Practice #3: Strategic Leaders Create a Team Culture that Supports Learning
In Everyday Strategic Leadership, the third practice of strategic leaders I write about is that they create a culture that supports learning.
Deciding to Learn
Learning is a choice. It’s a choice about how often one schedules time to see customers and listen for their emerging needs.
How diligent a team is in reviewing their performance data, comparing reality to their assumptions, conducting after-action reviews, and sharing lessons learned is a choice.
Whether a team defaults to studying an issue for six months or rapidly prototypes potential solutions for testing in the real world is a choice. (An even more important choice in a world with AI.)
I say all that to underscore that the methods of team learning are straightforward, but it takes a mindful effort to ensure that they occur. It’s easy to assume people will learn and share, but the critical activities often get pushed down on our to-do lists in favor of moving on to the next thing. In my research, strategic leaders, don’t let that happen.
Making Learning Strategic
Strategic leaders also get more value from their learning activities by orienting them to answer critical strategy questions directly.
For example, the baseline learning questions for a product might be ones like these:
What’s working and what’s not working in the product?
What features are most used?
But if you added a strategic lens, you’d also ask questions like these, which get at more important definitions of success:
How good is the product compared to alternatives? How obvious is that to potential users when they first encounter it?
How well does the product meet the most important needs of users?
Are customers using the product in a way that helps us achieve our organizational goals (e.g., retention, growth, sharing, mission impact)?
Having strategic questions in mind is so important because the data and activities you need to answer them are substantially different from those required to answer the baseline questions. And being able to orient the team’s day-to-day work to generate all the necessary data enables more effective strategic decision-making.
Previous Posts about Everyday Strategic Leadership
Decoding “You Need to Be More Strategic”
Practice 1: Strategic Leaders Strategically Invest and Protect Their Time