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True leaders
are humble enough to realize they don’t know it all and that it
is imperative to continually seek out new knowledge. That’s why
Linda Huett, President and CEO of Weight Watchers International,
says that learning is like dirty dishes—“You never finish in terms
of your own development,” she says. “No matter what you’re appointed,
you are still just learning, and you’ve got as much to learn from
the people who work for you as you’ve got to give them,” she confesses.
Leaders learn
from a variety of sources. During interviews with 27 of the nation’s
most successful CEOs and Presidents for the book True
Leaders, leaders revealed that they are avid
readers of books; they listen to audiotapes; they seek out advice
from experts, peers, and mentors; and they even resort to sage advise
given by parents. They openly embrace a process of self-discovery
and view most mistakes as learning experiences. Interestingly enough,
they even glean powerful lessons from bad examples.
Jack Kahl,
founder of Manco, Inc., had the good fortune to meet Sam Walton,
the founder of Wal-Mart, when Kahl was a young entrepreneur, calling
on the giant retailer as a client. About the third time he met Walton,
Kahl was carrying a book. He handed it to Walton who looked at the
book and said, “You’re a real student of management, aren’t you
Jack?” Then he told Kahl he’d make a deal with him. If Kahl would
share with him the best things he had read and learned from, he
would do the same with Kahl. That momentary exchange turned into
a lifetime friendship not just based on learning, but on loving
to learn together. “At home I have two leather-bound books—each
of them several inches high—of letters from Sam that we shared because
of our loving to learn together,” Kahl said. From 1976 to 1988,
Kahl continued to learn from Walton and the learning worked so well
that it helped Kahl to grow his littlie entrepreneurial venture
into a multi-million dollar business that has now become global.
Learning from the experienced
David Novak,
Chairman and CEO of TriCon Global restaurants says that every person
he has ever worked for has invested in him and he in them. Novak
believes that individuals are a product of what they are exposed
to. “If you stay among the same group of friends or the same company
without getting outside of your industry, you will become very limited
in your thinking,” Novak explains. He reads everything he can about
leadership. And, he takes advantage of the opportunity to meet experienced
peers who he can also learn from. “How many people get a chance
to meet with Jack Welch?” he asks. “Now I can keep that conversation
to myself, or I can share what I’ve learned,” Novak says. So, he learns from experienced business associates and then
passes the learning on to his own team of leaders. “I get to meet
people—do things, go places—that most people will never ever get
to do. So I think I need to share it—not just keep it for myself—give
credit where credit is due and share it.”
Tim Webster,
CEO of American Italian Pasta, has a board chairman who functions
as a mentor to Webster. His board chairman is a retired executive
from the Kellogg Company who spends two to three days a month with
Webster and his leadership team, primarily mentoring them. After
30 years with Kellogg, the chairman has an incredible depth of knowledge
and experience and a mastery of so many disciplines that Webster
feels he has benefited greatly from the experience.
Dan
Woodward is another CEO who has drawn from experience. As CEO of
Enherent, an IT architecture and design company, Woodward hired
his former boss’s boss, Jack Mullinax, to be the CFO and Executive
Vice President. Woodward first worked with Mullinax as a young financial
analyst when he joined IBM. “He made such an impression on me that
I always looked for opportunities to work with him,” Woodward said.
Several years ago, the two were put together in a joint venture
headed up by Woodward prior to joining Enherent. “After I came here,
I lured him out of IBM and got him to hold off on retirement for
a couple of years to help me,” the CEO said. Woodward credits his
colleague for having had more aggregate impact on him over the years
than anyone.
Learn from bad bosses
Unlikely
as it may sound, many of the successful CEOs and Presidents interviewed
actually learned from what Ann Hambly calls “reverse mentoring.”
Hambly, Managing Director of Prudential Asset Resources, says she
had a lot of reverse mentoring. “I’ve had a few bosses who treated
me in such a way that I will never, ever treat an employee like
that,” she said. Hambly learned from these negative examples and
made a promise to herself that she would never be that kind of a
boss.
“It’s funny
how the negative examples stick with you,” said Jim Copeland, CEO
of Deloitte & Touche, one of the world’s leading accounting,
tax, and consulting firms. “I remember we had a managing partner
who said if you have over ten hours of overtime, you have to have
it approved before you work it. We were in the midst of this busy
season, a manager that was working on one of my jobs was going to
go beyond the 50 hours allocated, and it was a Saturday or Sunday
night before we figured that out.” Copeland told the man to go ahead
and work the hours. When the managing partner found out the next
day he told Copeland the time wouldn’t be paid. Copeland took a
strong position against that managing partner’s decision and the
man got paid. “It was just a classic example of somebody absolutely
determined to have his will obeyed no matter whether it happened
to make sense to the circumstances or not. It was just absolutely
stupid.” It was a lesson he never forgot.
Learn from quotes and tapes
Terri Bowersock
is dyslexic. She learned the hard way that even with learning disabilities,
people can be successful if they believe in themselves and have
the courage to find new ways to learn. Bowersock’s disability was
not recognized during her early learning years. Although she learned
to fake her way through high school, she could never make it at
college. She didn’t let that stop her. After visiting a family friend’s
small consignment store, Bowersock had a dream. She drew the plans
for her business dream with crayons and pictures because she couldn’t
write a business plan. With her dream and her pictures and a $2000
loan from her grandmother, Terri Bowersock opened her first consignment
store in Phoenix, Arizona. Today she operates a multi-million dollar
owned and franchised company, has never had to borrow money from
a bank, and has hired a CEO and a CFO for the things that require
their respective kinds of education. She laughs about the fact that
she doesn’t have a business degree. “What I do have is a BMW degree,”
she says with a smile. “That’s because in my car (a BMW, of course)
I’m never without a cassette.” That’s how Bowersock continues to
learn—by listening to tapes of success stories about other entrepreneurs.
As trite
as it may seem, several of these leaders use notable quotes to remind
them of things they’ve already learned, but can so easily forget
to do. At Manco, notable quotes hang everywhere throughout the corporate
headquarters. Kahl placed his favorite quote directly in front of
the water cooler to ensure that he, as well as employees, would
be influenced by it several times each day. It is a Socrates quote
that says, “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.”
The quote is indicative of Kahl’s determination to recognize that
there is always room for growth-oriented learning. The quotes are
so popular that Kahl has had a booklet of them put together to give
to visiting guests who frequently ask for copies. To Kahl, it’s
just another way of passing the learning along.
Learn from mistakes
Facing up
to mistakes can be great learning opportunities. Linda Huett says
that far too often leaders look for scapegoats when a mistake is
made. “Usually it isn’t any one individual’s fault anyway,” she
says. “We all make mistakes. We try not to have them, and we certainly
don’t do them intentionally.” Living up to mistakes, talking about
them, and facing reality helps the learning process she says. “Learning
from the mistakes is what’s really important,” she says.
Mike McCarthy,
Chairman of McCarthy Building Companies, one of the country’s top
ten commercial builders, owned up to a big mistake several years
ago. And, it taught him a very hard lesson. McCarthy said that the
company grew quickly and got too big. “I wasn’t watching it as I
should have been,” he confessed. As a result, the company lost $22
million in one year. That resulted in losing their bonding and their
financial backing. It was an incredibly difficult time for McCarthy,
resulting in having to lay people off. “I drove around the country
with my wife and two little babies in a Dodge minivan and a trailer
for our clothes,” he said. “I personally went and laid every person
off. The reason I did this was because I had screwed it up. They
had done their jobs, I hadn’t done mine, but they were going to
lose their jobs while I got to keep mine. I wanted to have the pain
of doing that so I would never forget.” McCarthy said it was a major
mistake, but also a major learning experience that he never forgot
as he worked to restructure and rebuild the company.
Leaders can
certainly continue their learning by attending more formalized educational
programs as well. Some attend special executive think tanks; some
attend special educational programs or seminars conducted by collegiate
scholars or CEO peers. But, for the most part, the learning continues
in a variety of less formal ways. Leaders even learn from humility,
as confessed by Gary McDaniel, CEO of Chateau Communities. McDaniel
believes that many times in a leadership position, ego tends to
get in the way. “When you do that,” he says, “the balance of the
organization suffers.” He shares a story that brought this point
home to him early in his leadership development. McDaniel was a
second lieutenant in the Air Force and had worked with an individual
for over a year when he found out he was going to be transferred
to another assignment. “I was bemoaning the situation and saying,
‘Gosh, I’m so good, who’s going to come and take my place—how can
anybody do this just as good as me?’” when the man taught me a very
important lesson.” The man responded to McDaniel by saying, “Lieutenant,
if you pull your arm out of a bucket of water, how long does the
hole last?” “I’ve taken that with me for the last 30 years of so,”
said McDaniel. “It’s a very true statement—the hole doesn’t last
very long. Neither do leaders with inflated egos.”
So, like
dirty dishes, learning is never quite finished. There is always
learning to be done—through books, tapes, good bosses, bad bosses,
and peers, even mistakes. True leaders know that in a world of constant
change, one thing remains unchanged—there is always something new
to be learned if you are humble enough to admit it and courageous
enough to seek it.
How open
are you to keep on learning? Ask yourself these questions:
Who are my mentors?
What other leaders in my organization am I learning
from?
What do I do to demonstrate my commitment to continual
learning?
How humble am I about things to be learned?
What do I do to share what I have learned?
Who am I not taking time to learn from that may provide
unexpected knowledge?
Bette Price is
an author, consultant, and professional speaker on leadership development
issues, and co-author of the soon-to-be-released True
Leaders: How Exceptional CEOs and Presidents Make A Difference by
Building People and Profits (December 2001, Dearborn
Trade Press). She is also president of the Price Group,
a management-consulting firm based in the Dallas suburb of Addison,
Texas. You can contact her at bette@pricegroupleadership.com.
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