Inspirational leaders are great teachers

-Jakarta Post-(Amol Titus | Business | Sat, August 11 2012, 9:06 AM)

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires,” stated William Arthur Ward.

All those readers aspiring to make the transition from managers to leaders should pause for a moment and consider their current operating style at work.

Like the majority of managers, do you simply tell instructions and demand obedience based on your positions of authority? Explaining tasks is also not enough. If you have developed standard operating procedures, it is, of course, your role to familiarize and clarify them to your employees. That is task management, not people development. If your operating style is just focused on that, it is not enough and you are certainly not ready for leadership roles. And your organization is losing out if it has put you into such roles.

A good beginning for both the organization and the aspiring manager is to first understand that contemporary leadership now requires a serious commitment to teaching or to use corporate speak coaching related skills development activities. The nature of business complexities is such that employees need to constantly refresh, upgrade and re-orient.

Unfortunately, most companies opt for the easy way out on this. Citing time and priority issues, they expect individuals to develop through self-learning, or they outsource management development by sending employees to seminars or training programs often on ad hoc basis. Worse still, no meaningful training or development is carried out under the misguided excuses of cost control or competitive pressures.

Senior managers cannot become effective teachers when they themselves have stopped learning. At times bossiness is all too evident not just from the command and control styles adopted but also from the egoistic attitude of the pompous “Mr. Know It All”. In Indonesia, another commonly observed reason is the preference for status quo. According to John Gardner “one of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure”.

While retreating into the comfort zone might be beneficial to the lazy manager, such a retreat can spell disaster for companies that are constantly facing ferocious headwinds of change.

With business cycles, consumers, competitors, technology and risks all changing organizations have no choice but to create the buzz of learning and development inside their boundary walls. Each day should embody a serious new learning experience. The corporate culture should be characterized by open knowledge transfer and sharing. Seniors should spend less time in cabins and offices on paperwork and more at the frontline and factory floors observing, listening and suggesting.

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge” is the astute observation of John Naisbitt, and when corporate training does take place often participants are seen drowning under an information overload. Meetings and presentations are only a first step. What is more critical is a laser like focus on the objective of teaching, its co-relation to the strategy or business transformation taking place and time bound follow up to monitor behavior change and action. Teaching concepts like six sigma, governance, supervisory skills or customer relationship management is good, but what is more critical is how the concepts are customized and applied to the specific situation of the industry and company.

This is where the “demonstration” aspect of teaching comes into play. Superior teachers and managers have a passion for demonstrating. They roll up their sleeves, dive into projects and activities and like to experiment. Their energy is infectious and a loyal following develops when employees see seniors in action. This is particularly important when companies are facing major technical challenges, targets are stiff and the external environment is uncertain.

Inspirational leaders recognize first and foremost that they are what Peter Drucker termed “Knowledge Workers”. According to Drucker, “Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.” Thus, inside the organization, there is a positive circulation of ideas, transfer of best practices and continuous improvement of processes, products and services. Such activity does not happen in isolation but it is demanded by the organization. Training is a right not a favor and teaching is a duty not an option. When leaders start to be held accountable for skills development and knowledge-driven competitive advantages then they give the activity the seriousness it deserves.

Like Jack Welch, who writes in his book Jack Straight from the Gut — “When all is said and done, teaching is what I try to do for a living. Truth is, I’ve always liked teaching.”

His passion resulted in the company’s training and leadership development center, Crotonville, becoming a hub of GE’s energy and drive. Welch was a regular at Crotonville claiming “I loved the wide-open exchanges. The students taught me as much as I taught them. I became a facilitator, helping everyone learn from one another. I had ideas that I brought to every class, and our exchanges enriched them. I wanted everyone to push back and challenge.”

In doing so, he set an example of great leadership imbibing the essence of inspirational teaching.

Apart from internal teaching there are also plenty of opportunities for corporate leaders to engage with academic institutions and teach university and school students. It is unfair to expect ready-made pipelines of talent without getting involved, helping impart key concepts and developing critical competencies in graduating students.

Inspirational teaching, like inspirational leadership, is about sharing lessons from the past, showing how to excel in the present and preparing individuals well for challenges of the future. The lessons taught by such business leaders continue to define the successful journeys of their organizations long after their tenures have ended.

The columnist is president director of strategic advisory firm IndonesiaWISE and a senior visiting faculty at leading academic institutions in the region.