Overcoming Learning Disabilities

When a new leader derails, failure to learn is almost always a factor. Information overload can obscure the most telling issues. There is so much to absorb that it is difficult to know where to focus. Amid the torrent of information coming your way, it is easy to miss important signals. Or you might focus too much on the technical side of the business ”products, customers, technologies, and strategies ”and shortchange the critical learning about culture and politics.

To compound this problem, surprisingly few managers have received any training in systematically diagnosing an organization. Those who have had such training invariably prove to be either human resources professionals or former management consultants .

A related problem is failure to plan to learn. Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. Few new leaders take the time to think systematically about their learning priorities. Fewer still explicitly create a learning plan when entering a new role.

Some leaders even have learning disabilities, potentially crippling internal blocks to learning. One is a simple failure even to try to understand the history of the organization. A baseline question that every new leader should ask is, How did we get to this point? Otherwise, you risk tearing down fences without knowing why they were put up. Armed with insight into the history, you may indeed find the fence is not needed and must go. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it where it is.

Other new leaders suffer from the action imperative, a learning disability whose primary symptom is a near-compulsive need to take action. If you habitually find yourself too anxious or too busy to devote time to systematic learning, you may suffer from this malady. It is a serious affliction, because being too busy to learn often results in a death spiral. If you do not learn, you can easily make poor early decisions that undermine your credibility, making people less likely to share important information with you, leading to more bad decisions. The result is a vicious cycle that can irreparably damage your credibility. So beware! It may feel right to enter a new situation and begin acting decisively ”and sometimes, as we will see in the next chapter, it is the right thing to do ”but you risk being poorly prepared to see the real problems.

Perhaps most destructive of all, some new leaders arrive with the answer. They have already made up their minds about how to solve the organization s problems. Having matured in an organization where things were done the right way, they fail to realize that what works well in one organizational culture may fail miserably in another. As Chris Bagley found out the hard way, this stance leaves you vulnerable to serious mistakes and is likely to alienate people. Bagley thought he could simply import what he had learned at Sigma to fix the plant s problems. Even in situations (such as turnarounds) in which you have been brought in explicitly to import new ways of doing things, you still have to learn about the organization s culture and politics to customize your approach. Besides, displaying a genuine ability to listen often translates into increased credibility and influence.