops, on-the-job training, or crucible experiences. One thing you can do immediately is to reflect a bit on how you learned something recently.

Fortunately, most organizations subscribe to one or another popular assessment of learning styles. As in the case of motivational assessments, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of what employers already offer. But, again, even if they do not offer an assessment (or if you worry about sharing the results of your assessment), there are many tools available in the market and on the Web. David Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory is one of the most widely used and accessible diagnostics around and at modest cost provides a wealth of material that can be used in filling out your PLS.

Kolb’s research on how people use experience in learning builds from distinctions along the lines of the VARK model and adds to them the dimension of “efficacy”—that is, how effectively people translate something they see, hear, or feel into a new understanding.¹³ According to Kolb, most of us develop a strength in, or orientation to, one of four basic learning styles (see table 5-1): converging, assimilating, diverging, or accommodating. Each learning style is an ideal type, and, as was the case with McClelland’s motivational types, people rarely operate from just one. For purposes of this discussion, however, let’s consider what differences in learning style mean.

TABLE 5-1

Kolb’s four basic learning styles

Source: Adapted from David A. Kolb, The Learning Style Inventory: Technical Manual (Boston: McBer and Company, 1976); David A. Kolb, “Learning Styles and Disciplinary Differences,” in The Modern American College, ed. A. W. Chickering (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981); and David A. Kolb and Ronald E. Fry, “Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning,” in Theories of Group Process, ed. Cary L. Cooper (London: Wiley, 1975).

Someone with a diverging style, for example, is much more comfortable learning from dealing with open-ended problems and situations that call for creative responses, compared with, say, someone with a converging style who learns by chopping problems into smaller, more rational and manageable pieces. Thus, the fuzzy front end of a product development process, when it’s not at all clear what will ultimately emerge, is a place where someone with a diverging learning style would claim he learns best. On the other hand, someone with a converging learning style would say she learns best when she has things under control and where there is a new but logical method for solving problems to be learned.

Try the following exercise for yourself to see where you come out in this kind of inventory.

Not Just Style, But Stance, Too

Your Personal Learning Strategy needs to address not only your learning style, but your learning “stance,” as well. By stance I mean how open you are to learning new things, particularly under highstress conditions. In chapter 3 I took up the question of how some people learn from crucible experiences, and in chapter 4 I dove into the research on expert performance; in both cases I drew attention to the barriers to learning that can crop up during periods of stress, when new or disconfirming evidence can appear without warning. Thus, it’s not enough to gain insight into how you learn when things are going smoothly; you must also have a clue as to how you react to learning opportunities that present themselves as stressful, uncomfortable, perhaps even unnerving events. Not surprisingly, your reactions will be of signal importance when it comes to crucible events on the job and off.

Although we take up the connection between your learning style and crucible experiences explicitly in the next chapter, you might consider the following thought experiment to begin assessing your own learning style under stress.

YOUR CRUCIBLE EXPERIENCES

So far in this chapter we have walked through three steps to help you begin exploring your internal beliefs and motivations. At this juncture it makes sense to address directly what all these ideas have to do with how you learn from your own crucible experiences.

As you’ve thought about your own experiences, compared them with those of the people I’ve quoted, and pondered questions about why you lead and what your own personal aspirations and motivations are, as well as how you lead, you’ve been processing in the background your most influential leadership experiences. Now is the time to bring them to the forefront.

The following exercise involves recollecting and analyzing several of your crucible experiences. The exercise is structured to enable you to quickly surface key insights and assumptions and then to document them so they can be used in subsequent chapters as “data” and points of reference. Completing the exercise will be extraordinarily helpful in crafting your own Personal Learning Strategy in chapters 6 and 7.

In the two chapters that follow, you will be guided toward creating your own Personal Learning Strategy. Chapter 6 gives you the opportunity to assess yourself along the core leadership dimensions—adaptive capacity, ability to engage others through shared meaning, and integrity—and suggests exercises to help limber your mind along each dimension. Chapter 7 will help you design more concretely a Personal Learning Strategy.