'Learning leaders': DIY learning campfires

I want to say something here about a couple of instances that I've come across recently of managers doing things to build their own learning.  I'm not saying that this represents any kind of widespread trend, but I am noticing the fact that it is happening and therefore it's worth noting and sharing.

Both examples are from the same company. 

What is being done? - reading, analysing, discussing, acting

What's of interest is that this is a bottom-up approach kicked off by a manager, with an interest in the field of leadership and management, and dubbed 'learning leaders'.  This practice is now being followed and adapted by a colleague in the same business unit.

The group is meeting once a month for about an hour or two outside of the normal office hours.  There is a selected topic and book/video or podcast.  The group reviews, analyses and discusses the things of interest that arise from the reading.

There are several positive benefits of this approach.

Following personal interests rather than waiting for the prescriptions from the L&D department

I like the responsibility that's being taken to follow personal learning interests rather than waiting for L&D to decide what should be learned about.

Encouraging collaboration and learning

I like the collaborative and social learning process.  Sharing stories and insights is the equivalent of sitting around the campfire; it's enjoyable and the insights shared spark ideas and suggestions for action and further learning.    It's also encouraging managers in other teams to do something similar.

What are the other possible ways in which this kind of self-directed, practice-based development might be expanded?

Practice-based development done in situ and in the unique working context of a particular team offers lots of potential sources of learning.  Here are some ideas of ways it could be expanded

Breaking down hierarchies to become nodes in a network

As well as meeting to share insights and stories in, say, an operational and hierarchically organised team, it's also an opportunity to encourage each 'learning leader' to identify and follow their own learning interests; to become a node in a network of learners and to develop their own branching networks of interests that are independent of the operational team. 

Note taking via blogging and micro-blogging: capturing learning as it emerges

Writing is an extremly powerful learning tool and social tools like blogs and micro-blogs really do help capture the flow of learning, if not quite in real time, pretty close to it.  And the sharing of this flow of learning is very useful and helpful to others.  This includes those who might have been at the same meeting - it's always useful to read others' perspectives - and those who couldn't make it or weren't invited.  If it's useful, then why not share it?  

 

Recording the action

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's Situational Learning Theory showed how midwives and tailors, for example, learned their trade by what they termed legitimate peripheral participation, i.e. participating in the act of learning the skills of the trade.  Much of what managers do isn't so easily available for learning in this way because it takes place behind closed doors, e.g. in 1:1 or team meetings.  

I'd like to see much more use made of digital video recording and making this available as a piece of primary learning data in much the same way as, say, a formally designed learning video.  The benefit of this would be that a learning group could really focus on their specific in situ and in vivo learning.

My interests

As a foot note, a word about my interests.  The thread that runs through everything that I follow and write about is an interest in observing and understanding managerial practice.  Our management learning practices give priority to abstract knowledge over in situ everyday practice and my interest is in helping managers by:

• Looking closely at the situation specific facts as the basis for action and performance improvement
• Creating context-specific knowledge about how things get done: in this place, at this time, by these people, in these specific circumstances 
• Boosting self confidence by helping to affirm what it is they aleady know or are doing
• Providing a platform from which they can then develop and follow their learning interests. 

 Image from Deposit Photos

Blogs - creating shattering masterpieces or a foundation for creativity?

"All of us—the public, critics and composers themselves—spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in 30 years’ time very few works that are well known today will still be played, but does that matter so much? Surely out of the works that are written some good will come, even if it is not now; and these will lead on to people who are better than ourselves."

 Benjamin Britten

This comment from the British composer Benjamin Britten affirms a truth for me about what is at stake in making a commitment to sharing expertise: it allows others to make their own connections and stimulate their own creativity...for composing read blogging.  

I was having a conversation with a colleague recently who was interested to know what value I had got from blogging.  For example, if it had generated business for my consultancy.  For him, it was a calculation as to whether the time investment was worth the effort.   And laying beneath the surface of the commercial value consideration was also a series of deeper questions and reflections like whether he had the self-discipline and commitment to keep it going - ‘how much time do you invest in your blog each week?’ 

The value question interested me; what value do I get from committing to making public my personal notes and thoughts? 

Sharing or not sharing both influence meaning making

There’s a word association game that you can play in a group.  The rules are one person starts with a randomly selected word and then other members follow the word either by adding another that is associated with it or, by deliberately breaking the association, choosing another word at random.  The process continues for as long as required.   

Two things will emerge: first, even though each team member can choose whatever word they want, it is in fact quite hard not to associate with the theme of the preceding words; or to put it another way others’ meaning making is stimulated by what others are saying and sharing.  The ordering can be broken but order returns quite quickly because we quite naturally reciprocate another’s thoughts and ideas.  Second, the flow of ideas is influenced not only by those who speak, but also by those who don’t.  The idea of silence making a contribution feels somewhat counter intuitive but this is exactly the effect that it has since it allows whatever word theme in play to continue uninterrupted. 

The implication for blogging is that unless we share what we are thinking, we leave a gap that prevents others from associating with or building on or stimulating their own ideas.

Free flowing conversation

One of the principal theoretical ideas that underpins my views about learning is the idea of free flowing conversation, which comes from the work of Ralph Stacey on complex responsive processes. 

Stacey is concerned with the communication of ideas and how meaning is created in a two-way process of free-flowing conversation.

What interests me here are the links and parallels to the act of blogging and sharing.  Although Stacey doesn’t write specifically about blogging as a complex responsive process, my sense is that it is simply another facet of communication and therefore part of the same concept.  The comments feature on blogs is akin to the naturally occurring processes of gesture and response in face-to-face conversation.  So the written medium provides a similar means for others to add their thoughts, which in turn stimulates further insights and creativity. 

    

Note taking on steroids

Writing things down helps me order my thoughts and I find the process the most important way of learning.  And by blogging it also provides me and others with a searchable database of knowledge.  My favourite blog on the value of social media and learning is by Donald Clark, or as he puts it 'note taking on steriods'.

 

Note taking in public  - creating masterpieces?

Britten touches something very important for me about a key blockage to any form of creative publication or presentation of one’s work -  ‘is my work worth publishing’, ‘is it good enough’, ‘if I spent longer on it, could I make it better?’

Like any other skill, my experience of blogging is that it gets easier and better with practice.  There is an art to writing something for others to read but in my mind this is less important.  We cannot know in advance whether what we have produced is a masterpiece or not.  Some posts seem to flow better than others, for sure, but what I do know, from what people tell me, is that they value the act of sharing.

  

Concluding thoughts

We all share our ideas quite naturally through conversation.  In the networked era of the 21C, social tools like blogs are opening up channels for us to share asynchronously what we know, have and think and to make connections with others who we may not know but who share an interest in our ideas.

Oscar Berg's collaboration pyramid creates a very succinct picture of the value creation opportunities of sharing.  I have learnt a great deal from reading others' blogs and it has encouraged me to reciprocate.

First and foremost value is being created for me and my learning.  The spin-off benefits of learning from others, connecting, creating commercial value are all possible but the first step is to share so that, to quote Britten, 'some good will come, even if it is not now'. 

Bibliography

Stacey, R.D. (2003) Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity.  Harlow: Pearson

Image from Deposit Photos 

 

Coaching and management - like mixing oil and water?

Situational Leadership (SL) - Hersey and Blanchard

Capability/Motivation grid (AIT) - AIT Consulting Ltd (UK)

Coaching  and management - like mixing oil and water?

When I talk to managers about coaching what always strikes me is the diversity of how this concept is understood.  We are living in a time when the notion of coaching has seeped into our lexicon and is being applied in sport, business and personal development as a universal nostrum to cure all performance issues.  I think this is interesting.  My observation, particularly in the business domain, is that coaching is being used somewhat uncritically.  Its practices and skills are quite specific and, to some extent, are in contradiction of traditional notions of management concerned with the efficient control of resources.

There are surprisingly few formal programmes that take a critical look at the particular challenges of combining the roles of leader and coach.  More typically coaching programmes for managers focus quite narrowly on a single framework like GROW and attempt to develop questioning and listening skills only, often with actors and contrived role plays.  These produce short-lived results.

I've been thinking about this for some while, but the topic feels particularly relevant as I am right in the middle of two programmes of personal development about coaching: one looking at professional coaching practice and the other at the role of a coaching leader.  This post is a reflection of some of the things that I am noticing as I am learning.

     

Leader as coach - a shift from challenging leader to challenging coach

Coaching is just one of several roles that managers are being asked to adopt alongside that of leader, mentor, trainer and performance manager.  Doing any of these roles well requires a good awareness of the boundaries and this is especially important for coaching.  There is a kind of mental switch required to move from being a challenging leader to a challenging coach, the essence of which is about 'letting go'.  From what I am noticing about my own learning, this distinction is not something that can easily be taught.  To make sense of what's required it needs the manager to pay close attention to the experience of coaching in the context of three areas: 1) who they are as a leader 2) how they interact with others, especially with those that they are managing and 3) the culture of their workplace setting in which coaching is being applied.

Managers talk about coaching - what do they mean by this and what is it that they are doing?

From the many conversations I have had with managers about coaching my sense is that they have misappropriated its practices as a method to manage underperformance.   I have noticed how coaching type questions are being used frequently to facilitate and challenge areas of underperformance. The issue here is that if the questions used 'lead the witness' and are in the category of 'questions with a known answer' they can feel  disingenuous and manipulative.

The alternative approach and, in my view, the one that has stronger integrity, is to give direct feedback to highlight the underperformance.  I've met lots of managers who are quite uncomfortable with giving direct feedback.  Instead they are opting for a coaching style approach in the hope that  the underperformance will be self-correcting.  This is optimistic, at best. 

Capability/Motivation - Skill/Will matrix - when are we truly coaching vs doing something else?

I've overlaid two models designed to help sort out when and when not to coach.  In common, they both use the same skill/will dimensions.  The differences come in a) the labels used and b) in their understanding of when coaching is used.

The Situational Leadership (SL) model has been widely adopted worldwide and so is something that is familiar to managers through their training.  Of interest is the term 'coaching'.  In this model it is referring to a style of leadership that is both directive (tells, instructs) and supportive (asks questions) for dealing with 'followers' (the model's description of those being led) whose capability and motivation is below par.   In practice, this combination of 'pushing' and 'pulling' is complex and to be done well needs managers to have understood the differences in their own role as performance manager versus that of a coach. I think the term 'coaching' is misleading.

In contrast, AIT's Capability - Motivation grid makes a much clearer distinction between the management practices at each stage, which I think is much more helpful.  Instead of SL's Coaching, AIT use the term Under Performance.

I'm not trying to split hairs here.  What AIT is making clear is that coaching is an approach that should be reserved for high performers only, i.e. people who already have the skill and the will to stretch their own performance.  Everything else is about something else.  This should not and does not rule out the use of good questions and effective listening skills to manage underperformance, but what it is not is coaching.  

Contracting and the management of expectations

For me the absolute crux of the matter is about making a clear 'contract' with the individual or team as to whether a conversation is about the management of performance or whether it is about coaching.  The primary difference is about who is controlling the agenda.  The complexity in this for the manager is the need to stay alert to shifts in the boundaries within a conversation.  What may start out as a coaching conversation might shift to one about performance in which the manager has a legitimate right to direct. I talked about the ABC of managing expectations in my last blog.

Ongoing reflections

Coaching has become part of the management hegemony.  I think its practices, whilst useful and part of the day-to-day work of a manager, contain a number of distinctive qualities that do not sit easily with this role.  My sense is of a need for much greater emphasis on raising the critical awareness of managers to work out for themselves how, when and in what ways coaching might be applied in their context.  To focus solely on the skills of coaching, within a simple framework like GROW, and brushing up on questioning and listening skills is not unhelpful, but is also glosses over, or misses completely, the complexities of combining the roles of performance manager and coach.      

The ABC of managing expectations - Always Be Contracting

I facilitate a lot of management developement programmes and central to my approach is to encourage managers to think critically about their practice and to use it as the basis for inquiry and development.

Just this week I have been working with a group looking at the management of performance.  The part of this that they found most useful was to map out their expectations of each role or roles which they manage, and for them to also give thought to the expectations that these same roles might have of them.

On the face of it this is a deceptively simple process but what it has revealed are several taken-for-granteds about managing people and their performance

People know what's expected of them - they have a performance plan

Performance plans tend to focus on outputs rather than expectations.  A lot gets taken for granted about the standards of performance that provide the inputs to the outputs.

Managing is about making demands of others

In part this is true but managers overlook the extent to which others make demands of them too.  What's being taken for granted are the asymmetrical power relationships of hierarchy and the tacit 'right' of those who are further up the chain to make demands in one direction.

Conflict - what conflict?

As part of the analysis I ask managers to surface areas of conflict between their expectations of others and others expectations of them.  What becomes clear is that conflicts are tacit rather than discussed explicitly.  Once thought about, managers are then able to access a deeper sense of some of the interferences that might be affecting their working relationships and the impediments to performance.  The discussion that follows is about the extent to which expectations of others and vice versa are clear.

Contracting expectations - Always Be Contracting

Contracting is an idea borrowed from coaching that I think is relevant to line managers in the management of performance expectations too.  The ABC mnemonic Always Be Contracting is about always being alert to what's going in a performance discussion: to sense and make sense of conflicts and tensions, to make explicit our expectations and understand others expectations of us, to talk about these is ways that are personal, practical and encourage responsibility. 

This is a process that is taking place continously and emergently from the management of performance and always two-way.

Reflections on a becoming a coaching leader

I have just completed the first part of a coaching leader programme that builds over four months and includes an academically recognised accreditation.  It's targeted at people who are either line managers or who work with line managers and its purpose is to develop coaching practice beyond what's normally expected from shorter skills development courses. 

Alongside the other things that I write about here, I am going to use this blog to share some of my learning reflections.

Practise to improve practice

First, there is lots of practise all of which is done using real issues generated by the participants.  No role plays, no actors, just practise in real time to develop practice, supported by observation and feedback from participants and the faculty. 

Manager as coach

Second, the programme is called the Coaching Leader Programme.  However, what I noticed in the first module is the emphasis on coaching practice as if coaching was mutually exclusive from management.  I struggled with this to start with as I wanted the connection to the everyday work of managers to be more explicit from the off.  Having spent more time practising and reflecting on my own coaching practice, what I'm noticing is the importance of taking a step back first to test out what it is I already know and have always been doing and to get feedback on the impact of what I am doing.  My interest in the connections with managerial work will follow as an continuing inquiry and topic within this blog.

  

Write down to write up

Third, participants are expected to make lots of notes as a continuous process of noticing, capturing and sensing learning.  In my experience the value of this step cannot be overstated.  What's encouraging is that the write up of the learning is mainly to be about personal reflections of practice and supported by theories and models, rather than the other way around.

A tip I picked up from one of the faculty on my masters course was that before you can write something up you have to write it down.  Continuous note-taking from readings, observation, practise is critical.  What works for me is to keep noticing what it is that I am paying attention to and making notes in a little black book.  

Where next?

To quote Michelangelo, I am still learning.  My personal inquiry through the process I'm now following is to make sense of the role of manager as coach.  It's not that I see these concepts as incompatible but there are some important differences.  Central to this is the distinction between somebody who operates as a coach who is external to the organisation and a line manager who must combine this with a direct role in the performance outcomes of the member of staff. 

 

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Managers/leaders can't 'stop the clock' they can only operate in real time, so let's teach them this way too

Training courses and management books feed a steady diet of models that, in their abstracted ways, paint a highly simplified picture of managerial work: one that is deterministic and sets managers in a special place over others.  The models also try to force a distinction between the work of managers and leaders - to my mind this distinction is artificial and rather too neat.

For example, managers create order through planning and budgeting whilst leaders inspire, create visions and take risks without ever placing these concepts in the context of actual practice.  

Of course, there are different types of managerial work and some of this work does lend itself to being chunked up into neat labels of activity.  At one level this could be helpful in, for example, analysing what type of work is being done over a period of hours or days and then making a plan to shift the balance.  However, there is a lot being taken-for-granted which management teaching chooses to either gloss over or ignore.

Managers are taught as if they are able to 'stop the clock'

So what's being taken-for-granted?  The common assumption in many of the models is that managers and leaders are able to exert their will on a system in ways that are unique from those whom they are influencing.  It's as if they, and they alone, have been given the gift of being able to separate time and space:  as if they were able to stop the organisational clock to allow them time to make plans before communicating them in an inspirational way, of course, to an expectant and uniformily receptive followership; if only it were that simple.

Leadership and management is about creating meaning with others

If management and leadership is about anything, then it is about getting things done with others.  To be able to get things done managers have to be able to create a shared meaning of their ideas and intentions.  The key point is that meaning making is a two way process of gesture and response and this is something that is taking place continuously.  To be effective, managers/leaders have to understand that they are always part of the process and cannot separate themselves from it.


   

Leaders and managers do have influence but...

Managers and leaders do have important roles and their position in a hierarchy does mean that they are able to exert an influence that is unequal to others.  They do, for example, create missions and visions, or design structures, or recruit the 'right' people or identify priorities.  However, in exerting this influence they are doing so as active participants with and not separate from others. 

In practice, their managerial 'products' will have been the result of many conversations with each person's response bringing forth new angles and insights that change the manager's first idea and which, in turn, brings forth more ideas.  The result is something that is always evolving from one moment to the next, never static and irreducible in terms of time and space. 

Implications for management learning and management development

The interactional work that managers and leaders do with each other and with those they lead/manage is highly complex.  The models that dominate so much of management development oversimplify practice and, rather more importantly, fail to encourage any real time understanding of how this interactional work gets done.  The models may make the ideas easier to grasp but in the increasingly complex world of organisations this approach is not viable.  It is the exploration of actual practice that will  connect learning with working and learners with workers/managers/leaders/etc. 

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Mapping social settings

I like maps.  As an outdoor type, I've a real respect for the art of the cartographer. The maps produced by the Ordnance Survey of the UK are practical and very clear; great for planning, route finding and problem solving.  They serve very well the purpose for which they have been designed.   

But maps, depending on how they are drawn, can be much more than aids to spatial awareness.  A recently published book - 'History of the World in Twelve Maps' by Professor Jerry Brotton describes how maps, through history, have shown us different things about the political, social and economic interests of a point in time.  The Mappa Mundi, for example, is not suitable for route-finding but it gives something of use and interest about the Christian world, based on the topography of the Bible. 

 

Mapping social settings

 

If you follow this blog you will know that I see it as important to be able to learn from practice through processes like learning by doing, learning from experience, learning from peers, noticing what's happening in the day-day always occuring action of the workplace. 

In terms of learning practice, this is not a discussion about blending content and media  - this helps  - but a disruptive challenge to the status quo.  Our practices in management learning are too reliant on theories and models; too abstracted from the workplace. 

  

An alternative is to place practice centre-stage and to make it available as a source of learning.  And this is where maps come into this, especially if we were able to produce maps of social settings.

Topographical maps have been designed to be practical: to help people understand something about a place, to make choices before taking action, to problem solve once in action.  The same must also be true for the mapping of social settings and for the design of practice-based learning.  In writing this blog I took a look at how online maps, like Google Maps, were created and discovered a number of parallels to my interests.  

Insights into real-world usage to better serve the needs of users

Good maps demand an understanding of users' needs.  The designers of Google Maps have used ethnography and usability research to create and refine a product that has become the benchmark.

Mapping as a local exercise—with cultural, ethnic, and region-specific quirks and nuances

If your interest is to understand how things work, in practice rather than in theory, then it follows that the better the detail, the better able you are to account for the practices that are important in that setting. 

For example, the designers at Google Maps found that, generally speaking, people navigate primarily by street names in Western countries and by landmarks and points of interest in the East. This is due to a combination of factors including a lack of road names, e.g. in India where locals rely on landmarks, or just a more complex street addressing system , e.g. in Japan where street numbers are assigned by date of construction, not sequentially. 

A feeling of friendliness, clarity, and simple focus

What if an intangible benefit of practice-based learning, based on social maps, was that it helped learners because it could be trusted to provide data-driven practical information that was easy to use? 

A collection of zoom levels, imagery, angles, and on-the-ground panoramas

What's taken for granted about maps?  That the birds-eye view of the ground is the only view?  Maps have always offered a range of scales (zoom levels if you like) but what the likes of Google Maps has done is to put us into the territory with satellite imagery and street view perspectives.  What else could be added?  - for example, sounds, temparatures, real-time data, user reviews, wikis?

Getting the data

 

Quite clearly, the investment required to gather the data on which Google Maps has been based has taken a great deal of time and money.  But what it has done is show us what can be achieved by getting into the detail as opposed to sticking with the status quo.

If we are going to be able to get the data from social settings, which has the level of detail to be able to construct something like a map of, say, human dynamics, then we need technology to help us.  It's why I have been following the work of Sociometric Solutions with interest.  It's an organisation that evolved from the MIT Media Lab and they have developed an electronic badge, similar to a security pass, which collects voice, body language and other proximity and location related data. 

Some of their work was featured in the April 2012 edition of HBR 'The New Science of Building Great Teams' pages 59-70.  If you follow this you will see examples of maps of intra and inter team interactions that are very interesting for the detail and the data that they produce.  To my mind, it is not difficult to see how this type of analysis could be extended to produce a range of social maps that, just like their counterparts from the world of topographical maps, might provide the base for overlays, search results and personal customisation.

Of course, even a Google Map is not a real-time representation of the territory and judgement and expertise is still required.  The emerging technology from Sociometric Solutions is giving a glimpse of how the gap to the social world of the workplace might be bridged. 

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