As a manager, your role must be to model organizational learning behavior. If you want others to be constantly learning, you must set an example for them. If you say that you want teams to reflect on their actions, derive lessons from their experiences, and share these lessons with others, then you must do this yourself, and make this visible to the group.
To create a community of learners, leaders must be learners themselves.
In the current environment of major structural changes, a leader must be at the vanguard of organizational change, questioning long-held corporate beliefs and assumptions, asking new questions, not just seeking new answers. Becoming a catalyst of paradigm shifts means more than acquiring new skills: it requires assuming a whole new way of being—as a theory-builder, a visionary, and a learner. In the new model, leaders will build and nurture learning organizations. They will be responsible for enhancing the quality of their thinking, not just the quality of their doing. This means becoming theory-builders: creating new frameworks for continually testing strategies, policies, and decisions … leaders must have the courage to become learners themselves … Becoming a true learner may be the most difficult shift that a leader makes. (Daniel H. Kim, 1993)
Chris Argyris said this about learning in Teaching Smart People How to Learn: “Success in the market-place increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it.” He is referring to highly educated professionals who hold key leadership positions. Often, they learn just enough to make incremental improvement in a process. Managers as well as employees, he writes, must “… reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act.”
Argyris argues that managers need to think differently if they want to break down defensive reasoning. They have to learn how to learn from failure. Even though our natural tendency is to reject criticism, and to find other people and situations to blame for the problem, we have to learn new ways of looking and thinking about our own behavior.
People want to perform effectively and be thought of as competent. Your example will motivate others to learn new ways to reason through a problem. “People can learn to recognize the reasoning behind their actions. They can face up to the fact that they unconsciously design and implement actions that they do not intend. Finally, people can learn how to identify what individuals and groups do to create patterns of organizational defenses and how these defenses contribute to an organization’s problems.
Change in defensive reasoning has to start at the top. Senior management must be honest about problem situations, examine the data about these situations, challenge the inferences that are made about this data, and then make decisions that fit the new awareness.