Executive Leaders

Gradually we are learning that leaders can benefit significantly from "executive champions" who can be protectors, mentors, and thinking partners.  When dramatic improvements achieved in organizations threaten others, executive partners can help in  managing the threat.

They also play a mentoring role, helping leaders to mature, to understand complex political crosscurrents, and to communicate their ideas and accomplishments to those who have not been involved. Let's face it, outside the team, those activities that are making a difference are sometimes seen as evidence of "being out of control."

Part of the problem in appreciating effective executive leadership in learning is that all of us are so used to the "captain of the ship" image of traditional hierarchical leaders.  When executives lead as teachers, stewards and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle, contextual, and long term than the traditional model of the power-wielding hierarchical leaders suggests.

Effective executive leaders build an operating environment for learning.

One way is through articulating guiding ideas.  "I have always believed that good ideas will drive out bad ideas.  One of the basic problems with business today is that our organizations are guided by too many mediocre ideas, ideas which do not foster aspirations worthy of people's commitment." - Hanover's Bill O"Brien.

Another way is through conscious attention to learning infrastructure.  Shell's management team came up with a redesign so that management teams regularly were asked not just for their budget and their "plan" but for multiple plans describing how they would manage under multiple possible futures.  They call it "planning as learning."

Can't forget the executive team itself as a way to build operating environments for business.  What is important, first, is that executives see that they, too, must change, and that many of the skills that have made them successful in the past can actively inhibit learning.  Achieving such shifts in think, values, and behaviour among executives is not easy.  The name of the game is giving up power, giving up power is difficult.