Leadership Nudge – Leaders Learn Always
A key philosophy of “leaders learn always” is that you learn as much as possible from the things you are already doing. Onboard my submarine, we found that if we just paid attention to our everyday operations, like starting the reactor, getting under way, and submerging the ship, we could learn a lot.
When you delegate authority to make decisions further down the hierarchy, your teams’ operational and technical knowledge takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for operational competence. If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical and operational knowledge on which to base those decisions. Control without competence is chaos.
Learning is a “key enabler” to allow you to pass decision-making authority to lower and lower levels in your organization. The purpose of learning is to increase technical and operational knowledge. The result of increased technical and operational competence is the ability to delegate increased decision making to your teams. Increased decision making among your team members will naturally result in greater engagement, motivation, and initiative. You will end up with significantly higher productivity, morale, and effectiveness.
My leadership nudge to you this week is this:
Deliberately put yourself in a new position where you are forced to take a new perspective. So maybe you sit in one of your employees’ chairs and you see what the world looks like from their side.
Let us know how it goes!
