Leading & Learning Go Together

Sandy Thompson

At LEAD we have worked with hundreds of leaders who work in organisations, serve on boards, and inspire community action.  What is very clear for us is that those leaders who engage in ongoing self and professional learning and development are the most effective in creating change and making a difference in their communities. This is backed up by undisputed evidence from the international academic and research community who have followed in the footsteps of the grandmothers and grandfathers of leadership development. Just three by way of example:

Margaret Wheatley, the renowned author on leading in complexity is so adamant about the value of ongoing learning for leaders she has a chapter in a recent book called It’s Better to Learn Than Be Dead (Who do we choose to be? Facing reality claiming leadership restoring sanity.)  Stephen Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about the need to sharpen our saw - preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have - you. This includes learning, reading and writing. James Kouzes in The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations writes “if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you’d be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can.”

Ongoing learning and development or ‘sharpening our saw’ enables us to motivate others and influence change in a complex and dynamic world. Leaders we work with that are open to learning and seek out opportunities to grow and develop generate significant changes for our sector as well as transform communities one person at a time.

Exceptional leaders are life-long learners who:

• Commit to ongoing personal development.

• Are clear on what they want to achieve

• Never stop moving forward.

• Seek the best ways to challenge the status quo

• Think critically, experiment and reflect 

• Have an inherent curiosity

• View the world through a learning lens. 

Leadership development needs to be deliberate – life is to short to meander around on your leadership journey. While there are many, many, opportunities of informal leadership development (all it takes is the ability to reflect, a notebook, and a couple of honest friends) engaging in a formal programme is the mothership of leadership development.

We might be biased – although I don’t think so, we have done our homework – but there are a number of characteristics of a good leadership development programme.

• It is not one off –  it encompasses a range of continual leadership development opportunities.

• It includes both formal approaches (training and education workshops, coaching and mentoring, Communities of Practice) and informal approaches (reading, research, and structured reflective practice)

• Action learning and reflection are incorporated as core learning processes.

• Knowledge content is underpinned by values based leadership philosophies to reflect the sector. This includes collaborative as well as strength-based approaches.

• The culture of the leader and the culture of the community they serve is paramount in the teaching and learning processes.

• Soft skills development such as emotional intelligence and good listening are valued just as much, if not more than, hard skills such as planning and writing.

• All dimensions of leading are addressed: leading self, leading one other, leading teams, organisations and communities.

• Leading-self underpins the programme.

• All aspects of leadership are incorporated: leadership as a person, leadership as results, leadership as a position, leadership as a process.

• A collaborative approach that acknowledges the expertise within the group is taken and programme leaders are facilitators rather than experts.

Leaders do not travel on their leadership journey alone. They seek and solicit external expertise and support to ensure their leadership development stretches and grows them in the right way. Leaders in New Zealand have access to a range of excellent programmes both here and overseas (including ours at LEAD!)– make sure you choose the right one for you and that you invest your precious time in quality to support your leadership journey.