Leadership Notes -- Thoughts on Leading People and Making a Difference in Organizations
Word count this issue: 638
Estimated reading time: 3.5 minutes
Periodically in my work I find myself on long flights like I have this week. Facilitating a planning session on Cape Breton Island Sunday, Monday Tueaday and then doing a organizational culture workshop on Bowen Island in BC on Wedneaday, meant a 6000 kilometre journey on Tuesday evening.
The gift of being able to move almost effortlessly between two sides of this country coupled with smart phone technology means I have the opportunity to be learning, almost constantly while I travel. Podcasts, audio books, online magazines not to mention interesting links shared on social media offer us an amazing array of learning.
It is clear that learning is one of the 5 Thrives for the Digital (R)evolution. There is an old adult education model that describes the fundamental challenge for us all.
We are all unconsciously incompetent about most of the world and its wonders. When we become aware of something new, we become consciously incompetent. As we learn more about this new thing, we become consciously competent and finally after some practice we become unconsciously competent.
In the Digital (R)evolution, every single one of us will be move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence on a regular basis. Interestingly, our ability to learn is in large part related to status. Years ago, one of my first projects as a brand new Training Officer was the learning and development side of a migration from WordPerfect 5.0 to Word 6. (Yes, that long ago!) The process we used was rather simple, two or three employees would meet with me for half a day, in the morning. I would show them the ropes in Word 6, and meanwhile the IT folks were literally removing WordPerfect 5.0 from their desktop and installing Word 6, so that by the time they returned to their station after lunch, they had to use Word 6. An Executive Assistant (EA) who worked along side a very senior leader in the network, and had for many years, kept canceling her training sessions with me. She was ‘too busy’, she had ‘a vital report’, she had ‘a doctor’s appointment’, the list of excuses became quite long. I wondered if it was a question of status for her. She was a ‘go to’ person on all sorts of levels, she worked with the most senior people in the network and beyond. She was famous for her attention to detail and expectations of perfection. I walked into her office one day and asked her if she’d like a special training session, just her, no one else. I could show her the basics, and leave her alone for a half hour to practice by herself, and then come back to show her some more stuff. She sighed and said, yes, that would be good. We set it up for the very next day, I showed up, we worked our plan, and I let her play with the mouse and make mistakes privately, and supported her every half an hour or so. It took her until about 2 pm that day, but she was ready to go back to work on Word 6. And she did. The lesson I learned was that sometimes we have to work around status, we have to honour that for some of us right now, and for all of us at one point or another in this (R)evolution, we will find ourselves in a place of conscious incompetence, that is we know that we don’t know, and that is a very uncomfortable place. It is however the place that learning begins.