Sarah
is a facility manager in a large multinational accountancy firm. She, along with her team of five direct
reports, is responsible for all operational aspects of one of the firm’s
national headquarters. Sarah’s role is
tremendously varied; no two days are the same as she continuously attends to
any number of discrete, independent tasks.
Sarah
is consistently viewed by her superiors to be a high performer. However, in her most recent performance
review, Sarah’s manager highlighted a number of areas where he believed Sarah
could improve. Specifically, the manager
commented on how he believed that in order for Sarah to become more effective,
she needed to be better at finding synergies across the multitude of tasks that
she and her team performed. The manager
believed that while Sarah was very good at her job, she didn’t seem to be
building capability in her team; to the point that he worried what would happen
if Sarah left or was out sick.
At
first, Sarah didn’t pay too much attention to these comments. She was performing well and, in her mind, that
is all that mattered. Sarah believed
that her manager didn’t truly understand the demands of her role and that, in
her own words, “he didn’t know what it’s like to be putting out fires all day
every day.” Sarah was speaking
figuratively, even though part of her role was actually to oversee the fire
evacuation plan for the entire building. She saw her role as “doing what needed to be
done — no more, no
less”.
Over
the course of a number of conversations with Sarah, it became clear that she
approached each task as if it were new. In
Sarah’s mind, no two tasks were ever exactly the same and as a result each day was
met with a fresh perspective. This was
obviously proving to be successful for Sarah in some areas; she had built a
team that was extremely nimble, innovative and constantly open to trying new ways
of doing things. However, this
orientation was clearly being overused. Sarah’s
team had few documented procedures beyond those required by law and she didn’t
have the confidence in her team to “remember what to do.” She found it very difficult to take a
vacation.
Sarah
and her team were in a constant mode of re-learning. Sarah prided herself on being in the trenches
with her team and had an “all hands on deck” mentality. However, because of
this, Sarah never took the time to take stock of the team’s activities and how
they were being accomplished; she was unable to see obvious parallels and
synergies between activities.
In
time, Sarah discovered that her drive to be in a constant state of action
prevented her from stopping and thinking about how she approached her role and
led her team. She came to realize that
she had actually received the same feedback in other roles and in other jobs
but had never taken it on board, always justifying that her role was about
“doing, not thinking”. In the language
of the Learning Agility Assessment Inventory, it was clear that while Sarah was
a strong innovator and risk-taker, she rarely took time to reflect and had the
tendency to be defensive when given feedback from others.
This
insight helped Sarah change the way she approached her role and ultimately the
way she led her team. Sarah has tried to take a more holistic view on her
team’s activities and be more open to how they are perceived by important
organizational stakeholders. As a result,
Sarah has been able to institute a number of important projects, including one
to document re-occurring processes and procedures and another to gather
feedback from the team’s primary clients in the facility. These two projects
alone have given her team the ability to institutionalize their role knowledge
and allowed them to take a more strategic and planned approach to their work.
Ultimately, Sarah believes this insight has allowed her to take on a more
effective leadership role within her organization and she is expecting to be
promoted to the position of regional operations manager in the near future.
SHARED
FROM:
http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/LearningAgility.pdf;
Learning About Learning Agility (2012), By Adam Mitchinson and Robert Morris,
Ph.D. Contributors: W. Warner Burke, Ph.D. & Doctoral Research Group,
Phillip Braddy, Ph.D., Michael Campbell, William Pasmore, Ph.D.
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