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2015-06-09 07:30:19
J.P. FlaumBecky Winkler
June 08, 2015
On the surface, John looked like the perfect up-and-coming executive to lead
BFC s Asia expansion plans. He went to an Ivy League B-school. His track record
was flawless. Every goal or objective the organization had ever put in front of
him, he d crushed without breaking a sweat.
But something broke when John went to Asia. John struggled with the ambiguity,
and he didn t take prudent risks. He quickly dismissed several key
opportunities to reach out for feedback and guidance from leadership. It became
clear that John had succeeded in the past by doing what he knew and operating
rather conservatively within his domain. It also became clear that the company
was going to massively miss the promises it had made to the Board and the
Street if John remained in the role.
With a heavy heart, BFC s CEO removed his promising prot g from the role and
redeployed him back in the US. He decided he had no choice but to put a
different kind of leader in the role Alex.
While talented, Alex had come to be known behind closed doors by the moniker
DTM difficult to manage. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, and he
wasn t afraid to challenge the status quo. He loved a challenge, and he was
comfortable taking risks. It turned out to be the best move the CEO ever made.
No stranger to ambiguity, Alex was flexible in formulating his strategy and
sought feedback from the people around him. He made a risky move at the
beginning that backfired on him. But as a result, he learned what not to do and
recalibrated his approach. That was the key to success. His tendency to buck
the established BFC way of doing things was exactly what was required for the
company to successfully flex its approach and win in the new territory.
What Alex s success exemplifies is the importance of learning agility : a set
of qualities and attributes that allow an individual s to stay flexible, grow
from mistakes, and rise to a diverse array of challenges. It s easy to assume
that those qualities would be highly prized in any business environment.
Flexibility, adaptability and resilience are qualities of leadership that any
organization ought to value.
But in practice, this is not the case. As a rule, organizations have favored
other qualities and attributes in particular, those that are easy to measure,
and those that allow an employee s development to be tracked in the form of
steady, linear progress through a set of well-defined roles and business
structures.
The Link Between Emotional Intelligence and Learning Agility
How does emotional intelligence connect to learning agility? In their
groundbreaking 1990 article, researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Meyer
defined it as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to
monitor one s own and others feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them
and to use this information to guide one s thinking and actions. Learning
agility is central to the first part of the task the ability to monitor and
manage one s own emotions. And since that leads naturally to an increased
ability to listen, it is reasonable to suggest that learning-agile people might
be more skillful at monitoring and responding to others emotions as well. The
link between learning agility and sensitivity to others emotions has not yet
been fully documented but making the connection might prove to be a fruitful
area for further research.
Learning agility, by contrast, has until recently been hard to measure and hard
to define. It depends on related qualities such as emotional intelligence that
are only just beginning to really be valued. It also relates to behaviors
such as the ability to recover from and capitalize on failure that some
managers would prefer not to think about.
The Pillars of Learning Agility
According to the researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the
Center for Creative Leadership, learning agility is defined as follows:
Learning agility is a mind-set and corresponding collection of practices that
allow leaders to continually develop, grow and utilize new strategies that will
equip them for the increasingly complex problems they face in their
organizations.
Learning-agile individuals are continually able to jettison skills,
perspectives and ideas that are no longer relevant, and learn new ones that
are, the researchers say.
The research identified four behaviors that enable learning agility and one
that derails it.
The learning-agility enablers are:
Innovating: This involves questioning the status quo and challenging long-held
assumptions with the goal of discovering new and unique ways of doing things.
Innovating requires new experiences, which provide perspective and a bigger
knowledge base. Learning-agile individuals generate new ideas through their
ability to view issues from multiple angles.
Performing: Learning from experience occurs most often when overcoming an
unfamiliar challenge. But in order to learn from such challenges, the
individual must remain present and engaged, handle the stress brought on by
ambiguity and adapt quickly in order to perform. This requires observation and
listening skills, and the ability to process data quickly. Learning-agile
people pick up new skills quickly and perform them better than less agile
colleagues.
Reflecting: Having new experiences does not guarantee that you will learn from
them. Learning-agile people look for feedback and eagerly process information
to better understand their own assumptions and behavior. As a result they are
insightful about themselves, others and problems. In fact, in prior studies,
Green Peak Partners discovered that strong self-awareness was the single
highest predictor of success across C-suite roles.
Risking: Learning-agile people are pioneers they venture into unknown
territory and put themselves out there to try new things. They take
progressive risk not thrill-seeking, but risk that leads to opportunity.
They volunteer for jobs and roles where success is not guaranteed, where
failure is a possibility. They stretch themselves outside their comfort zones
in a continuous cycle of learning and confidence-building that ultimately leads
to success.
The learning-agility derailer is:
Defending: Being open to experience is fundamental to learning. Individuals who
remain closed or defensive when challenged or given critical feedback tend to
be low in learning agility. By contrast, high learning-agile individuals seek
feedback, process it and adapt based on their newfound understanding of
themselves, situations and problems.
How do these five facets translate into behavior, performance and results at
work? The researchers found that learning-agile individuals are notably:
More extroverted: They are more sociable, more active and more likely to take
charge.
More focused: They continually refine and polish their thinking and their work.
They are more organized, more driven and more methodical.
More original: They are more likely to create new plans and ideas, seek
complexity and readily accept change and innovation.
More resilient: They are more at ease, calm and optimistic. They rebound more
quickly from stressful events.
Less accommodating: They are more likely to challenge others, welcome
engagement, and express their opinions.
The research also shows that while many individuals can model some aspects of
these behaviors, learning-agile individuals stand out in particular for their
resilience, calm, and ability to remain at ease. It s not just that they are
willing to put themselves into challenging situations; it s that they re able
to cope with the stress of these challenges and thus manage them more
effectively.
The derailer defensiveness also has an impact on performance, of leaders
in particular. When the researchers reviewed 360-degree evaluations, they found
that leaders who ranked high on the defending scale were considered less
effective. By contrast, peers and direct reports rated more highly the leaders
who ranked high on the reflecting scale.
Researchers at Columbia University and the Center for Creative Leadership
collaborated to develop an objective test for learning agility, called the
Learning Agility Assessment Inventory (LAAI). It s a 42-item survey that
measures learning-agile behavior by asking individuals about how they respond
to challenging situations, then scoring the answers against the four enablers
innovating, performing, reflecting and risking and reverse-scoring the
derailer, defending. In developing the test, researchers compared the scores to
a 360-degree assessment and to another established personality test, the
Workplace Big Five Profile.
We then administered this test to over 100 executives mostly private-equity
backed C-suite leaders that we had previously assessed in a rigorous half-day
structured interview. In a 2010 study with Cornell University, we showed that
our assessment grades predict performance, as measured not only by revenue and
EBITDA but also by boss ratings (often issued by the Board). The more recent
study extended that research by showing that those who out-performed in our
assessments also scored higher on the LAAI.
Taken together, the two studies demonstrate that high learning-agile
individuals are also high performers.
Cultivating Your Own Learning Agility and Coaching It in Others
One of the best ways to coach for learning agility or for that matter, any
desirable set of behaviors is to recognize and develop it in yourself.
Becoming more learning-agile will help you cope with the turbulence of the
workplace. And it will make you more aware of how to bring out the potential in
your learning-agile people.
Among the ways to cultivate learning agility in yourself are:
Innovating. Seek out new solutions. Repeatedly ask yourself, What else? What
are 10 more ways I could approach this? What are several radical things I
could try here? It doesn t mean you do all of these things, but you explore
them before proceeding.
Performing. Seek to identify patterns in complex situations. Find the
similarities between current and past projects. Cultivate calm through
meditation and other techniques. Enhance your listening skills listen instead
of simply (and immediately) reacting.
Reflecting. Engage in counterfactual thinking explore what-ifs and
alternative histories for projects you ve been involved in. Regularly seek out
real input. Ask, What are three or four things I or we could have done better
here? Frame the question in specific terms, instead of simply asking, Do you
think I should have done anything differently? But make sure the questions are
still open-ended that will encourage colleagues to speak up.
Risking. Look for stretch assignments, where the probability of success isn t
a given.
Avoid defending. Acknowledge your failures (perhaps from those stretch
assignments) and capture the lessons you ve learned from them.
Reaping the benefits of learning agility takes effort and commitment. That
said, the first step is simple: Recognize its attributes and that it is an
asset that you need to cultivate. After that comes the hard work creating
accurate screening methods, putting the systems in place to identify
learning-agile individuals and creating career paths and management techniques
to get the most out of them.
But once you have started that process, you will begin to realize the benefit
an organization that is more flexible, more adaptable, better able to respond
to business volatility and therefore more competitive in the face of
unprecedented challenges. The results might even be revolutionary.
J.P. Flaum is the Managing Partner at Green Peak Partners. In addition to
managing Green Peak, J.P. spends most of his professional time coaching CEOs on
critical leadership and human capital objectives.
Becky Winkler, Ph.D., is a Partner at Green Peak Partners. Becky leverages a
rich background as both a business consultant and an Industrial-Organizational
Psychologist to help organizations make decisions around the selection,
promotion, and development of key executives.