The Practice of Leadership » Learning

Keeping Unscheduled Time

George Ambler — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:06:04 +0000

“Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. … Only when you have substantial ’slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem. Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.” – Dov Frohman

Making time to reflect and think is a critical leadership practice. In its simplest form, reflecting is just thinking about what happened. It’s the process of thinking about and examining what we’ve experienced, how we reacted and what changes we need to make to become more effective.

There are few people who make a conscious effort to learn from their experiences and fewer still who learn from their experiences. This is because reflection is not an automatic process for most people. Most of use make our way through life simply reacting to circumstances. To be effective leaders must make reflection a regular practice.

“Leaders like everyone else, are the sum of all their experiences, but, unlike others, they amount to more than the sum, because they make more of their experiences.” – Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can’t Lead

A simple way to start a practice of reflection is by asking questions, questions about how we feel, about the results we are getting in our life, and what we can do differently to get different results. For example, find a quite place where you are not going to be disturbed, take an issue that’s important to you, and ask yourself the following questions:

What happened?
What was I trying to achieve?
What went well and why?
What didn’t go so well and why?
How did it affect me?
How did it affect others?
What were the consequences (positive or negative) for myself and others?
What could be done differently next time?
Would this change improve the consequences?

“Reflection is asking the questions that provoke self-awareness” – Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

As leaders much of our success is dependent on the way we think. Given this, it’s important that we schedule regular time-out to reflect on how we are behaving, how we are thinking about a situation and what adjustments we might need to make to improve our effectiveness.

Do you have a dedicated place when you spend time reflecting?
When was the last time you spent reflecting on an issue that is important to you?

Leaders are Self-made, Practical Learners

George Ambler — Sun, 17 May 2009 19:17:15 +0000

Photo by snappybex

Leaders are pragmatic learners. They take the time to reflect and learn as they go from life’s experiences. Consider the following description of leadership from Burt Nanus in his book Visionary Leadership.

“Look at the life story of a visionary leader and it is unlikely you will find much in the way of specific training for leadership. Thus far, most people who have succeeded as visionary leaders seem to have been self-selected and self-made. Bill Gates received no leadership education, nor did Ted Turner, Wayne Huizenga, Frances Hesselbein, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, or any of the others… And apart from an active curiosity , some basic intelligence, and the ability to learn from experience, they seem to have no remarkable genetic endowment predisposing them to leadership success. They are people who figured out for themselves how to dream dreams, enthuse others with their visions, and then make them happen.” –

Having a dream and the courage to act on it, is the first step on the leadership journey. The ability to learn from and adapt to the unfolding events and challenges on the journey is the key to success. Leadership creates action to shape the future and conditions of uncertainty the ability to learn as you go is what separates winners from losers.

Five Challenges that Accelerate Leadership Development

George Ambler — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:50:55 +0000

The high levels of change demand increased leadership capabilities and the requires organisation to focus on the development of future leaders. The Center for Creative Leadership has studies the development of leadership for the last 38 years and have identified five key challenges that have facilitate the effective development of leadership:

Challenge 1: Unfamiliar responsibilities. When you practice new skills and expand your knowledge base, you learn how to operate effectively when you are early in a learning curve.
Challenge 2: Creating change. When you lead change, you learn to operate in ambiguous situations, think strategically, make tough decisions and persevere in the face of adversity.
Challenge 3: Significant accountabilities. By expanding your role in terms of scope, scale, time pressure and accountability, you learn what it takes to be decisive, to work and learn at a fast pace and to have significant impact.
Challenge 4: Managing across boundaries. Assignments that require you to collaborate across functions and business units or to work with people over whom you have no authority will strengthen your ability to influence others.
Challenge 5: Dealing with diversity. By working with people of another culture, gender or background, you will be better prepared to adapt to different expectations and persuade people of different backgrounds to work together.

Organisation face an increasing leadership shortage, not having sufficient leaders to meet their organisations future needs. Given this leadership crunch the way organisations approach the development of leaders is critical.

Have you included these five challenges as key components of your leadership development programme?
Have you included these five challenges as part of your personal leadership development?

How many of the 7 habits have you integrated into your life?

George Ambler — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:02:36 +0000

In Stephen Covey’s bestselling book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen discusses the following 7 habits:

Be proactive. You are responsible for your life. Decide what you should do and get on with it.
Begin with the end in mind. Think of how you want to be remembered at your funeral. Use this as a basis for your everyday behavior.
Put first things first. Devote more time to what’s important but not necessarily urgent.
Think win-win. Have an abundance mentality. Seek solutions that benefit all parties.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Don’t dive into a conversation. Listen until you truly understand the other person.
Synergize. Find ways to cooperate with everyone. Value the differences between people.
Sharpen the saw. Continually exercise and renew four elements of your self: physical, mental, emotional/social, and spiritual.

Many of us have read this book and been inspired by its profound message. The question is, how many of the 7 habits have we integrated into our lives? Consider the following story from the post “Read any good books lately? So what?”, which illustrates the difficultly many people experience in applying some of the great leadership principles and practices into their lives.

“One of the best-selling business books of all time is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A colleague of mine recently told me about attending a workshop at which the presenter asked, “How many people here have read 7 Habits? Stand up if you’ve read the book.”

More than half of the 100 people in attendance stood.

Then the presenter said, “If you can remember three of the seven habits, stay standing. If you can’t name at least three habits, sit down.”

More than half of those standing sat down.

Then he said “If you can recite all seven habits, stay standing.”

Only three people remained standing.

Finally, he said, “If you are living all seven habits in your life, remain standing.”

The remaining three people sat down.

That event further illustrates the sad truth that we can read good books, but reading is not enough. If we want to incorporate what we read we need to seriously study the content.”

If you were asked the same questions, which group would you be a part of? The challenge to us as leaders as we learn is to apply what we are learning into our lives. Do you consciously seek to apply what you learn into your life?

How Leaders Make The Most Of Their Experiences

George Ambler — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:53:57 +0000

“Leaders like everyone else, are the sum of all their experiences, but, unlike others, they amount to more than the sum, because they make more of their experiences.” – Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can’t Lead

Leaders are continual learners and effective leaders ensure they make the most of their life experiences. It’s important then you understand how to extract the maximum value from what you learn from your experiences as you journey through life. Here are some of what I have learnt about the importance of learning from what life throws at you…

1. Accomplished leaders learn best from experiences: The Leading Blog has a post, “What Is Your Plan For Personal Growth?“’ discussing the importance of having a plan to grow, as discussed in the book “Crucibles of Leadership” by Robert Thomas. Thomas writes that crucibles “are like trials or tests that corner individuals and force them to answer questions about who they are and what is really important to them.” The best learning comes from these types of personal experiences that have been reflected upon and understood.

“Accomplished leaders say that experience is their best teacher. They learned their most meaningful and important leadership lessons — lessons that they’ve integrated into their own leadership style—through crucibles. These were critical events and experiences, times of testing and trial, failure more often than grand success, that grabbed them by the lapels and demanded to know ‘What do you stand for?’ and ‘What are you going to do?’ A situation arose that did not respect age, gender, generation, nationality, talent, or charisma; all it asked was that the person step up and be someone or do something they’d never been or done before.”

2. Learning from Experience is not an automatic process: Learning from experience is important for effective leadership. However, learning from experience, does not just happen. It’s surprising how few people take the time to reflect on and learn from their experiences. Learning is not an automatic process and people do not automatically learn from their experiences.

Unless we take the time to engage in reflection, we will end up repeating our mistakes, unable to extract learning from our experiences.

Whenever we take a break and review, analyze and evaluate our experience of new information, with the goal of increasing our understanding, we are busy reflecting. It’s through this process of reflection, that our life experiences are transformed into learning and deeper self-understanding.

3. We learn from life’s experiences through the process of reflection: Reflection is triggered by events in our life’s and especially crucibles. Reflection is the process of mulling personal experiences over and over in our mind. During this process we’re asking ourselves a number of probing questions, examining our experience from different perspectives and making connections with previous experiences.

As we reflect on the events and circumstances in our lives, we seek to understand our behaviours, looking for what caused us to react and behave the way we did. The goal of this introspection is to gain a deeper self-awareness and understanding. We learn best from life’s experience when we have a chance to think about our behaviours and it’s underlying causes. Through the process of reflection, we become an observer of own own thinking and actions.

“We should be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it – not like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” – Mark Twain

The process of reflection is initiated by thinking and questioning our feelings, behaviours and actions. This allows us to gain an understanding of why we’re getting the results we are and what we need to do differently, to improve and create better results.

It’s a common belief that we we all learn from experience, this is partially true, learning from experience is not an automatic process. We don’t learn just because we have an experience. We learn best from evaluated experience. Learning occurs through the deliberate process of reflection. After all you’ll always be more convinced by what you have personally discovered than by what others have found.

4. Schedule time for reflection: We learn when we take the time required to reflect on our experiences. We make on of the biggest mistakes if we think that learning from life’s experience is going to happen automatically. You don’t own your experience until you understand them.

5. Slow down: We deceive ourselves if we think that by doing things faster that we will be more productive. Slow down and take time to think and reflect on your experiences.

6. Take responsibility: By taking responsibility for what’s happening in our lives we move from being the victim to the owner and author of our lives. We must take responsibility for the results we are getting in our lives. Blame nobody. As soon as we blame we become the victim and justify our actions. Start by asking yourself, “What choices or decisions could I have made differently?”, “How have I interpreted these events?” and “Has my interpretation on these events contributed to this situation?”

“Experience is not what happens to you but it is what you make of what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley

Reflect on the following:

Are you slowing down enough to think about your daily experiences?
Have you set aside time to think and reflect on your experiences?
Do you make it a habit to learn from your experiences?
What surprised, angered or made you happy this week? Why?