To kick-off the New Year I decided to do something different in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my direct reports. First, we will be meeting as a group to read and discuss The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes. Second, the one-on-one meetings will no longer be status updates of their respective departments but instead we will use the time together to work on improvements to our systems and processes.
I began to rethink our meeting format and content based on many factors, namely The Leader’s Handbook. The book, written in 1998, is an excellent resource for learning how to manage people and workflows. I would highly recommend it. From the outset the author makes it clear that he was heavily influenced by W. Edwards Deming’s work on quality and management. He makes frequent references to Deming’s 14 Points for Management and his System of Profound Knowledge.
A major premise of the book is to rethink how one views and manages people within their organization. If something goes wrong, is your first assumption to blame someone or do you inspect the system within which that person works? I’ll write more about that in a future blog.
The thing I wanted to highlight first was the author’s comments on how we learn. 
He referred to it as Transformation’s Learning Curve.
A) The illusion of learning or “mastering the rhetoric”
B) The “ah ha” moment and realization that “we don’t know much”
C) Real learning begins
How many times have you experienced this yourself or seen a member of your team go through this process? Perhaps your teaching your team a new process and they all nod their heads in unison indicating that they understand and know what to do. And then several days or weeks go by and you notice they aren’t effectively using the new process. You quiz them on what they learned and they can repeat it back to you verbatim. They’ve mastered the rhetoric but they do not truly understand the process. But as time goes by you’ll suddenly see a shift in their behavior. They’ve had an “ah ha” moment and said “now I understand” and then true learning and behavioral change begins.
You see this behavior in children all of the time. As a father, you can tell you children “stay away from the hot stove or you’ll get burned” but they don’t fully understand. They can repeat the rules back to you but it’s not till they touch that stove (they all inevitably do it, so young parents just deal with it) that they go “ah ha, now I know what Mom and Dad warned me” and true learning begins.
The learning curve applies to individuals, teams, departments, and even entire organizations. It took a long time for Microsoft to finally grasp the importance of the Internet. It required a memo in 1994 from a “pain in the ___” change agent named J Allard to move Microsoft to steps B and C.
So as you bring new concepts and processes to your team or you’re learning new ones yourself remember the learning curve. It’s virtually unavoidable. Only through time and experience can one fully grasp something new. It requires repetition. You may have to teach the same concepts many different times and in a variety of ways (verbal, written, illustrations) until they fully grasp and can effectively leverage what you are teaching.
Curtis S