Just Seven Things

Leaders Learning Skills from their Teams

The Open Book by Dan Christian Lavric

Just something that occurred to me today as I was taking a note of what one of me client senior managers had said to me that I wanted to learn from.

How many leaders and managers consciously look to learn from their teams? How many are both open to the fact that they could learn from the people that they’ve hired and that work for them, as well consciously seeking out opportunities.

NLP frequently indicates the information to be gleaned from modelling other people. It is interesting that a fair few of the ideas I have read about suggest the identification of influential leaders or peers. People within your communities to network to and ask all of those ‘how do you know?’ questions. It’s probably through a remission in my reading, but using people who work with you and for you in aggregate to create a composite ‘model’ is not something I’ve read.

Now, reading this back, I’m probably going off on one. The compartmentalised skills, attitudes or behaviours are well and good when exhibited separately and modelled from. Often though the benefits to be be sought lie in how those individuals marry together elements in their overall life. How do they handle the opposing thoughts or the conflicts that arise?

However, for me I noticed that there is a lot of validity in using your colleagues or team members. Advantages include the close proximity on an ongoing basis: the ability to validate through experience what they’ve said when you’ve elicited responses. The ability to see the impacts that their behaviours have on others: your ability to be able to take this and through trial and error model your ‘way’ of doing whatever it is you’re looking to do.

Finally, I think that one of the big things for a leader is that by modelling and therefore also learning better how to mirror behaviours, the level of engagement that you can develop with your team becomes far superior. You can talk their language and act in the way that elicits the best response from them. When you need to. Another tool in your kit…..