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Do you thrive on continuous learning? Do you feel inspired to lead others to learn? Then you could be considered a learning leader!
Leaders often have to wear many hats in an organization. A learning leader helps with the growth and development of their team members and themselves to ensure their team can adapt to change and grow in their career.
What is a learning leader?
A learning leader:
Values and promotes a learning culture
Encourages others to acquire new knowledge and skills
Takes an active role in promoting and facilitating the learning process
Changes their leadership tactics according to their environment
Learning leaders exhibit various characteristics. Understanding and applying these skills to your personal and professional life will ensure you become a leader others look up to.
1. Deal with ambiguity
As a leader, you will often have to deal with a lot of ambiguity. Ambiguity is when things are uncertain or confusing and can be interpreted in multiple ways.
You may have team members who need extra support, or you may come across a situation you need help with. As a learning leader, your role is to understand the problem and find solutions.
This could include upskilling yourself and your team with skills such as project management, leadership, communication, etc. Developing a skill will help ensure your team learns and grows when there is a need for more skills.
Interested in developing your skills? Search Rumie Bytes, edX, or YouTube to get started.
2. Foster engagement for learning
Fostering engagement within your team involves:
Having an open communication channel for feedback
Understanding how to motivate others
Setting clear goals and expectations
Empowering decision-making within your team
Encourage members to share something they recently learned with everyone on the team. This helps with knowledge sharing and encourages everyone to get motivated to learn and lead by example.
Feedback allows you to learn, improve, and grow, while decision-making enables the team to be creative and open-minded, and encourages curiosity.
A balance between growth, improvement, and creativity will ensure your team members are engaged and satisfied with their work.
Did you know?
Employees in a learning culture tend to be more engaged and satisfied in their roles.
"Employees who spend time at work learning are 47% less likely to be stressed, 39% more likely to feel productive and successful, 23% more ready to take on additional responsibilities, and 21% more likely to feel confident and happy."
This leads to better retention rates within the organization.
3. Facilitate learning opportunities
Understanding that learning and growth are central to all you do as a leader is essential to helping you and your team grow.
Develop learning habits that help you grow, such as setting a schedule to learn, setting goals to learnnew skills, learning from your mistakes, and learning from others.
Your team will also grow and learn with you as you grow and learn. Continuous learning will allow you to share your knowledge, foster collaborative learning, develop research skills, and increase your desire and capacity to learn.
Participate in and encourage your team to take training courses or programs, attend workshops or seminars, and take on mentoring or coaching opportunities.
Quiz
What are some other ways to encourage learning? Select all that apply:
Opportunities allowing learners to learn at their pace, such as book clubs, learning circles with peers and externally, and mentoring programs, will help encourage autonomous learning. A highly competitive environment can cause learners to feel left behind if they aren't keeping up with the rest of the team. This can work negatively and discourage learners from further learning.
4. Use systems thinking
Systems thinking is an approach that looks at the whole picture instead of the smaller components, which can be misinterpreted when individualized.
Learning leaders are encouraged to look at the bigger picture to understand and identify the root causes of problems.
This allows learning leaders to "forecast behaviors, predict problems and solve issues." Thus, leaders are able to better understand situations and quickly find solutions.
Take, for example, LEGO blocks. They don't make sense individually but begin to make sense as they are put together.
This concept can also be applied to making changes within your team or organization. To change something, you have to understand the components that go into it.
Time for an activity!
You're a team leader in an organization that values continuous learning. Your team consists of individuals with diverse skills and backgrounds.
Lately, you've noticed a decrease in team collaboration and a reluctance among some team members to participate in learning opportunities. This is impacting overall team performance.
How can you assist your team members out of this slump?
A. Create a learning resource hub where team members can share resources, books, articles, online courses, conferences, webinars, etc.
B. Sign up team members for learning opportunities such as workshops, webinars, or conferences.
C. Integrate learning into their performance reviews through goal-setting opportunities.
D. Recognize and reward team members when they set and reach learning goals through praise, recognition, and monetary rewards if applicable.
Quiz
Read the above options and select all that apply:
Allow your team members to choose the learning opportunities they are interested in instead of signing them up without their consent. Learners are more motivated when they pursue learning aligned with their interests. As a leader, encouraging your team members to learn is easy to implement when you develop a learning mindset. Consider what motivates you to learn, and apply the same methods to your team.
This Byte has been authored by
Shalini Sadana
Learning & Development Professional