Set Yourself Apart: Grow Your Learning Agility

Are you a new manager?  Or, perhaps you've been in a management position for a while and wondered how you can help your line reports perform and innovate more.  For much of the past two years, I've been researching a couple of content areas that may be able to help managers in these situations.  My research has shown a few new findings in the world of workplace psychology that can be useful to leaders and managers to help drive performance of those people they oversee.  My research has found the following:

1) The highest performers at work have a certain proclivity for success that they already come to work with.  This is called learning goal orientation.  Basically, people with a high degree of learning goal orientation see specific goals as opportunities to learn something new, rather than a means to an end.  They tend to not get bogged down by focusing only on how that big upcoming presentation MUST wow stakeholders; instead they see their preparation for the presentation as a chance to learn something about stakeholders needs.  If they do not wow stakeholders immediately, these employees want to focus on how they can do better next time because they genuinely love to learn.  For managers, having line reports with this type of outlook is not something that can necessarily be shaped or changed; instead, employees come to the job with this kind of outlook baked in.  As has been noted in previous research, these employees tend to be higher performers.

2) While learning goal orientation is harder to coach for because it is a personality trait, there are things managers can do like modify their own behavior that can help increase subordinate performance.  When managers adopt a coaching orientation, they can drive subordinate performance and success.  Specifically, they need to do a few things:
 

• Be available for their line reports.  You can't coach someone if you don't reasonably take the time to coach them.  Telling them that your door is always open if they have question/concerns about a specific problem is a great place to start.

• In a similar vein, managers need to provide guidance.  Perhaps their line reports are stumped about a particular problem, and need suggestions about where to take their ideas next.

• At the same time, managers should not provide all the answers to their subordinates.  Taking a questioning (a true coaching) stance is a great solution because it forces line reports to come up with their own ideas instead of always relying on you to solve their problems.

• Finally, managers need to provide inspiration.  Do you exude confidence that your line report can improve in a problem area?  Do you support their taking on of new challenges?

3) In modeling these types of behaviors for your line reports, you are able to create a safe space for your team to learn.  This safe space (also called psychological safety in the scholarly literature and in ground-breaking research by Google's Lazlo Boch) is necessary for teams to feel supported to try new things and innovate.  If someone is worried that making a few mistakes will lead them to be terminated immediately, they will feel stifled and scared to solve problems, undercutting their (and your team's) performance.

4) All of these factors work in tandem to support subordinate learning agility - the propensity for individuals to learn quickly - that ultimately drives their performance.  Learning agility is really important and is a new conceptualization of performance.  High performers are, ultimately, "high learners" - individuals who are able to see both what works and what doesn't to quickly and nimbly modify their behavior for a new context.

The crux of my research has ultimately shown that there are specific things managers can do to coach for learning agility, which can lead to high performance in individuals and teams.  By keeping these behaviors in mind, managers can take subordinate effectiveness, especially in subordinates who already have high learning goal orientation, to the next level.  However, no matter the extent to which an employee already has a strong desire to learn, manager coaching behavior has a knock-on effect because it creates a safe space for teams to learn that can lead to both greater performance and innovation.

Selected references:

Amabile, T. M., Schatzel, E. A., Moneta, G. B., & Kramer, S. J. (2004). Leader behaviors and the work environment for creativity: Perceived leader support. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(1), 5-32.

Burke, W. W., Roloff, K., Mitchinson, A., Catenacci, L., Drinka., G. O., Kim, J. (2016). To live is to learn: A behavioral model and measurement of learning agility. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Organization & Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

DeRue, D. S., Ashford, S. J., & Myers, C. G. (2012). Learning agility: In search of conceptual clarity and theoretical grounding. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5(3), 258-279.

Drinka, G. O., Catenacci, L. C. & Burke, W. W. (2017). Assessing potential: Validating a new learning agility inventory. Poster session presented at the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology Annual Conference, Orlando, FL.

Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41, 1040–1048.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Heslin, P. A., Vandewalle, D., & Latham, G. P. (2006). Keen to help? Managers’ implicit person theories and their subsequent employee coaching. Personnel Psychology, 59(4), 871-902.

Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (2000). High potentials as high learners. Human Resource Management, 39(4), 321-329.

Smith, B.C. (2015). How Does Learning Agile Business Leadership Differ? Exploring a Revised Model ofthe Construct of Learning Agility in Relation to Executive Performance. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Academic Commons (http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8765D95).