Leaders are learners. Even better, leaders are continual learners.
That concept is a core idea that we promote in our work with both new and experienced leaders. In most cases, our clients and workshop participants nod in agreement when we offer the idea. Frankly, it’s a pretty easy idea to agree to in concept, and it’s hard to do on a consistent basis. Or, maybe I should say, it gets harder to do the more experience you have and the more you know.
After all, when you already know something, what more is there to learn?
Consider a situation where you know something is true and someone says something that contradicts that knowledge. When this happens, you will likely reject what they say without giving their statement consideration. After all, you know that they are wrong.
Sometimes, though, what we know is not necessarily true. What we know might only be what we believe and believing something to be true does not make it true. From a learning and behavior standpoint this confusion between what we believe to be true and what is actually true presents a challenge. Since we “know” that what we believe is true, we will act on that belief, even though the belief is not actually true. And we will reject information that contradicts what we “know.”
One time, I was confronted with this type of challenge. As I listened to a well-respected speaker at a multi-speaker conference talk about productivity and time management strategies, the speaker questioned the two-minute offense often used in American football. In short, he wondered how a team that had not moved the football in 58 minutes of a 60-minute game could focus for the last two minutes and score a touchdown. As he finished this part of his talk, he said: “Why can’t they run a two-minute offense for the whole game?”
As he asked that question, I thought “that’s impossible, a football team cannot possibly run a two-minute offense for a full game.” I know that to be true. Everyone knows that to be true.
Then, I began to question if what I knew to be true was actually true or if I only believed it to be true.
This questioning process is the beginning of learning. Until we question what we know to be true, we remain closed to the possibility that what we know is really only what we believe.
When I questioned what I knew to be true, I began to explore situations and to think about ways that a team might run a two-minute offense for more of the game. Questioning my beliefs about running a full game under a two-minute offense opened my mind to think about my personal productivity and time-management habits. Then, I began to question what I knew to be true about my ability to become more productive and what “facts” limited my ability to do so.
The speaker achieved his objective. He threw out an extreme statement about football that made me question my beliefs so that I began to think differently about time management and productivity. That was his real objective. I do not think he really cared if a football team runs the full game using a two-minute offense. I do think he wanted people in the audience to rethink what they “knew” to be true so that they could learn something new.
The same questioning process allows you to keep learning in other situations where what you know is true and incomplete. Questioning what you know keeps you in a learning mindset so that you are willing to expand your existing knowledge rather than believing you know everything there is to know about a topic.
As you continue learning and growing as a leader – especially as you gain more knowledge and experience, continue to question what you know. When you question your facts and the depth or breadth of what you know, you might find that the facts you know are true and that you do know a great deal about the given topic. It is also possible that you will find that your facts are really beliefs and/or that there are areas of the topic where your knowledge is incomplete. If you find the later, you have opened the door to learning something new.
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Good points, Guy. Sometimes, it's good to stop and reassess our perspectives… As leaders, we need to look for opportunities to learn new ideas so we can model that to our teams. Thanks for the thoughtful article!