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Features

Published November 2008

Business Is the Curriculum, and Leaders Are Teachers

  

  Michael Chavez, Sushanth Tharappan and Gil McWilliam

Having organizational leaders teach employees seems like a wonderful idea, and generally speaking, it is. But to be a truly effective means for instruction, it has to be applied at certain times and in certain ways.

To CEOs, teaching may sound like a genteel retirement activity, though in fact, today’s organizations have little choice: To keep their pipelines healthy, they need their seniormost talent to teach as well as lead. Given global demographics, it will be more difficult to fill senior positions as people retire, so today’s leaders are increasingly pressed to pass on their accumulated knowledge and wisdom before they leave.

Is it even possible to claim the title of leader without being a teacher? Management guru Noel Tichy writes in The Leadership Engine, “For winning leaders, teaching is not a now-and-then sideline activity. It is how they lead and at the heart of everything they do.” Companies want more than mentoring, coaching and being a role model. They believe that at least some of their top executives ought to be seen as teachers in a more traditional sense, taking a turn at the front of a class of senior colleagues.

Expectations tend to run high for a leaders-as-teachers (LAT) initiative, but good planning trumps good luck: In short, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong.

One example of an organization using LAT successfully as a leadership development tool is Bangalore-headquartered Infosys Technologies Ltd. Infosys’ LAT initiative, called the Leaders Teach Series, is anchored by the Infosys Leadership Institute, which has organized and conducted more than 50 LAT offerings around the world.

Why Bother?
At Infosys, as elsewhere, three principal considerations drive the LAT approach to employee development:

• Companies want to access tacit knowledge locked away in the minds of leaders. This knowledge, while often critical to business success, is wrapped in unique, hard-to-replicate experiences and a leader’s professional context. Familiarity with customer requirements, sales methodologies, techniques for achieving operational excellence and processes for driving innovation are subjects that often are career-specific, rather than industry-specific or company-specific. Firms want to access and transfer this deep background in a way that it can be reapplied to new problems.

• Companies hope to leverage the benefit of linking the medium with the message. By bringing leaders to the forefront of the process of developing other leaders, it sends a powerful signal to the organization about the value of specific insights and the importance of the development process itself. How might you, as a program attendee, prioritize an educational intervention taught by an outside expert as opposed to one taught by your boss?

• Embracing LAT offers hope to organizations frustrated by the chasm between HR and the business. Engaging leaders in teaching leaves little room for disagreements on learning priorities between learning and development professionals and top dogs. To fully deliver the messages, frameworks and tools, leaders must be fully part of the process and supportive of the content. In such an environment, true partnership between HR and the line leaders should be much easier to achieve.

Five Caveats
The way of LAT, however, is fraught with peril. Certain factors weigh heavily in deciding whether LAT is the right tool for the job. Let’s consider the tradeoffs: