Leadership and Learning

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." ......John F Kennedy.
Alwin Tofler says: " Tommorrow's illiterate people will be not the ones who haven't learnt to read, but rather the ones who have not learned how to learn."

Beginning the article with these wise words of the Great thinkers the author Jean Francois Manzoni explains his 25 years of research on leadership as follows:

Why should leaders be life long learners?

• Modern world is complex and ambiguous;
• Volatile and uncertain;
• Therefore leaders need to develop new responses and capabilities; to integgrate the knowledge in to their behavior..

How can leaders do it:

• firstly, identifying a need for improvement;
• secondly, to achieve an initial competence in the new skills; the author emphasis that this requires a tremedous amount of attention, practice and persistence;
• finally the leader must reach a new competence that is unconscious.

The reader draws an analogy of riding a bycicle.

The author points out the following obstacles for life long learning of leaders:

• executives sometimes confuse understanding a concept with implementing it; knowin something doesnot guarantee that you can implement;
• excecutives underinvest in developing a more granular understanding of a concept. If you want the knowledge to be in your head and usable you muyst take notes an review them regularly;
• If you want to behave different from a habitual response and consistenly with a new objective you need to intercept the habitual response before it is produced. 

Source: Jean Francois Manzoni "How leaders need to be life long learners too," 
                Economic Times, 24th June,    2014