We have a guest blog this week
about a fascinating topic: Learning agility. Thanks for David Hoff, co-author
of Learning Ability-The Key to Leader Potential.
Learning agility is finding
yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do – but then figuring it
out.
Why would that be important? In an
organizational context, if you are promoted from one function to another or
from an individual contributor to a manager role, how do I know you will be
successful? The answer is that I don’t, because you’ve never done the job
before. The research says if leaders make that decision without the help of an
assessment process, the odds of the person being successful is 50-50 – essentially
the flip of a coin.
What is the cost if the coin lands
on the side of being unsuccessful? It depends; the range is anywhere from one
to three times that person’s fully-loaded pay, including compensation and
benefits. That’s an expensive coin toss!
Most organizations use a performance management system to give
employees feedback on their performance and to equitably distribute merit
increases. The output of this process is supposed to be a development plan,
which describes the key objectives a person should achieve in the coming year
and the areas he or she should begin to improve.
Some companies put additional time,
effort and money into critical jobs and/or high-potential employees. There are
different definitions of high-potential employees; a common one is a person
with the ability to be promoted two levels above his or her current level. An
example would be a manager with the ability to be promoted to a vice president.
You can’t spend significant additional dollars on everyone, so who gets this
extra time and attention? That is the $64,000 question.
One answer is to spend time on
the most learning-agile person. But how do you determine learning agility? That
question has stumped people in the talent
management field for some time. My favorite response is,
“Those who can learn on the fly.”
How do you operationalize that
definition? What would I see a learning-agile person do? How would I teach
someone to? Be more learning-agile? These questions are where learning agility
becomes more complicated.
Researcher Scott DeRue, from The University of Michigan, established a model that identifies speed and
flexibility as the two most important factors determining learning agility.
Learning agility is about being able to digest a large amount of information
quickly and figure out what is most important (speed). DeRue defines
flexibility as the ability to change frameworks to help you understand how
different things are related or connected.
DeRue also made a distinction
between learning agility and learning ability. “Ability” means the cognitive
ability or “smarts.” Ability is important to a point, but then, smarter is not
necessarily better. Earlier, I noted that learning agility is being in an
unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out. The ability takes
you to a certain point. Then, agility becomes more important.
DeRue says there are both cognitive
and behavioral components to learning agility. The cognitive ones – the “hard
wiring,” if you will – are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The
behavioral ones are more learnable, because if you do the things described by
the behavior, then you are demonstrating that part of learning agility.
Another researcher, Dr. Warner
Burke from Columbia University, confirmed what DeRue described and found seven
additional dimensions of learning agility. He embraced speed and flexibility;
his research also identified experimenting, performance risk-taking,
interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information-gathering, feedback-seeking
and reflecting. Burke also developed a test to measure learning agility; his
work led to a valid and reliable tool with years of research to support its
results. This is a huge step beyond the 50/50 coin flip to determine who we
develop and promote.
Here are three tips for using learning agility in your work:
- In the future, people are more likely to be hired less for what they “know” and more for their ability to figure out what they “don’t know”. So get curious about what you don’t know as a way to make a difference in your career.
- To increase your flexibility (one of the learning agility dimensions), take the opposing point of view (from your own position) during a discussion. Support that contrary position as strongly as you would your original position.
- When seeking feedback (a dimension of learning agility), seek to understand what the other person is saying by truly listening. Defensiveness gets in the way of learning agility.
