How do managers learn?

I’m interested in the nature of managerial work; of how managerial things get done and to understand how critical knowledge, skills and behaviours are developed; in other words how is it that we learn to do these things, in practice.  

One of the most useful live research inquiries that I did during my masters studies was to interview some managers at a financial services company to find out how they had been learning up to that point.  I used the Critical Incident method to find out how managers felt they had learned to become competent in the critical aspects of their jobs.  I was following up on some similar work done in 1976 by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart.  Their study addressed the question of how managers acquire their skills - see Burgoyne, J., and Stuart, R. (1976) The nature, use and acquisition of managerial skills and other attributes.  Personnel Review 5 (4) pp19-29 for the full details. A summarised version is available in 'The Manager's Guide to Self Development', chapter 4, by M Pedler, J Burgoyne,T Boydell.  

What was helpful about their analysis was the way in which they created a hierarchy of 11 skills and attributes (10 in the original study): from basic knowledge to higher order cognitive functioning.  These were grouped into three learning categories, based on the work of Gregory Bateson, to try to differentiate between simple and complex issues:

1.  Taking in a fact or piece of data, equivalent to an act of sensing or perceiving, or taking in a stimulus. 

2.  Learning different kinds of responses appropriate for different situations.  This covers a wide range of social, emotional and problem solving skills

 

3.  Meta-learning skills that makes an individual better at achieving learning of the (2) type.  This could be expressed as meta-cognition, i.e. knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know and covers things like creativity, mental agility and balanced learning habits and skills.

Qualities of a successful manager (Burgoyne and Stuart)
Basic knowledge & information	Command of basic facts Relevant professional knowledge
Skills & attributes	Continuing sensitivity to events Analytical, problem solving, decision making skills Social skills Emotional resilience Proactivity
Meta-qualities	Creativity Mental agility Balanced learning habits Self knowledge

  

This provides the context of what I want to comment on: 

First, sources of learning most frequently mentioned by the managers

Second, which theories are most helpful when thinking about management learning

Third, how should management learning practice respond?

Sources of learning

What did the managers cite as their most important sources of learning to become a manager?  The top three in Burgoyne and Stuart's work were: 

• doing the job (42% of all mentions) 
• non-company education (21%) 
• living (12%) - this category is about a broad range of life experiences that take place outside of work.

What's interesting is that in-company education only came fourth in order of importance; in my own research sample, which admittedly was much smaller, it didn't feature at all.  

No real surprises?  Overall, maybe not, although I was quite surprised how infrequently in-company education was mentioned. The findings also raise a critical inquiry:  if the greater part of learning managerial skills comes from natural experiential sources and not events where the learning purposes are deliberately planned, then how should learning practice evolve?

Theories that inform practice

I've summarised in the table below those theories that might help to inform practice.  I've selected a mix of cognitive, experiential and social learning theories. My approach is deliberately multi-disciplinary since this reflects how we learn things.  It also helps to point towards a process of learning and the design of practices that can amplify what's taking place naturally.  By implication, I'm giving less attention to content. Content is important to some extent, but less so than we might think. In fact, if we follow the 70:20:10 model of learning, the 10 = 10% of learning coming from formal learning like courses whilst the other 90% is experiential from doing the job and conversations/interactions/observations with/of the boss and peers. 

Theory	Comment
To maximise potential we should consider the workings of the human cognitive system.	This is on the basis that it is the cognitive system that acquires, stores and retrieves information for later use.  Itiel Dror 's work in this field is interesting and relevant
Improving higher order cognitive learning will help learners tackle complex problems	This means raising awareness of meta-cognition or deutero learning that pays attention to knowing what we know and knowing what we do not know.
Knowing how best to learn opens up choices and encourages commitment	This means explicitly teaching learners how to do this. Charles Jenning's blog posting provides a good list of 'core continuous learning skills' that support meta-learning
Learning is experiential and needs to be reinforced through practice	This point was made as far back as Aristotle and in more recent times by Dewey, Kolb and Marsick & Watkins
Learning is socially constructed through observation and conversation	Social Learning Theory (legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice - Lave and Wenger) or as a complex responsive process through conversation - Ralph Stacey. Donald Clark's  posting on peer learning and another from  Harold Jarche pick up the collaborative learning themes
Learning is a reflective process and can be enhanced through facilitation	See the work of Argyris, Argyris and Schon, Boud and Miller about the animation of learning by facilitators: external or line managers. Donald Clark's  piece on note taking and reflective writing gives another perspective on self-managed reflection

  

How should management learning respond?...by placing workplace practice centre-stage

Based on what I have researched, it seems clear to me that managers have learned to do what they do through trial and error and through conversation and observation.  Therefore, as learning professionals, I feel that it's critical that we respect how people learn and adapt our practices to facilitate, support and challenge that which learners are already doing.  

If we look at the traditional problems of philosophy such as how is knowledge created and what is there to be learned about we can see that in much of our traditional management learning practice preference is given to theory and the formal knowledge of the teacher.  The problem that this sets up is that, by our actions, we value more highly abstract theory over the knowledge that can be found in actual practice.  As a result a lot gets taken for granted about the role of the teacher as knowledge provider and the learner as knowledge receiver.   This could be to the extent that it might even separate learning from working which, if so, seems a curious, if unintended, outcome. An alternative perspective on this same issue is that teachers (or senior managers/executives who set priorities for learning) may adopt a kind of superior moralizing or 'knowing what's good for them' that, however well intentioned, has the effect of taking away responsibility.

My position is that we have to change our management learning practices to really help learners look at their workplace practices.  This means reversing the traditional teacher-learner model to something like a workplace practice-facilitator model.  This places what is being done everyday right at the centre of knowledge production and learning.  In terms of learning practice this is likely to include the methods of live workplace observation, facilitated and self managed reflection, collaborative learning practices with others and 'just-in-time' knowledge inputs.  I think the pay-off of so doing is three-fold.  

First, it will help managers to look closely at the situation specific facts as the basis for action and performance improvement. 

Second, it will provide context-specific knowledge about how things get done: in this place, at this time, by these people, in these specific circumstances. 

Third, the development of meta-learning skills will be emancipatory and a boost to self confidence.  I have found through my practice that by encouraging learners to reflect deeply upon what it is that they already know helps to affirm and provides a platform from which they can then develop and follow their learning interests. 

The development of these threads is at the heart of my own practice development and continuing critical inquiry.  I will write more about this in future posts.

Glimpses of learning

As I develop this blog about learning in practice I thought that I would start by saying something about the nature of how I am learning, my experiences of it and some reflections on what seems to help.  

1) I notice that my learning feels random and messy.  I gather a series of random insights; glimpses of learning that encourage, validate, challenge and so on. For example, I pick up a newspaper or a book and start reading.  As I start reading, something in the text sparks something of interest and I pay attention.  If it is sufficiently interesting I might then do one of several things: I rip out articles from newspapers; or, I make notes in the margin of a book or magazine; or I open Evernote www.evernote.com and make some notes. This latter technique is something that I've started doing over the past couple of months and I'm finding it very useful as an aide to memory and infinitely more efficient as I have all my notes in one place, tagged by topic.

2)  I notice the provisional nature of what I am learning.  By provisional, I'm meaning that it's not always apparent how the insights might be applied.  Although I can't always be sure where or how the ideas might be applied, making notes at least gives me some chance of picking up the threads at a later date.

3)  Confidence to follow one's learning interests seems to be important.  But I've found this difficult.  When I was working for my MA in Management Learning between 2006 and 2008 I made the following note on the peer learning site: 

“The thing I still find quite tough is giving voice to my own practice ....versus the models and theories that are already 'out there'.  In other words the former is less important than the latter.  To deal with this I have a sense of needing to try and know all that there is to know first - a hopelessly unrealistic task in itself - before being able to bring what I know or have experienced.  I've decided to stop fighting this and to get down first what I'm thinking or feeling about an issue that I've researched, what's important and so on, and then matching this up against what I think I need to find out; the assumptions I might be making.  Listening to my inner voice and letting myself discover things seems to be part of the way forward.”

4) As I've developed my practice interests in management learning, the experiences and activities that seem to have been most important to me are these:

• being a manager at work and as a volunteer in the Scout Association.  The volunteer role has added a lot of breadth to my experience because when managing volunteers you have to play to people's interests and strengths; you don't have the 'carrots and sticks' of financial rewards and sanctions
• teaching/facilitating the learning of others
• parenting
• my Masters studies.  The assignment writing, commenting on and marking peer's papers, critical thinking and research skills have really moved me on. 
• reading lots of different things from blogs, books on leadership topics, articles, newspapers ....almost anything counts.
• making connections back to earlier experiences  

The point about all this is that it isn't structured or contained within a few formal courses.  Things come at me all the time and the learning skill seems to be in noticing what it is that's going on around you and then noting it in some way for later reflection.

And what drives me on in the field of management learning is in shaping practice.  I'm always interested in conversations that are about questioning, challenging and thinking critically about the status quo.   

Taking note...

Taking notes

I've been promising myself and others that I would commit some time to writing a blog about management learning.  For a while now I've been making notes - lots of them - about things I've been reading or observed in a somewhat chaotic manner - clips from newspapers, handwritten notes in various notebooks, scribbled notes in the margins of books and articles and Word documents.  Donald Clark, through his 'Plan B' blog, pointed me in the direction of Evernote and it has really helped pull my note taking together into one place.  There is still a fair bit of catching up to do but things are heading in the right direction.

Learning in Practice

I'm interested in the notion of learning in practice.  This is partly about learning through doing since this seems to be where most of our learning is taking place.  Even though this practical, practice based idea of learning makes sense to me I'm also a bit cautious about giving something a label because of the risk of me, and others, trying to generalise by putting learning in practice into a box, alongside other notions like action learning, coaching and so on.  It's as if that, by so labelling, the concepts have boundaries that both contain but also gloss over the fine-grained details of what is being done and how, what's being experienced and what is it that there is to be learned about in any given setting. 

So, first and foremost, my interest is in placing everyday practice centre stage so that it can then be treated as a source of knowledge and reflection that's as valuable in its own right as formal knowledge that's taught in business schools or published in books and articles.

Themes of interest

I'm thinking and note taking about several things at the moment.  Briefly these are:

Self Managed Action Learning - action learning sets without a facilitator.  I rather like Revans challenge that learning sets should be self managed.  Current practice tends to rely on a facilitator being present.  Why?  What's being taken for granted by their presence?

Social media - by and large this is a personal phenomenom and it has little traction in corporate learning.  There is a social media of sorts that's being organised through open source tools like Moodle but, in my view, the interactivity of these is still quite limited and usually come with strong corporate branding and an authorised spoon-feeding of content.  Whose decides what's in and out?  How do we encourage people to follow their own learning interests?

There are several others that I will comment on later.  At this stage, I just want to set the scene of what's interesting me and to make a start in the blogosphere.