# 70: Leadership Learning
Story behind the Passage
This morning while taking my run, I had a herureka moment. It was facilitated by the fact that I had to write an intro to someone yesterday and I completely messed up. Everything I wrote about me and my business was true. But the problem was: I was not able to find the label that brought it all together. Labels are important when trying to explain something to people. And selling yourself and/or selling a product takes some explaining in order to convince someone.
So, towards the end of my run, I was still kind of thinking about the fact that I was not satisfied with my intro from yesterday and then it immediately jumped at me that I had just made a huge circle around myself. I mean, literally like going in loops for about ten years. Why ten years? Well, in 2010, one of my first projects that I got invited to join in a large university was entitled “Leadership Project.” And there was a reason for this. Somehow, even my students mention leadership as something that they relate with me. But I kind of missed to see this for a while. I mean, I missed to see the label. The topic has always been there, of course.
This incident this morning made me send another intro. Of course, you do not always get a second chance. But sometimes: You just create the second chance yourself. All this made me pick Burns’ book Leadership for today. Even though, leadership is the one and only thing that fascinates me about almost anything — even if the topics might look very different — I have no other book that is so comprehensive while at the same time being so much to the point. To me, it really is the most illuminating compendium of leadership knowledge, exactly because Burns, just like my other heroes such as Drucker, was not a business professor but a political scientist.
My Learnings
“Learning from experience, learning from people, learning from successes and failures, learning from leaders and followers: personality is formed in these reactions to stimuli in social environments.” Is it not so funny that it does not say anywhere in this sentence: “learning from books”? Of course, theoretical learning might be included in one of these concepts. But it does not seem to be a priority. Otherwise, Burns would have made it more explicit. And the funny thing is that we, our society, still gives so much about book learning. Do not get me wrong: Obviously, my entire blog would be a complete fake if I did not believe in the power of reading. But that is only one part of the story. I completely agree with Burns on all of the other learning sources, especially experience.
This is also why I am quite sad that especially young scholars are so helpless when it comes to organizing their own experiences. I mean, it does not take more than an e-mail or a call to start an experience of some kind; be it an event, a visit to a corporation, some form of internship, etc. But no, all of this is obviously valued less than sitting somewhere in a lonely study, reading books, and thinking about starting “real” life in the future — whenever that might be.
This way, various “reactions to stimuli” are not possible because the stimuli are always the same. Due to the fact that many young scholars nowadays become part of small cohorts of some selected graduate circles, they have even less interaction with others (even before Covid). Hence, training new forms of reaction cannot happen. Consequently, no leadership learning takes place at all. But there is a reason for this, of course, and this reason is found in the environment.
“The social environment becomes a vast maze of rewards and punishments that reinforce certain responses and extinguish others.” This is a very tragic part of the current leadership learning epoch — I think. Of course, we know about the basic learning mode of rewards and punishment. But the sad part is linked to the latter aspect of fully extinguishing certain responses. I truly see this. Some people that I once believed would be great leaders in their field, simply stopped learning. They just did not expand their leadership potential. This was because of the environment.
What makes this so sad is that, as far as I see it, this burned potential is lost forever. You cannot go back to it. Maybe it can be compared to sports. If you completely stopped playing a certain sport at some point, you will never manage to catch up with others. And, no, I am not talking about comparing yourself to others all the time. That is what Burns in the next sentence also highlights quite brilliantly. Leadership learning is always “unique” to a certain extent — as unique as every individual.
Still, what I am saying is that the environment in which you move around is the number 1 reason that can burn your leadership potential. It can be really toxic. You imitate people who are no leaders and somehow you lose track of the fact that leadership is something that is worth learning for each and everyone. But even the brightest and highly educated people in this country get into this habit of always waiting for someone to take action or to make them do something. They are always ready to become followers and even develop sophisticated and self-reflected theories about this. But they are not ready to LEAD.
If there is one simple characteristic of leadership, it is: YOU take action!
I am not saying that I was always brilliant when it comes to that. Academia does leave its mark on people; even those who have all the skills and the right implementation-orientation to get things done and to motivate others. But sometimes, even they end up broken. Again, nobody can escape the influence of one’s environment. And this is not special about the academy, of course. It applies to each and every social and professional realm.
The positive side of this is, however, that we can all take charge of our own leadership learning path — if we make sure that we are surrounded by people who inspire our own leadership capacity; people who stand up, take action, take risks, move others, and also constantly move their own comfort zone. These are the ones that will make us move forward and they keep us away from the danger zone in which our abilities run the risk of being “extinguished.”
The most interesting and rewarding thing to me is also that this state of being puts you in a position where there are hardly any problems left. I mean, problems that might have looked like real problems to you in the past. All you see around you are opportunities for fixing things that are causing others (people and companies) a waste of resources. And then you decide if you want to help to make it better. The same applies to human tragedies. Yes, some things that others are being faced with are terrible — also during Covid. But your brain immediately jumps to the solution part. Your empathy is not lost but turned into a positive force.
The nice thing about this is also that you get so much energy; not from the hypothetical dreaming but from implementing the solutions. I am not talking about big actions. I am talking about picking up the phone to call someone in order to make sure that someone else gets the money that he deserves, for example. This is nothing big but it is rewarding in the sense that you are immediately helping someone. You feel that every minute you invest into this is worth it.
This is leadership: taking action and learning from it to become even better in the future.
Reflection Questions
1) How do you define leadership?
2) Which leaders did you learn from in the past?
3) In which field — big or small — do you consider yourself a leader? Which criteria tell you that this is true?