Eleven Skills of Leadership: 11. Managing of Learning

A teacher is the manager in the classroom, but she is not simply a manager of learning. Teaching connotes activities too typically requiring a lecture hall and a large number of desks. The emphasis is on learning, not on what the instructor teaches. On the contrary, managers of learning are slightly different from “teachers” or “instructors.” They know that people learn as individuals, not as a class or group. They know each individual is important; therefore, each individual leader must learn or all will receive an inferior program.
The Manager of Learning (MOL) competency is more complex than most leadership competencies. Comprehensively, Manager of Learning (MOL) describes a system for exposing learners to the need to know and involving them in their own learning. Again, the focus is always on the participants’ learning, not the teacher’s teaching.

Manager of Learning has four steps: Guided Discovery, Teach/learn, Application and Evaluation. Let us take a glance look at each.

Guided Discovery: The learner is confronted with a pre-planned leadership situation (or guided discovery) which makes a demand on him so that he can internalize the need for new principles, concepts, skills and techniques and/or improvement of those existing.

Teach/learn: Having internalized the need for learning because of the attempted action, the leader-in-training enters into a learning period. This period is designed to teach the skills, techniques and knowledge needed to cope with the first situation and with similar situations.

Application: Having received instruction and having had proper practice, the leader-in-training engages again in an actual leadership performance, during which he will have a chance to compare his performance exhibited before and after the instruction and evaluate his own development. The application is a practical test and performance of the new principles, concepts, skills or techniques. Situations for application are devised that simulate or parallel as closely as possible situations the learner may encounter in the home environment.

Evaluation: Key to continued learning in the program is an opportunity to apply the new knowledge. The learner makes an individual contract with the coach-counselor describing one or more ways he will apply what he has learned. The learner is asked to evaluate the application and share his learning with the counselor.