Another piece of research, published by Good practice Ltd (www.goodpractice.com) explores how managers learn and stresses the strong link between learning and performance.  It reveals that most learning is informal on-the-job learning, very much about how to get better at doing the job.

This supports what we have always stressed, that the best medium of learning is the work to be done. Indeed the meta-levels of such learning are about re-focusing the work to be done to better meet it’s purpose and then evolving the purpose itself – raising the game!

We see this phenomenon in competitive sports (witness the winter Olympics) where people learn to perform and then learn to be among the leaders before, just possibly breaking new ground and learning to take things to a new level. Everyone has a quest to be as good as they can be and therefore has an appetite for learning.

Not all learning is of the same kind.  We need first to learn how to do a job and then how we need to learn to change in ourselves, in order to do it better.  Finally we enable the whole process to become more fit for the world.  In hierarchical control and command organisations, these three levels of learning are often divided.  Those low in the hierarchy are expected to just do as directed.  Middle level people have the job of getting people to get better results. Only the top folk occasionally think about the name of the game.  This division fails to tap into the creative potential of the vast majority of people.  How much better that senior people devolve all three learnings throughout the organisation.  The work of leadership is to lead learning.

So how does this happen?  If leaders are not leading learning, what are they doing? How can people be encouraged to have an appetite for learning and meta-learning?