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Create Teachers and Leaders

TEACHING IS the highest form of learning. Likewise, great leaders are great teachers. Over the years, we have discovered that the person who teaches a course often learns the most. There are individuals in your organization who teach courses in local community colleges or continuing education courses in the community. A great way to develop those around you is to have them teach within your organization. Maybe it is a course or a roundtable on your department and its services. Maybe it is an informational seminar for internal constituents so they can better understand how your department functions. It could even be a course for customers.

Think about those daily issues that bother you and those around you. Which of these issues could be cut off at the pass with a little education of key stakeholders? Brainstorm these issues with your team and determine how each can be addressed through education. Then ask one or two of your team members to take on the problem and implement a solution. This way, you are developing your team and assisting your department in communicating its message.

A variation of this approach is a strategy in which management training is cofacilitated by a training/human resource specialist and an operations manager. These “nontraining managers” are taught in the art and science of presentation and facilitation skills. The results can be outstanding. In one scenario we learned about, managers who attended the “train the trainer” sessions placed much more credibility in the program than when it was facilitated by a training specialist alone. More important, participants appeared more attentive than when the session was facilitated by only the training professional. The program ended up nearly “standing room only” for most of the sessions—including those that were five-day residential sessions requiring an extensive time commitment. Participants wanted and valued hearing the views of operations leaders. And finally, a serendipitous discovery was made … those nontraining specialists (e.g., the operations leaders) who cofacilitated the sessions noted that they became much more adept not only at coaching and facilitating but also at implementing what they taught.