● Explain what you personally have learnt recently, and how it has changed your leadership.
● Use the same step-by-step approach to learning, so everyone knows where learning has got to and what needs to happen.
● Openly discuss how you are experimenting.
● Always have (some of) the team working on a problem/opportunity, and sharing their findings/recommendations.
● Ask the team to read, then discuss, and new ideas or an article.
● At the end of every team meeting ask each member of the team what they will now do differently before the next meeting.
● Provide a senior manager coach/mentor for those who want one.
● Constantly, plan, implement and review innovative experiments. A little, careful experiment can create a lot of learning.
● Invite (but do not require) everyone in a meeting to briefly present something, big or small, they have learnt since the last meeting.
● Discover what can be learnt from a recent complaint, or organisation difficulty.
● In a team meeting, invite someone to explain their challenging problem. Then, facilitate a discussion that helps everyone understand, and find new solutions.
● Create new kinds of important feedback from external and internal customers.
● Ask “what if” the team bent the rules, or stopped/started something, or saw the opportunities in problems, or did what it has never done before.
● Use delegation, projects and secondments to widen individuals' experience and develop new ideas.
● Ask individuals/pairs to present technical innovations, what is happening elsewhere in the business and beyond, new research, etc...
● Make performance information more helpful and more visible; talk about performance more often.
● Brainstorm ways of learning - then choose the quick, cheap, fun ones.
● Give time to discussing why yesterday's thinking was unhelpful, and how assumptions need to change.
● Go the extra mile to get feedback on your leadership - get the team's ideas on how you could be more effective.
● Suggest pairs and trios work on each other’s problems.
● Ask "painful questions" about inconsistencies in actions and thinking, e.g. why did we make that mistake again.
● At the start of every team meeting, discuss a new idea or a challenging question.
● Agree with everyone (including you) a learning goal outside his or her comfort zone.
● Evaluate a project, change, training...
● Invite comments and questions on a pertinent piece of news, website or article.
● Support your people 100% when they challenge assumptions and ways of working.
● Ask for three genuinely different solutions to each problem - do not accept just one answer - even if it is great.
● Every week ask someone about their learning, and what you might do to help.
● Openly encourage risk-taking - publically say failures are valuable - praise those who fail whilst trying new ideas.
● Ask team members with particular talents to coach others - make peer coaching a part of how the team works.
● Invite team members to join senior leadership meetings when big decisions are made.
● Most important of all, ask searching questions such as what don't you know, how do you know that, what have you learned about you?
If you did not see something that could work for you, let me know. I will have more ideas!
Peter
