leaders development Archives -

The challenge lies in making use of on-the-job experiences. This means finding better ways to identify developmentally significant jobs, to move the right people to them and to help talented people learn from them. How well these things are done is far more important than how formal or elegant the procedures are.

—The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, 1988

In 1988, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published an important study. Important because of the insights it contained, and important because it has largely been ignored for the past 25 years. CCL interviewed successful executives to better understand how they got better at leading. These were in-depth interviews, the kind that allow participants to tell stories about their experiences and reveal what they had learned.

The researchers found that the primary way successful executives learned was from on-the-job experience. Not training, not books, but the work itself. Hence the title of their book, The Lessons of Experience. [Read more…] about Learning to lead

It’s now been thirty years since Peters and Waterman published In Search of Excellence. As Art Kleiner, Editor of strategy + business, has pointed out, this book brought into the mainstream the notion that building a successful company requires more than simply managing the numbers. Since then, hundreds of books and articles have examined the topic of excellence in organizations and individuals. This month, I present my modest contribution to that conversation: how do we idiot-proof excellence?

Idiot-proofing means designing something so that even a person of low intelligence would use it properly. In my experience, there are few bona fide idiots in the world. In fact, if you subscribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, everyone is smart at something. Thus, calling anyone “stupid” or an “idiot” is, well, stupid.

Yet I would also assert that there is an idiot within each of us. To be specific, the magnificent human brain contains a part that acts more like a reptile than a homo sapiens. It responds to external events by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. This “survival brain” is very effective at protecting us from genuine harm, yet it also gets activated when no true physical harm is present. A variety of wonderfully mischievous behaviors result. [Read more…] about How To Idiot Proof Excellence [January 2012]