Utilization of leaders as teachers can take many forms. Whether
deployed on a small or large scale, there are six primary benefits
that organizations derive when their leaders serve as teachers,
coaches, and mentors:
- helps drive business results
- stimulates the learning and development of leaders and
associates
- improves the leadership skills of those who teach
- strengthens the organizational culture and communications
- promotes positive business and organizational change
- reduces costs by leveraging top talent.
The first three benefits were covered in the feature article in the
July 2009 Learning Executives Briefing. In this second part of a
series, we will look at the last three benefits.
Strengthens organizational culture and
communications
The fourth reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is to
strengthen your organization's culture and communications. This is
one of the most important aspects that we have inherited from the
centuries of leader-teachers that have preceded us. Culture
transmission and communications through leader-teachers occurs in
at least five ways.
- Leader-teachers model desired organizational
values. They can teach, talk about, model, and even write
about desired organizational values, practices, aspirations, norms,
and communications. The concept of setting the "leadership and
ethical tone at the top" is vital in many respects. By top, I do
not mean just the CEO. There are many "tops" in organizations. For
example, there are leaders of businesses; designated geographies
such as divisions, territories, countries, and regions; and
functional areas and teams. Associates, managers, and leaders are
always scanning the organization to see what is acceptable and what
is not. Leader-teachers have unique opportunities to explicitly and
subtly serve as role models in their day-to-day responsibilities
and when they teach.
- Leader-teachers enhance communities of practice.
They are part of important social networks within their
organizations. These networks, which serve as cultural pathways and
reinforcing mechanisms for organizational communications, have also
come to be known as communities of practice with rich reservoirs of
knowledge and professional experience for defined areas of
expertise and responsibility. They also can serve as an ethical,
moral, and values-based compass for acceptable and unacceptable
behavior in the organization. Company-wide, the leaders-as-teachers
community of practice is an extraordinarily powerful force in
organizational life. Energy, information, and explicit and subtle
messages are communicated throughout the organization by
leader-teachers who help the business achieve high levels of
business performance while being supported by strong, values-based
leadership.
- Leader-teachers encourage continuous learning.
Through serving as leader-teachers, leaders model the value of
professional development and continuous learning. They also model
that leaders are expected to teach, coach, and develop themselves
and others on an ongoing basis. Leader-teachers send clear signals
about the value of strengthening individual and organizational
capability. Also, by encouraging others to become leader-teachers,
those who already teach perpetuate and even expand this capability
within their teams and throughout the enterprise. Leader-teachers
also are in an excellent position to provide the tools to raise
issues and solve problems. For example, town meetings can be
conducted during learning programs or as stand-alone sessions. They
can model desired behavior while providing excellent opportunities
to communicate important information through both prepared
statements and spontaneous responses to participant questions,
assertions, concerns, and expressions of hope.
- Leader-teachers drive organizational commitment.
The very nature of certain program content describes, or is even
the essence of, the actual desired business and organizational
culture. When program participants experience modules such as "good
to great" principles, execution, decision making and problem
solving, moral person/moral manager, and development of self and
others, important messages are communicated. When leaders teach
these sessions, these important messages and ideas can take on an
even greater sense of urgency and commitment. These teaching
settings also provide leader-teachers ideal moments to describe
their teachable leadership perspectives.
- Leader-teachers encourage crossfunctional and cross
cultural ties. When leaders teach diverse groups of
employees and other leaders, they have unique settings to stimulate
crossgeographic, cross-business, cross-functional, and cross
identity group thinking and understanding. Left to their own
natural dynamics, individuals, teams, and organizational units tend
to be more closed than open in their communications and
collaboration with other parts of the broader organization. By
teaching heterogeneous groups or teaching in locations of the
organization where they typically would not work or have much of a
presence, leader-teachers often have a cross-fertilizing cultural
effect when they lead and facilitate programs.
Promotes positive business and organizational
change
The fifth reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is to
enable leaders to serve as catalysts for business and
organizational change through their direct access to a wide range
of learners. When leaders teach and coach, they are availing
themselves of some of the most powerful levers for implementing
change.
Leader-teachers can be key supporters of change. One company
adopted a common change model - John Kotter's eight-step model of
change - and subsequently more than 2,000 managers and leaders have
learned the model from some of the company's most senior,
experienced, and credible executives. Change vocabulary - such as
sense of urgency, guiding coalition, and generating short-term wins
- are commonplace at that company's facilities. By using specific
examples and vocabulary related to change leadership and change
initiatives, leader-teachers are employing both a direct and
effective methodology to stimulate learning and affect a culture
that is conducive to change.
Change is also pushed through a company with Six Sigma programs
that serve as learning vehicles for important business or
organizational change initiatives directly related to the company's
performance and productivity. Hundreds of Six Sigma manufacturing
and transactional projects have contributed in very important ways
to the overall operational effectiveness of the company and are
taught by certified company leaders and professionals who use the
designmeasure- analyze-improve-control framework.
Leaders who are subject matter experts can serve on program design
or review teams for topics or programs that support business and
organization change initiatives. Leaderteachers can also serve as
guest speakers during programs or during organizational and team
meetings; lead businesses, geographic organizations, enterprise
processes, or function meetings; and integrate learning and change
elements directly into their annual business plans. Finally,
leader-teachers can use everyday opportunities to drive change
initiatives and find teachable moments that can be converted into
learning experiences.
Reduces costs by leveraging top talent
The sixth and final reason to implement a leaders-asteachers
approach is to drive numerous cost efficiencies by leveraging top
talent. The leaders-as-teachers approach can be delivered for
"pennies on the dollar" compared with many other forms of delivery.
In many cases, involving leaderteachers as subject matter experts
eliminates or minimizes the need for expensive external consultants
when internal capability is actually available for selected topics
or courses.
In addition, a leaders-as-teachers process can be structured in
ways that utilize the power of social networks, which, along with
communities of practice, increase the likelihood of being able to
easily import and export ideas, course materials, and faculty
across organizational boundaries. One of the many positive benefits
of these practices is saving money through both organizational
synergy and the reduction of duplication in the teaching learning
processes within organizations.
Even though a vibrant leaders-as-teachers process may be in place,
utilization of external executive education programs and expert
external resources still have an important educational role. The
decision to send employees or leaders to external programs can be
made more judiciously than if the internal leader-teacher
capability were not in place.
To counter too much internal perspective and content, carefully
selected external experts can enrich program content and knowledge
sharing.
This article was excerpted from the ASTD Press book, Leaders as
Teachers: Unlock the Teaching Potential of Your Company's Best and
Brightest by Ed Betof. The former vice president of talent
management and CLO at Becton, Dickinson and Company is a senior
fellow and academic director of Wharton Executive Education's
Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership;
ebetof@gse.upenn.edu.