A Leader’s Mandate :

Help Others Learn

The power of learning-focused leadership

Karen Hebert-Maccaro
“To be successful, an
organization must find the
most efficient and effective
manner of upskilling and
reskilling its workforce.”
To learn is to adapt. And adaptability is arguably one of
the most critical capabilities you can have on your team or
in your organization today, particularly since technological
and business change is happening at a rate never before
seen. This pace of change has profound implications for
both organizations and individuals. The average shelf life
of a skill is now less than five years,1 and some estimates
suggest that as much as 50% of subject knowledge
gained during year one of a four-year technical degree
may be outdated by the time the student crosses the
stage for graduation.2
Recruiting new employees to quickly meet the continuously
changing skill needs—even if possible in a competitive
talent landscape—is obviously not the single solution.
And with the cost to replace an employee estimated at
between six and nine months of the position’s salary,
retaining good employees is a cost-efficient practice.3
But if retention is paramount, so too is upskilling and
reskilling.
To be successful, an organization must find the most
efficient and effective manner of upskilling and reskilling
its workforce. The most effective leaders know this and
take steps to affirm a culture and practice of continuous
learning on their teams.
1
https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/
pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf
2
http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/skills-stability/
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-kantor/
3
high-turnover-costs-way-more-than-you-think_b_9197238.html
4
https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/
pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf
A Leader’s Mandate by Karen Hebert-Maccaro
A challenge:
Organizational disconnect
Too many leaders simply defer to their human resources
(HR) or learning and development (L&D) colleagues to
address their teams’ needs to grow and develop. This is an
abdication of one of the most important responsibilities of
a leader — and it invariably fails to satisfy the needs of the
team. Of course, partnering with HR and L&D is a prudent
way to develop a culture and practice of continuous
learning on your team, but relying on those colleagues
exclusively is problematic for several reasons.
First, no one knows your business and your team members
better than you. As a leader, you’re in a unique position to
understand the skills and competencies required for your
team’s success as well as the strengths and gaps of your
individual team members.
Second, while partnering with HR and L&D should provide
important knowledge of learning science and curriculum
design, their involvement will invariably be episodic,
whereas you’re in the position to reinforce learning-oriented
behaviors day in and day out.
Third, despite some shifts in this area, many L&D organiza-
tions are still primarily focused on traditional classroom
learning. A recent study suggests 50 – 63% of L&D efforts
are focused on this method,4 which takes employees out of
their workflows and into learning environments (physical
or digital) rather than providing learning tools that can
be used within the workflow or adjacent to it. While this
type of learning is critical, it isn’t optimized for efficiency
and therefore must be occasional. You can’t have your
entire team off the road or out of the office in a class-
room for days on end.
Finally, in most organizations, L&D and HR resources serve
more than one team or perhaps even an entire organization
through a centralized structure, which means resource
allocation decisions are made based on the “greatest
good to be done” approach (i.e., a company determines
which tools and programs to buy or develop based on
their applicability to the largest number of employees or
the company’s most strategic priorities). This may mean
that you find yourself with support for only some of your
team’s learning goals.
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“Leaders must share the
responsibility for developing
their employees by building
a culture and practice of
learning on their teams.”
The results of a recent study appear to suggest some of the
above challenges may be resulting in poor satisfaction
when leaders rely exclusively on HR and L&D programming.
It concluded that the most important thing leaders want
from their L&D programs are business impact (#1) and ROI
(#2), and yet only 8% of leaders say they see business
impact, and only 4% say they see ROI.5 While this may, in
part, be attributable to disconnects in how to measure
impact and ROI, the results are still telling. However, the
blame for these disappointing outcomes does not rest with
HR and L&D alone. Leaders must share the responsibility
for developing their employees by building a culture and
practice of learning on their teams.
Create a culture and
practice of learning
Both a culture and a practice of learning are necessary to
encourage team members to embrace adaptability and
learning as a core competency. Culture provides the
psychological safety and commitment to the ideas, while
practice supports the application — the actions and
behaviors that allow for adaptability and learning to be
key attributes of any team. Let’s take each in turn.
What is a culture of learning,
and how do you build one?
A corporate culture of learning supports open mindedness,
independent thinking, knowledge seeking, and shared
learning with a focus on the goals of the organization. Such
a culture is rare (found in only around 1 in 10 companies by
some estimates) but has been linked to real business impact.
In fact, according to research conducted by Josh Bersin, the
A Leader’s Mandate by Karen Hebert-Maccaro
founder of Bersin by Deloitte, “The single biggest driver of
business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning
culture.” 6 Don’t let the rarity of such a culture discourage you;
building one in a team isn’t impossible, and that team’s
success can impact the organization as a whole.
While there are many ways a leader can build a culture of
learning among his or her team, here are a few ways to start.
Embrace failure routinely
First, let’s get something out of the way. Embracing and
even celebrating failure without learning from it is a mistake.
However, embracing failure as a learning experience results
in growth — the foundation of learning. But doing so requires
an observable commitment to the principle that failure is a
part of work, that open discussion of failure will not lead to
blame, and that a responsibility to highlight, dissect, and
derive meaning from failure exists at all levels of the team.
Starting first with you as the team leader.
It’s important to share the lessons learned from your own
failures and make it clear that failing (as a result of some-
thing other than egregious behavior) will not be penalized.
Being a “failure tolerant” 7 leader doesn’t mean you can’t
hold individuals accountable, but it does mean that your
team believes you will see excusable failures as part of good
risk taking, innovation, and growth — and an opportunity to
become better.
Encourage debate and dissent
Another contributing factor to building a culture of learning
is encouraging healthy debate and dissent. In fact, in a recent
Harvard Business Review article, Bill Taylor, cofounder of
Fast Company, says leaders must adopt what he calls the
“obligation to dissent.” 8 This obligation is crucial to a
learning culture because it creates, among other things,
a freedom for anyone, regardless of rank or role, to
create and share ideas without fear of these ideas being
dismissed or ridiculed.
When it’s known that excusable failures and debate and
dissent are welcomed as methods for individual and team
growth, adaptability, and success, you increase the odds
of your team members engaging, contributing, and
delivering on their full potential.
5
https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/
pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf
6
https://blog.bersin.com/how-to-build-a-high-impact-learning-culture/
7
https://hbr.org/2002/08/the-failure-tolerant-leader
8
https://hbr.org/2017/01/true-leaders-believe-dissent-is-an-obligation
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What is a practice of learning,
and how do you build one?
The practice of learning is comprised of the actions, systems,
and behavior you, as a leader, can build and promote as
part of a learning-oriented leadership approach. You must
establish the trust that is inherent in a learning culture
discussed above to ensure your team welcomes and
engages in these activities and behaviors themselves.

Build a learning agenda

Lots of leaders pay lip service to encouraging and valuing
learning but fail to activate the practice inside their own
teams. A good way to start is to build a team learning
agenda. The steps are relatively simple, but the discussion
that such an activity produces can be extraordinarily
valuable.
First, lay out your team’s strategy and major priorities or
initiatives. Then work with the team to identify the skills
required to achieve those initiatives and inventory those
that are covered by existing skills on the team and those
that are not. Discuss the team’s personal development
goals. This step may be best for one-on-one discussion.
Combining these individual and team gaps and aspirations
gives you your comprehensive learning agenda, which you
can then use to devise strategies for development. Sharing
this agenda with your L&D and HR colleagues, if you have
them, can be a great way to begin. Regularly using the
agenda to discuss progress and celebrate milestones is a
tangible way to exhibit your commitment to a learning
culture, employee development, and team success.
Promote performance-adjacent learning
Performance-adjacent learning is essentially learning that
occurs in the course of work, which is often nonlinear in
approach. This learning method addresses the need to
diversify learning beyond traditional classroom instruction,
helps meet your employees where they are, and provides
learning that is most relevant to the unique challenges and
needs of your team.
For example, a software developer in your firm is working
on a particularly challenging piece of code for a new
product feature. She finds herself stuck and unable to
proceed. She asks a few members of her team but gets
no satisfactory resolution. So she turns to your learning
tool, searches for a term that describes her problem, and
is directed to the precise section of a course, book, or
video that addresses the issue. She finds an answer and
returns to work within 10 minutes of her first entrance
into your digital ecosystem. The problem is solved. By her
own estimates that 10-minute investment saved her at
least an hour of additional work. Pretty good return on
investment, right?
The key here is to design or buy learning tools that enable
such behavior. You’ll need tools that enable precision search,
have a robust and relevant body of content, and offer a
range of formats to address the need for variety in learning.
At O’Reilly, we explored learning behavior on our online
learning platform during Q3 of 2017. By examining approxi-
mately 195,000 unique learning activities by learners across
a range of industries, we found that fully 42% were nonlinear
or conducted in a performance-adjacent manner. In Q3 of
2018, we surveyed just under 7,000 (6,852 to be exact) of
our learners and found that 44.2% self-report that they use
the learning platform in a performance-adjacent manner,
confirming our nonlinear finding from 2017.
Your employees want to learn in an efficient manner at
the point of need. You can help encourage this type of
continuous and seamlessly integrated learning by working
to provide or advocate for solutions and tools that enable
performance adjacency.
Be a learning-oriented leader
It’s simple, but there is still so much truth to leading by
example. As a leader, your willingness to share your own
learning processes, skills you’re seeking to master, and
experiences you’d like to develop emphasizes to your
team that learning is valued and valuable. Partner with
any available HR and L&D experts in this area, but don’t
abdicate your own responsibility.
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The leader’s mandate “Success requires
The need for adaptability has never been greater and the
competition for talent never stiffer. Success requires commitment to being a
commitment to being a learning-oriented leader and
developing both a culture and a practice of learning on learning-oriented leader
your team. Whether you have an HR or L&D team to rely
on or not, you must engage fully in creating the culture and developing both a
culture and a practice of
and practice of learning on your team, because without it
you miss the chance to help your team members realize

learning on your team.”

their full potential and positively impact the organization’s
success. Focusing on building a learning culture and learning
practice may be among the most direct ways to impact your
own success as well.

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