• You are intrigued by the process—the process of other people’s learning and growth. You aren’t impatiently waiting for the big-bang breakthrough. Instead you are content to see small increments of growth that happen every day. The “getting it” can be more exciting to you than the “got it.”
• The other process that intrigues you is the process of the activity. You revel in breaking activities down into their discrete parts and then showing others how to do each discrete part. You want others to understand the “how”— the “method”—and when you can show others the “how” you are delighted. This, in your view, is where the real learning happens.
• You give other people choices. You allow them to make their own decisions. You realize that choice is the mechanism for learning, for growth. You say, “You decide, then come back and tell me what you decided, and why.” You are a natural delegator.
• You know that people can learn only from where they are starting, so you ask lots of questions to determine their starting point. You listen very carefully. You watch closely. Any small action or reaction could be a clue as to where to join them in their learning journey.
• For others, this “start-by-listening” approach makes them feel heard and safe. For you it is the source of vital information about their learning styles, their personality, their understanding. You use this information to tailor what you are teaching so that it fits each person—you individualize.
• Physically you want to get on people’s level. You want to “walk the factory floor,” see people in their “natural habitat,” “get down in the dirt with them.” This achieves three things: 1) it shows them that you know them; 2) it shows you the world from their perspective; 3) it gives you the raw material you need to give them good ideas for how to get better.
• You are a learner yourself. Because you love the process of “getting it” you sign yourself up for classes so that you can feel yourself “getting it.” This is a constant part of your life.
• Your constant learning is not just for your benefit. It also serves to arm you with new ideas and techniques that you can use to help others. Consequently, to others you seem wise, an unending source of knowledge, experiments, and ideas that might help them grow.
• Whenever others run dry—of ideas or of self-belief—they return to you. You seem strong, patient, understanding, and yet always expectant.
How to Describe Yourself (in Interviews, Performance Reviews)
• “I like listening to people tell me what they do and how they do it.”
• “I’m a constant learner. For me there’s something energizing about the process of getting to a point where I’ve mastered a new skill. Recently I took classes to learn how to . . .”
• “I like getting down in the dirt with people, seeing the world through their eyes. Customers, colleagues, friends— I think I can truly help them only if I have seen their perspective.”
• “I don’t think you can teach all people in the same way. Instead I’m always looking for how each person’s mind works, and what motivates them.”
• “I never give up on anyone. In my heart I know that everyone can find success somewhere—we just have to persevere with them and discover where. Of course, it might not be within their current position.”
• “I love giving my people ideas; I’m constantly reading up on stuff so that I’ve got something to share with them when they call on me.”
• “I get a kick out of sharing my ideas or techniques with my colleagues. Knowledge is one of those weird things where you get more of it by giving it away.”
How to Make an Immediate Impact
• You want to help others, but you have to earn this right. So
begin with your student hat on
. People like students. They like to be asked questions about how they do what they do, and they like to hear themselves talk about why it works. Listening shows respect. So be inquisitive and be seen to be inquisitive.
• Find opportunities to feed people’s words back to them
. Describe what you’ve heard and what you’ve come to understand about their work and their process. Not only will you be able to test your understanding, you will also validate your new colleagues. They will appreciate this validation.
• “Sweep the floors” with your new colleagues
. Spend time with them in their environment. Watch how they do their work and notice the details of their struggles and their successes. These real-world details will give you raw material when you start trying to help them navigate through their struggles and achieve even greater success.
• Early in your new position,
find a chance to expose your team to at least one new idea
. Since you are constantly studying, reading, and researching, you will doubtless have new ideas to share. And since you have shown yourself willing to listen and learn, you will have earned the right to offer your colleagues a fresh perspective. Pick one idea in which you have great confidence and present it to the team.
• Volunteer to teach
. Teams are busy doing, and yet they know that new additions to the team will need to be brought up to speed. Some are frustrated by the novice’s lack of knowledge, but you aren’t. You are excited by their “ignorance.” Each novice is a chance to find interesting ways to fill in the gaps in his or her knowledge.
• Having asked your questions and “swept the floor” with your colleagues,
offer a way to help people track their progress
. Because you are interested in improvement, you will be adept at figuring out how to help people measure what they do; or, if measurement proves too complicated, how to define increasing levels of competency at a particular skill or task. Since everyone loves to chart their progress toward mastery, this could be an invaluable and immediate contribution.
How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level
• Keep learning
. Keep researching your subject. Attend the cutting-edge conferences. Read the expert posts. Make this a priority.
• Become an overt champion of others
. Discipline yourself to reach across the organization and place people whose raw talent you have spotted into positions of real responsibility. Some will say, “But she is not ready.” Don’t shy away from this risk. Instead, celebrate it. You are a genius at giving people just the kind of responsibility they need, at just the time when they need it.
• When you champion young talent in this way,
make sure your explanations for why this is the right person, the right responsibility, and the right time are vivid and detailed
. Become adept at describing the strengths you have seen in the person and why you think this strength will translate to the new, larger responsibility. Be equally detailed about what specific knowledge the person lacks, and how you propose this person go about acquiring this knowledge, without jeopardizing their ability to deliver results. This detail will give others, who have less of a feel for young talent, the certainty they need.
• Develop theory
. As an instinctive collector of factual bric-a-brac, you will always be a fount of new ideas and insights. But if you want to excel at helping others learn, you need a set of theories on which to hang all that your inquisitiveness has yielded. Theories clarify. They help others make sense of things. And so they will make you a better delegator.
• Refine your stories.
People are wired to be interested in a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They love the momentum, the drama, the detail, and the dialogue of a good story. Since you excel at noticing detail, and since you love the drama of learning and discovery, you will always have rich raw material from which to construct your stories. Take the time to do so. It will make you a better teacher.
• Always stay in touch with those whom you have helped to learn and grow.
Their continued success will be a constant source of joy for you. They are your alumni.
• Build your network of other “teachers.”
They will invigorate you with their ideas, their practical approaches, and their successes. They will push you to stay on top of new developments and to keep innovating.
What to Watch Out For
• Stay in the real world
. Trust the details you notice. You are such an avid reader and researcher you can sometimes be intrigued and even swayed by other people’s theories. While some of these theories may be sound, always rely on your own real-world learning as your guide.
• Know that things will not always work out as you had hoped
. A new young talent whom you championed will struggle. A new idea that you introduced and supported will fail to take hold. Be resilient and keep confident in your process, namely, that in most cases experimentation and delegation lead to progress.
• Teachers can sometimes come across as know-it-alls, so
guard your credibility
. This means a) keep doing your real-world research so that you always have on hand two or three recent examples of what you’ve seen and the sense you’ve made of it; and b) learn to be comfortable saying, “I don’t know and I will get back to you with the answer as soon as I can.” Never pretend to know what you don’t.
• It will be hard for you to thrive without an audience, even if your audience is a readership rather than a group of people you actually know.
So seek out your audience of learners and resist the temptation to get yourself promoted too far away from them
.
• When you join a new team, the learner aspect of you will do battle with the teacher aspect. The teacher aspect will immediately see people who could improve and ideas that could be spread.
Hold this teacher aspect in check.
You can’t simply waltz into a new setting and proffer advice and wisdom—well, you can, but it will be badly received. So in the learner-teacher battle, let the learner win. Ask your questions, take notes, be known for listening, and your wisdom will be more appreciated and more readily adopted.
How to Win As a Leader
Teacher
: Your strength is your faith in our potential. We never sense frustration with our struggles but rather sense a deep belief that we can keep experimenting and keep getting better. You accept us; and yet your expectations motivate us.
• We want to learn from you. And you want to teach us. So make time to teach us. Set aside one lunch a week to walk us through what you have learned along the way. Volunteer to be faculty for a series of classes. Blog about your experiences.
• You take the time to understand things from our perspective, and we love you for it. You are in touch with people’s everyday experience. Keep finding ways to demonstrate that this remains important to you. Stay “on the floor” with us. Keep yourself as close as possible to where the real decisions are made.
• Keep our core score visible and up-to-date. Knowing that you are monitoring our progress is motivating. You always find unique ways to celebrate our personal and organizational successes.
• Lead with your questions. You are one of those leaders who don’t believe that they have all the answers. Instead you look to us for the answers. Set up a regular coffee or lunch with us where you ask us what we think we can do to make the team perform better.
• You value experimentation and hands-on experience. This drives us. We know that it’s okay to make mistakes. We will soon appreciate that you expect us to articulate what we learned from those mistakes and thereby increase our organizational wisdom. Make this a definitive aspect of your leadership.