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CREATING YOUR OWN PERSONAL LEARNING STRATEGY
A Step-by-Step Approach
The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way.
—Mark Twain
WE HAVE ARRIVED now at the critical moment, the point toward which this book has been leading. It is time to develop your own Personal Learning Strategy—to carry the cat by the tail, as Twain put it so vividly, and see what emerges from the experience. Developing a Personal Learning Strategy means crafting a systematic approach to practice—and to practicing while you perform—tailored to your talents and your aspirations. Your PLS will do two things: it will aid you in the process of learning from experience—especially, though not exclusively, crucible experiences—and it will enhance your ability to adapt to change as a leader.
Some, perhaps many, of the resources that you need to develop as a leader are available from sources within your reach—for example, your employer. However, the responsibility for creating and enacting a PLS falls squarely on your shoulders. No one but you can know what you want to accomplish with your life. No one but you can know the obstacles in your way (and who, including you, put them there). Ultimately, no one but you can get you up at 4 a.m. to lace up your skates, hit the ice, and practice.
The logic behind a PLS is straightforward: leadership, like other performing arts, is distinguished by levels of accomplishment (i.e., novice, adept, eminent) and by constituent ingredients that are essential for progressing between levels of accomplishment. Four ingredients are important to becoming adept—thorough grasp of method, ambition, instruction, and feedback—and the fifth, your Personal Learning Strategy, holds the key to eminence.
On the basis of the exercises in the preceding two chapters and the examples throughout this book, you should be in a good position to create version 1.0 of your Personal Learning Strategy. There are three parts:
• Part 1 builds from the discussion of aspirations, motivation, and learning styles in chapter 5. The goal is to capture here, in one place, the driving forces behind your effort to grow and learn as a leader. In effect, part 1 will be a touchstone to which you will refer frequently—perhaps even on a daily basis—to keep yourself on track.
• Part 2 encourages you to rate yourself along three leadership dimensions discussed in chapter 6: adaptive capacity, engaging others through shared meaning, and integrity.1 Included in part 2 are example activities and potential crucible experiences tailored to specific aspects of each leadership dimension; consider them to be exercises for specific muscle groups.
• Part 3 guides you in cementing a plan for improving your leadership capabilities by creating intermediate goals to support their attainment.
You should include as inputs to your Personal Learning Strategy any and all results you can gather from leadership, learning, and personality assessments that your employer makes available (e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [MBTI], the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior [FIRO-B], or Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory, as well as results from 360-degree leadership assessments and annual performance reports). Take full advantage of the opportunities for technical training and technical practice that your organization provides. If your organization’s human resource group has detailed a set of leadership competencies, you should become intimately familiar with them and avail yourself of the assessment centers they have likely created (insisting, as you do, on receiving detailed feedback on their results).
Use your Personal Learning Strategy to set priorities when it comes to the training you invest in and the assignments you are offered. Since your career will likely span multiple organizations, only you will have the truly long-term view.
So let’s begin. In the following sections of this chapter, you will consider questions in the three broad areas I just outlined—and ultimately build your own Personal Learning Strategy. We begin with aspirations, motivation, and learning style.
PART 1: ASPIRATIONS, MOTIVATION, AND LEARNING STYLE
Leadership may be actively sought or reluctantly accepted, but it is a behavior deeply rooted in, even inspired by, personal values.
Why I Lead
“Why I lead” may be the most difficult place to start if you have not thought long and hard about it. If you are writing longhand rather than typing on your computer, I encourage you to use pencil (this is, after all, version 1.0) to jot down in the space provided a few key words that sum up your personal anthem. If you get stuck, that’s perfectly fine. Move on to the next step in part 1 and return later.
Why I lead
Why I lead:
If you have something to say, document it. Then, sit back for a moment so you can explore this more. Borrowing a familiar device from Total Quality Management, pursue the “5 Whys” for each item or statement that describes why you lead.2 That is, if you put down something like “I lead to make life richer and more rewarding for the people who work in my department,” then ask yourself, Why do I do that? One answer might be, “Because I believe that they deserve richer and more rewarding lives.” Again, why is that important? “Because I believe these people are capable of great things—more self-expression, more creativity, and more things that they and our customers value—than they are likely to experience if I don’t lead them.”
Only two whys, and already there’s much more grit, detail, and insight to the response than when we began. Now we can say, “I lead because I want to help people express themselves, realize their creativity, and produce things that they and our customers value.”
Changing the question to “Why you?” leads to a deeper exploration of what qualifies you to lead, and so on: “I feel a personal obligation to take responsibility, to make things happen, to create the conditions under which people can do and be things that really matter to them.” Fine, but again, why you (and not someone else)? And so on.
Two important notes here: first, don’t obsess. This is just an exercise—a glimpse at something you will muse about (and probably have mused about) for a long time. There’s no reason to believe that you will or must get the answer complete the first time through. Second, it’s a worthwhile exercise for you to evolve a shorthand version of your personal vision to serve as a goal, as well as a talisman, that reminds you of why you are on this journey to eminence as a leader. Use it the same way a taxi driver uses a photograph of his children taped to the dashboard of his cab (and if you have children yourself, no doubt they are also why you lead).
Myself at Peak Performance
In chapter 5 I recommended a split screen visualization exercise that began, as I do here, with your projecting ahead in time (to a certain date) images of yourself operating at peak performance. Now for this piece of your PLS, you get the opportunity to document, in as much detail as you can, the texture of that image. To aid you in making it graspable, we encourage you to use the present tense to describe what you see—not “I will” but “I am.” And don’t describe what you had to do or stop doing or give up in order to get there. Describe instead who you are as a result of some, as-yet-unexplored, intervening process.
Myself at peak performance
(future date: )
1. As a person:
2. At work:
3. As a leader:
4. At home:
It is important to be as explicit as you can be when describing yourself at peak performance. Don’t stop when, for example, you say that as a person, you are “athletic and trim.” Give it detail so you can measure it: “I weigh 175 pounds and play tennis three times a week.” Ask yourself each time you describe an attribute, How would I know whether I’d achieved that?
Once you complete this segment of the PLS, review it and see whether what you have written here extends, amends, or contradicts what you might have written earlier about “why I lead.”
My Current Reality
Now it is time to focus on the other half of your split screen: your current reality. By the very naming, current reality, you might feel inclined to be self-critical, dour, and disappointed. After all, once you have envisioned yourself at peak performance, it can’t help but be a letdown to look in the mirror. Recall, however, Bill Russell’s self-assessment: I have the pieces, but I don’t yet have the whole. There are likely to be many things that you will want to preserve and add to, as well as things that you’ll want to grow or discard, in pursuit of your aspirations.
So, describe in as much detail as you can the facts of your current reality. Again, be explicit; unless you have a meaningful baseline, you’ll have trouble discerning when you’ve gained ground on your aspirations.
My current reality
(today’s date: )
1. As a person:
2. At work:
3. As a leader:
4. At home:
Managing Creative Tension
If you’ve taken the last two steps seriously, you are likely to be feeling a little tension. Perhaps more than a little. That’s actually a positive because most of us need both a push and a pull to get change started. Waiting for what Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee term a “wake-up call” is both inefficient and risky.3 Discovering your most powerful and meaningful aspirations right after you’ve had a heart attack or some other near-death experience may not leave you able to do much about them.
So, use the creative tension between your current reality and yourself at peak performance to get “unstuck” and start to move. Begin with the supply side of the equation: what are the things you could do—the high-impact moves—that could give you the energy you need to overcome the inertial forces of your current reality? High-impact moves are actions you can take that will have a disproportionately positive effect on your development as a leader.
How can you know what those are? Interestingly, intuition is not a bad place to start, because, to paraphrase Ed Schein, most leaders know what they need to do and what they are doing wrong.4 They just need a reason to think it through and commit to doing something about it.
Of course, intuition and self-reflection are generally not enough, and there’s real benefit to be had from external, even clinical, judgment. That’s why, in chapter 6, I provided assessments of three core dimensions of outstanding leadership as a foundation to build on. It’s also why I encourage you to take advantage of assessments and coaching that may be provided by your organization. Recall the vital role played by coaches, mentors, and counselors in many of the crucible stories analyzed in chapters 2 and 3.
Finally, there are the obstacles that we encounter and often allow, consciously or not, to divert ourselves from accomplishing things we value, or things that we at least say we value. Stop for a moment and consider what some of your favorite diversions, time wasters, and “suddenly important” chores are. For example, when it came to writing, I used to find it impossible to start an article unless I had twenty pencils sharpened to a needle point and arrayed in my favorite pencil holder. Diversions are different from rituals; rituals are a valuable way to ingrain desired actions into an automatic routine. Diversions are ruses: they appear to move us forward but generally sidetrack us because they find partners, and together they create lengthy diversionary chains—for example, needing writing pads of paper of a specific color and style to go along with the sharp pencils, a clean desk that requires a can of furniture polish, a trip to the sock drawer for a worn sock to use as a polishing rag, an excursion to the mall to replace several pairs of worn socks, and a side visit to look at ties that might match a newly purchased sport coat. Sound familiar? (I will have more to say about the value of rituals and renewal in part 3).
Managing creative tension
1. How I manage the creative tension between the two visions:
2. High-impact moves I can take to accelerate progress:
3. Obstacles I routinely set for myself, and how I prevent them:
Motivations
Motivation is obviously an important aspect of your PLS, but it is likely to be the one about which you have the least insight unless you have taken a motivational assessment and have the results to work with. As noted earlier, many organizations do use these assessments. If you can get access to one, be sure to insist on a complete analysis of the results and their implications for your personal and career development.
Motivations
1. What motivates me most? (e.g., power, achievement, or affiliation):
2. I know this is important to me because:
3. These are the implications for my career goals:
The results of a motivational assessment are only as useful as they are believable to you and actionable by you. In the space provided, see whether you can cite examples of critical choices you have made in your career or, more generally, in your life that reflect the underlying motivation. Test yourself and see whether you cannot document equally compelling evidence for the influence of other motivations. Though it may be quite valid, the conclusion that you are motivated by the opportunity, say, to exercise power does not imply that you should abandon any activity or avocation that deviates from that motivation. No one is a pure type, motivations can change across different stages in adult development, and personality tests can be suborned by conscious or semiconscious gaming (e.g., “What would I like to think or have said about myself?”). The intent of any assessment is to help you deepen your selfunderstanding and to bring your aspirations into greater alignment with your more enduring traits.
Since career objectives will likely form a big part of your individual aspirations, it makes sense to give some thought to what the implications of your core motivations are for how you think about a career. Ed Schein’s concept of “career anchors” may be a useful one to consider as you think through the implications of underlying personality traits and lifelong work pursuits.5 According to Schein’s research, there are eight themes for which people will have a prioritized preference. These themes are not necessarily predictive of what careers people will end up in; however, people often find themselves understanding better the dissatisfaction they’re feeling with a current career when they review the results of their career anchors assessment.
Learning Style
There are two levels of learning to address here: how you learn under conditions of stress and challenge—as might be the case in a crucible—and how you extend your ability to learn from experience. Let’s consider each in turn.
As you will recall from the discussion of learning in crucible situations in chapter 2, research suggests that conditions of stress and challenge occasion dramatically different learning behaviors: often either we “snap back” to behaviors that are well ingrained (conceivably even comforting) but that make it difficult to learn new things in the moment, or we “lean forward” to behaviors characterized by an openness to learning. Begin this part of your PLS by reviewing the lifeline and the crucible stories you documented in chapter 5. What did you conclude about the conditions and the behaviors associated with learning something important about leading or about yourself as a leader? Did you tend to lean forward or snap back?
If you tended to snap back or assumed a defensive posture (that still did not prevent you from learning), it might help to jot down what you can recall about the way you came to recognize that you’d learned something important. For example, how long did it take, and what prompted you to recognize that something important had happened? Was a friend or adviser or coach involved? Did you notice something about an experience someone else had that led you to an “aha?” Did that insight come even more obliquely—for example, while watching a movie or reading a novel? The intent here is to render explicit—and therefore repeatable—the conditions under which you gain insight into something complicated, even difficult.6 If you can more easily recognize the conditions under which learning occurred—no matter how distant in time they may have been from the triggering events—then you increase the odds of learning again.
Learning style
1. How I learn best (according to experience):
2. Using the Kolb model, my preferred learning style is:
3. This means I am most likely to learn important things in these kinds of situations:
4. My opposing and adjacent learning styles are:
Opposing:
Adjacent:
Extending your ability to learn from experience is the objective of completing a learning styles assessment on the order of the Kolb inventory. You can gain insight into your default learning style, and you can identify situations where it will be possible to experiment with other approaches. The key, however, is to force yourself out of your learning comfort zone: not just what you know, but how you know.
PART 2: MY LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES
Before you begin to look more closely at enhancing your capabilities as a leader, think again about what you’re trying to accomplish here. If your goal is to become the CEO of your company, there is a definable set of assignments, competencies, relationships, and outcomes that will enhance your chances of achieving that goal. No guarantees, obviously, but a lot of hard work and a couple of well-placed internal coaches, and you are on your way.
But if your goal is to carry out your answer to “why I lead” and to fulfill the aspirations you’ve laid out earlier, then you need a plan that is far more robust. Allow me to offer a personal illustration here. When my daughter took up piano lessons, I suddenly got interested in learning to play too. I envisioned myself playing a Thelonious Monk tune that I especially loved. I saw people drifting into our living room while I played. They were obviously enjoying my playing, and I was absolutely perfect in my rendition. I stopped there. I knew my current reality: I couldn’t play piano. I knew what I had to do: get lessons. But when I talked with my daughter’s piano teacher the first day he arrived, I boldly cut to the chase:
“I see myself playing this Monk tune and everyone is enthralled. So I don’t need all the handholding my daughter’s going to need; I just want to learn that song—as a starter.”
Smiling, he said, “I can teach you to play that song. But there’s a catch: you’ll only be able to play that one song. Nothing more.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Hmm … ,” I started to say. But he cut me off.
“On the other hand,” he said, “how would you like to play any song? Any song you wanted to?”
I thought about it again. “Okay!” I exclaimed.
“Good,” he replied. “Then sit down next to your daughter.”
The outstanding leaders I’ve studied—men and women who have proved able to lead for a lifetime—have opted, metaphorically speaking, to sit down at the piano for the full range of lessons. Hence, I focus this part of the PLS on the three core capabilities: adaptive capacity, engaging others through shared meaning, and integrity.
Adaptive Capacity
Review your responses to the adaptive capacity self-assessment, and complete the following segments of your PLS. Note that on the next set of pages provided for each of the facets of the assessment, you’ll find both an example activity in which you could engage and a potential crucible experience that could enhance your ability in that area (see table 7-1). If your firm has identified organizational assignments or roles that provide learning opportunities paralleling any of those facets, by all means sample them as well. (I’ll take up the issue of timing and pacing of activities in part 3 of the PLS.)
Adaptive capacity
1. My score in the adaptive capacity self-assessment was
2. The facets of adaptive capacity where I scored myself most in need of work were (lowest-ranking three) and activities that I can begin in the next three months to enhance each:
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3. The facets of adaptive capacity where I scored myself in need of work were (middle-ranking three or four) and activities that I can begin in the next six months to enhance each:
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4. The facets of adaptive capacity where I scored myself highest (topranking three or four) and activities I can engage in to sustain them:
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Engaging Others Through Shared Meaning
Review your responses to the engaging others through shared meaning self-assessment, and complete the following segments of your PLS. Again, note that in table 7-2 we have provided for each of the facets of the assessment both an example activity in which you could engage and a potential crucible experience that could substantially enhance your ability in that area.
Engaging others through shared meaning
1. My score in the engaging others self-assessment was _____
2. The facets of engaging others where I scored myself most in need of work were (lowest-ranking three) and activities that I can begin in the next three months to enhance each:
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3. The facets of engaging others where I scored myself in need of work were (middle-ranking three or four) and activities that I can begin in the next six months to enhance each:
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4. The facets of engaging others where I scored myself highest (topranking three or four) and activities I can engage in to sustain them:
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5. My crucible story:
TABLE 7-1
Enhancing adaptive capacity: example activities and potential crucible experiences
| Example activity to begin with | Potential crucible experience | |
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| 1. Seek ways to improve as a leader | Solicit feedback on your performance in a particular leadership skill—e.g., communication or goal setting—from a sample of peers and direct reports | Volunteer to lead a youth group—e.g., Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts—or become an active member of an organization where you cannot be a leader |
| 2. Set stretch goals | Achieve a significant, difficult-to-obtain outcome, directly related to your statement of personal aspirations—e.g., run in a 5k road race within six months | Pursue a significant, difficult-to-obtain outcome, directly related to your statement of personal aspirations, that requires you to change your life routine in fundamental ways |
| 3. Develop a new hobby | Attend an “appreciation” event or course that introduces you to a new avocation—e.g., a lecture at an art museum or a gallery opening, or purchase a pit pass to a NASCAR race | Take up karate, sailing, or sewing (especially quilting since its traditions are as critical as its techniques), or learn a new language |
| 4. Learn about different aspects of my organization | Identify a part of your organization that is totally unfamiliar to you (best if it is a part that you are not interested in), and find out why some people think it is the most interesting part of the organization | Volunteer to take a rotation assignment in a part of the organization that you are unfamiliar with—particularly if it has the reputation for being an organizational Siberia—and make it a showcase |
| 5. Stay current on potential industry disruptions | Read industry reports to identify a major threat to the status quo for your industry and/or company, and then research, including attending professional conferences, so that you can write a one-page position paper and a plan of action to share with your peers and superiors | Organize an event that brings together leading thinkers and practitioners in the area of disruption in question, and lead them to develop a set of action alternatives—with no budget and outside your formal job description |
| 6. Find patterns | Spend an afternoon bird-watching (if you are not already a bird-watcher), and come up with your own rules for effective bird-watching | Figure out who your organization’s most dissatisfied customers are, and spend enough time with them that you can argue convincingly that they are right |
| 7. Concentrate on a fantasy | Take a recurring daydream or fantasy and treat it as if it were a work project: scope it, develop a budget for allocating scarce resources to it, and generate a timetable with major milestones | Assemble a team of people who live at the margins of your organization, and, with them, devise a vision of the ideal place to work |
| 8. Become a good judge of character | Volunteer to serve in a fund-raising capacity for a not-for-profit organization since that role demands the ability to discern who will pledge and who will make good on a pledge | Volunteer to serve as a review panel member for a philanthropic organization |
| 9. Persevere through difficulties | Teach a child how to ride a bicycle, or help a stroke victim regain his or her speech | Volunteer to take a leadership role in a turnaround, organizational downsizing, postmerger integration situation, or large-scale technological change |
| 10. Volunteer for a difficult assignment | Agree to serve on a citizen-review panel for your local police department | Volunteer to serve on a cross-functional task force in your organization |
TABLE 7-2
Enhancing capacity to engage others through shared meaning: example activities and potential crucible experiences
| Example activity to begin with | Potential crucible experience | |
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| 1. Encourage dissenting opinions | Set aside time in routine meetings for people to actively consider dissenting views on topics where there may be hidden disagreement | Identify a topic that is causing unproductive conflict in your work group, and organize a meeting that leads to honest dialogue and action; take responsibility for managing conflict, identifying actions that can be taken to mitigate the problem, and commit yourself publicly to seeing those actions through to completion and review |
| 2. Develop relationships with people in other lines of business and walks of life | Attend a social gathering where you make it your private but dedicated purpose to learn something about each person you meet that makes them special and interesting | Join a group that is just starting out, and help it refine its vision, mission, and objectives … and then stay with that group long enough to see the consequences of your work; e.g., a neighborhood crime watch, an after-school tutoring program, or a local disaster-relief group |
| 3. Send a clear message, clearly understood | Systematically assess whether the people who report to you clearly understand your position on a policy that is important to you and/or your organization—one that you think you have been extremely clear and consistent about | Run for elective office |
| 4. Get “buy-in” before implementing ideas | Condense your case for making change in your organization—work or otherwise—into a ninety-second elevator pitch, and present it to key stakeholders; assess their level of agreement and points of resistance; refine your pitch and try again | Run for elective office |
| 5. Hone a strong sense of purpose to my life and communicate that to others | Write and submit your own entry to National Public Radio’s program titled This I Believe | Volunteer to give a sermon or a speech at your church or synagogue in which you discuss a value that is central to your life |
| 6. Take an active role in subordinate career development | Set aside time with each of your direct reports and with at least three others who don’t report to you to find out what they are passionate about in their lives—and then suggest ways for them to pursue those passions at work | Volunteer as a tutor in a public school, coach a sports team if you have never done so, or work as a Big Brother or Sister |
| 7. Seek out others for career advice | Find someone at work who can serve as your personal coach | Form your own personal board of directors |
| 8. Practice empathy | Identify the stakeholder in a change effort you are leading who most scares or concerns you, and seek him or her out for advice on how to be successful in your change effort | Volunteer to serve as a tutor at a prison or correctional facility |
| 9. Tell stories to illustrate my ideas | Take a workshop or a course in storytelling, and use it to hone your own crucible story | Write a short story about a critical event in a character’s life and submit it for publication |
| 10. Become able to detach myself from my emotions | The next time you find yourself in the middle of an intense debate, notice the circumstances, notice your physical state, especially your breathing—and relax | On a topic about which you care passionately, search out and compile evidence that suggests that you are completely wrong |
Integrity
Review your responses to the integrity self-assessment, and complete the following segments of your PLS. Again, note that in table 7-3 we have provided for each of the facets of the assessment both an example activity in which you could engage and a potential crucible experience that could substantially enhance your ability in that area.
Integrity
1. My score in the integrity self-assessment was
2. The facets of integrity where I scored myself most in need of work were (lowest-ranking three) and activities that I can begin in the next three months to enhance each:
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3. The facets of integrity where I scored myself in need of work were (middle-ranking three or four) and activities that I can begin in the next six months to enhance each:
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4. The facets of integrity where I scored myself highest (top-ranking three or four) and activities I can engage in to sustain them:
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PART 3: SETTING MY AGENDA
Each of these new behaviors is intended to have a start date and an end date, to be built on every three to six months, and to be replaced with additional new behaviors. The purpose is to give yourself ample opportunity to practice while you perform. The key is to look for behaviors you can consciously practice at work and at home. (See the box, “Recovery and Renewal for [Corporate] Athletes.”)
Likewise, since we tend to play to our preferred learning style, there is substantial opportunity for personal and professional growth if you seek out experiences and situations in your adjacent and opposing learning styles. Scan your landscape at work and at home, and identify those instances and roles out of your comfort zone that will allow you to stretch into new behaviors, perspectives, and leadership capabilities.
TABLE 7-3
Enhancing integrity: example activities and potential crucible experiences
| Example activity to begin with | Potential crucible experience | |
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| 1. Disagree with the majority out of conscience | Don’t go looking to pick a fight, but the next time you find yourself in a situation where you strongly disagree with the majority opinion, speak up | Campaign publicly for a cause you hold dear |
| 2. Test the consistency of public and private views | On a single sheet of paper, write down the values, in statements rather than one-word bullets, that you believe you enact on a daily basis; next to each value, list an example of how that value influenced a recent decision you made | Expand the circle of people whom you routinely turn to for feedback, and include at least one person who has publicly opposed you; let them know that you seek their counsel because you respect their integrity, and ask them to provide you with their insights on a matter of great importance to you |
| 3. Follow through on commitments | For a week, as a routine part of every meeting you attend, whether or not you call or chair the meeting, do not allow the meeting to conclude without summing up the commitments that each individual has made, and make sure that each knows that you will hold them accountable for fulfilling the commitments they have made | Instead of contributing money to a cause you support, give your time, energy, and ideas |
| 4. Make myself available to others | Offer to mentor or coach someone in your organization; be sure that you are prepared to do so, however; that may mean attending a workshop or seeking instruction on how to mentor or coach | Offer to join the board of directors of a small, underresourced not-for-profit that is committed to a cause you support but is not visible and popular in the social circles you inhabit |
| 5. Explore guilt-inducing situations | Identify at least two situations at work that cause you to feel guilt—e.g., where you could have done something to right a wrong but didn’t, or an act you committed that now causes you to feel shame; for each situation, write down in detail in one column of a page why you feel guilt, and then in the opposite column write down what you should have done or will do should a similar situation arise, again in detail | Do or participate in something you can be incredibly proud of |
| 6. Believe in myself | Schedule time each day to review the positive things you accomplished, and congratulate yourself for accomplishing them | Start your own business |
| 7. Find out whether people think I am honest | Incorporate into your 360-degree leadership assessment explicit questions about your perceived honesty | Make honesty and transparency central to your organization’s mission |
| 8. Give up the lead | Prepare someone else to take your place as a leader in an activity that you deeply enjoy and value | Agree to take responsibility for the success of an important undertaking—preferably something you care about—but do so under the condition that you will not be visibly assigned to it and that you will never get credit if it succeeds |
| 9. Know the power of my position | At a social gathering among friends, offer a prize to the person who, by consensus opinion, does the best job of imitating you in voice and body language | At the outset of a new assignment, ask the members of the team you work with to write out (and seal away) one or two paragraphs that describe their positive and negative expectations of you as a leader; then, at the conclusion of your time in that assignment, hand back their statements (unopened), and ask them to comment, anonymously and on the same page, on which expectations you mirrored and which you contradicted |
| 10. Be open to being wrong | Institutionalize the role of devil’s advocate in your team so that each time you propose an action, there is a protected position from which contrary views can be launched | Publicly apologize and take responsibility for a mistake you or your staff made |
Use table 7-4 to set a list of tasks in key areas of practice, a start date for each, and a schedule for how often you need to practice. Don’t try to start everything at once, but also don’t be shy about giving yourself a weekly regimen to pursue. Think, again, about instances in which you have actually stuck to a plan for yourself: what were the circumstances, how did you keep yourself focused and your energy consistent, what support did you need in order to keep going? That experience could have involved a sport, a discipline you imposed on yourself to take and pass a test, how you quit smoking or lost weight, or how you acclimated yourself to a new job or a new city.
TABLE 7-4
Setting my agenda
| Task | Start date | Frequency | |
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| Part 1 | |||
| Why I lead | Review and refine | Immediately | Daily |
| Myself at peak performance; my current reality; managing creative tension | Review and refine | Immediately | Weekly |
| Motivations | Complete formal assessment; receive and review findings; incorporate into PLS | Within the first three months | |
| Learning styles | Complete formal assessment; receive and review findings; incorporate into PLS | Within the first three months | |
| Part 2 | |||
| Adaptive capacity | Identify intersections with training in leadership competencies offered by my organization, and enroll in relevant courses | Within the first three months | At least one course or training event per year |
| Undertake exercises that address areas of greatest development opportunity | First three months | One exercise per month | |
| Pursue a crucible opportunity in an area where I feel most in need of development | Second six months | One per year | |
| Engaging others through shared meaning | Identify intersections with training in leadership competencies offered by my organization, and enroll in relevant courses | First three months | At least one course or training event per year |
| Undertake exercises that address areas of greatest development opportunity | First three months | One exercise per month | |
| Pursue a crucible opportunity in an area where I feel most in need of development | Second six months | One per year | |
| Integrity | Identify intersections with training in leadership competencies offered by my organization, and enroll in relevant courses | Second three months | At least one course or training event per year |
| Undertake exercises that address areas of greatest development opportunity | Second three months | One exercise per month | |
| Pursue a crucible opportunity in an area where I feel most in need of development | Second year | One per year | |
| Part 3 | |||
| Resetting my agenda | Review and amend self-assessments in each leadership area | Every six months | |
| Review and amend PLS | Once each year |
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The idea in the opening paragraph of this chapter bears repeating: developing a Personal Learning Strategy means crafting a systematic approach to practice—and to practicing while you perform—tailored to your talents and your aspirations. In other words, only you can craft a PLS that both captures your imagination and contains within it the motivations that will help you adhere to it. If you discover that your most effective PLS need not take as structured or as regimented a form as the one I’ve suggested here, then so be it. The test, in the end, is the power and the durability of your answer to the question, “Why lead?”
Parts I and II of this book have focused heavily on the individual’s journey to eminence as a leader, inspired in part by Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice that “being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.” In part III, however, we helicopter up to the level of organizations in order to see better what they have to offer individual leaders in their quest to learn. We’ll find that organizations have a great deal to offer, but not in conventional ways. In fact, it may be the unconventional organization that shows us the most creative ways in which crucibles can be harnessed to develop leaders.