Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you mindfully set out to ensure that the people you lead are growing and developing? Do you think about not just the individual development, but organizational development as well, that is how do you guide your team’s growth to learning holistically? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking in this episode involves cultivating a learning organization. So part of the principle of creating more leaders is supporting continuous organizational improvement through a learning organization.

You should embrace learning and growth at all levels and encourage not only individual learning, but team learning.

The enabling principles I’ve shared throughout this season will, in part help you do just that, to build a learning organization. To put this entire season in context around learning organizations, I’m going to talk about several things. First briefly, what is a learning organization and why is it valuable?

Then I’ll talk about how Principle Driven Leadership helps make this happen, and I’ll share some thoughts about putting it into practice and close with a couple stories to help emphasize a few points. To start a learning organization fosters a climate where everyone can work towards individual excellence in a manner that also creates greater alignment and holistic organizational excellence.

Successful organizations work collaboratively, so they should learn collaboratively as well. You embrace individual and organizational growth through the practice of continual improvement at all levels, both individually and collectively. And if you do this well, you’ll create ever-growing teams that can take your vision further, can enlist more team members in carrying it on and take that ownership.

It’s that simple. Organizations that have space to learn and grow as individuals and as a whole will yield better results and are more resilient to adversity than any other kind of organization. So Principle Driven Leadership itself is in part, specifically designed to help build learning organizations.

The enabling principles that I’ve discussed throughout this season, in fact, also help you do that. So I’ll start with talking about the enabling principles in support of vision that I discussed earlier this season. Owning both understanding and being understood in this context is about being clear on your vision, on what success looks like, and on understanding what others want out of their career growth so that you can align these two paths together.

Measuring productivity by outcomes reinforces the metric of success of growth, positive impact, and the ability to deliver forward motion, and so that reinforces appropriate growth paths for your team. And the notion of winning through teams should drive you to see growth organizationally first. Thinking about how do we collectively become better at reaching outcomes and then use that to guide individuals on their own paths.

Next are the enabling principles that I discussed, which support problem resolution. Shaping problems before the solution in part means learning how to quantify a problem to make it solvable. This prevents your team from just having gut reactions and creates a more thoughtful learning organization.

Focusing on small wins helps to give us a means to incrementally and rapidly learn and improve. And the notion of accountability is all about learning in the face of mistakes. And last, the concept of creating leaders is specifically an organizational growth concept.

This is where you really step into true leadership and true organizational excellence. And so looking at the three enabling principles I shared for creating leaders: letting others shine is not only about giving space for people to excel, but giving them space to learn and then celebrating that growth.

Providing principles over practices helps give your team the guardrails on what success looks like and therefore what growth looks like. And a learning culture really does start with you. Centering the development of leadership skills as part of how you lead, ensures that you’ll build a sustainable and highly capable organization.

So how do you put all this into practice? Many people learn best by doing so, you should give people meaningful assignments that balance creating forward motion towards your organizational vision and outcomes, but also that helps develop their skills in a way that creates forward motion towards their individual vision for growth.

But centering on organizational outcomes first allows you to do this across your organization in a way that learning together, organizational learning, is core to your culture. Organizational learning starts with dialogue and discussion centered around honesty and focused on outcomes. This requires engaging in a spirit of inquiry, suspending your own assumptions to genuinely think together with your team and ask questions such as, what could we do differently to achieve better outcomes in the future?

And what did we do that led to the desired outcomes that we should keep doing? These two questions and others of this kind are core to any kind of continual improvement efforts. They’re not about assigning fault or blame, nor are they about ignoring what’s actually happened. These kinds of questions place you and your organization squarely in reality.

Centering on whether or not you’re reaching desired outcomes, and then focusing on how you can collectively get better at reaching them. Anything less will reduce the heights your organization can reach. Getting into the habit of asking yourself and your team these questions also helps break down the defensive mechanisms that insulate us as individuals

and as teams from the deep examination, that can actually drive growth.

Both we as individuals and organizations have defense routines that can cause us to react quickly and emotionally rather than respond thoughtfully and in alignment with desired outcomes. And the thing is, when these defense mechanisms kick in, they certainly can succeed in preventing immediate pain.

But typically they prevent us from learning how to reduce what caused that pain or what caused those problems, which means they’ll happen again and again these problems, creating a cycle where no one learns how to improve, but instead, we only learn how to hide. Now to be clear, it’s not the absence of this defensiveness that characterizes learning teams, but how well you overcome that defensiveness when it rears its head.

We are humans after all, and it’s hard to completely avoid taking a defensive stance in the face of adverse news. In the face of problems, . Worse still organizational inertia can make it even harder for a team to face the truth. You need to develop enough trust with each other to face the truth, and ask the questions I described to impart real learning in your organization, and thereby build stronger leaders and a stronger team.

So I want to close out with a couple stories. First, many, many years ago when one of my children was barely three, I took her to a playground. And eventually we wandered over to the big kid section. She saw a giant slide and she said she wanted to go on it. Now. It seemed really big to me. It was a bit taller than me, and granted, I’m at the low end of average height, but it seemed daunting for a three-year-old, someone that wasn’t even three.

My first instinct was to say no, but I assessed the situation. I thought briefly and decided to let her give it a try, that I would just stand casually close enough to catch her if she fell without being obvious about it. And my thinking going into this was: one of us will learn a valuable lesson today.

Turned out we both learned something. I learned that she could handle it and because I wasn’t obviously hovering, she learned to have more confidence in herself and was ready to take on more playground challenges. And looking at that through the lens of Principle Driven Leadership. You can see she had a vision climbing to the top and coming down the slide with the outcome of having fun.

And I could have told her what to do and more specifically how to do it and what not to do, but instead, I decided to enable her to give her the space. To try it herself., I was prepared to take problem escalation, her falling, literally into my own hands if necessary. But this gave her the room to make mistakes and learn from them.

Taking this into the professional world. I had a direct report a few years ago who was agonizing over whether or not to give responsibility to one of her directs, and she simply wasn’t sure if the direct could handle it. So I asked if the risk of severe negative outcomes was high, and she said it would be minimal. So then I asked her if she could keep an eye out so that things wouldn’t get too out of hand if her direct started failing or problems started occurring, she could step in. And she said she could.

Absolutely. So with those questions and those answers, the path became clear to her. She would give her direct the assignment and keep a subtle eye out without making it obvious that she was worried about his success. And leaning on my experience with my daughter. I said to her, one of two things is going to happen.

Your direct is going to prove that he can handle the challenge. And so she could stop worrying about whether or not he could and in fact hand off more outcomes to him, or she would see more specifically where and why her direct couldn’t handle it, and therefore give him the coaching he needed to be successful in the future.

Either way. Either of those paths was a much better outcome than her just sitting around worrying and wondering. And so in acting on this, she created a learning environment to help her direct grow as a leader, and ultimately it worked out. Her direct took on the new work, succeeded with a little help, and continued to grow further into a leadership role that improved our organization.

The more you encourage this kind of behavior, the more leaders you create, and therefore a sustainable organization starts to emerge. One that becomes less dependent on any individual while supporting everybody’s growth. In addition to just enabling the right behavior, you should do your best to teach what you can when it’s appropriate.

One of the great things about knowledge is that you can give it away and still not lose any of it. Now, I’ve worked with some leaders in the past that don’t seem to think that way, that think that giving in away would lose it and would share very little of their knowledge of their insights. More importantly because they believe that knowledge gave them power.

The problem is that they needed to continually exercise that power to tell people what to do, which means no one was learning. You will absolutely not create durable results by controlling people. It’s that simple. Also you gain more by sharing what you know, forcing yourself to work through the how and why you do something to get to the principles that really drive you so that you can teach others,

has the dual benefit of improving your own leadership skills along with that of others, while improving the impact and success of your organization. And what more could we want as leaders? So I’d like you to think about whether or not you are leading a learning organization. And if not, what can you do today to start on that path?

And if you are, how can you better foster collective growth? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And join me next time where I’m going to close out the season by sharing a few experiences from my own personal journey.