Leader to leader

Continuing her series of articles on leadership, Hilarie Owen shares her views on why some people learn leadership and others don’t.

No individual will learn how to develop their leadership by just attending a week’s training course – no matter how good. Leadership really is a lifelong journey and as such, involves continuous learning. Then why is it that not everyone learns from their life’s experiences and develops their leadership?

Picture the scene: The start of a development day and everyone is sitting in a circle waiting to find out what the day will hold. One person is sat with their legs outstretched in front of them and arms folded across their chest. This person is using their arms as a barrier and it’s clear they do not want to be exposed to a learning experience.

Another scene: A meeting is set up between a line manager and their member of staff. Immediately the individual begins aggressively saying: “This is a waste of time. I know how to do my job. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.” This individual is using language as the barrier this time. In both cases we are seeing defensive behaviour towards learning. If we understand this reaction better we may be able to improve any learning undertaken while working for the police service.

One of the well-known studies of defensive behaviour to learning was by Harvard psychologist Chris Argyris. He found that highly intelligent, professional people often have a barrier to learning because they are successful at what they do and rarely experience failure. This, he argues, means that their ability to deal with failure is poor. To ensure they don’t fail, Argyris says these professionals ensure they are not placed in such situations and use well developed defensive skills to avoid criticism or risk of failure. His second reason for defensive learning is that intelligent professionals are so highly paid they believe they are expected to know everything. He backs up his argument with a study of several hundred MBA qualified consultants who were competent and happy dealing with organisational issues but could not deal with exploring their own role and behaviours.

I disagree with this last conclusion that individuals who are highly paid have barriers to learning and have found another reason for defensive learning in intelligent people by working with other professionals including teachers, surgeons and police officers as well as consultants. It is also my experience from teaching in university business schools that the majority of those who take MBA programmes do so with the motivation that it will increase their salary and career status rather than the motivation to learn. That’s not to say they do not learn but rather that for many, it is not their main motivation. Therefore the scope of studying MBA qualified consultants only as Argyris did, is too narrow.

Instead I observed the behaviour of professionals when they became defensive and found it sometimes childlike which led me to the work of Dr Eric Berne and Transactional Analysis or TA. Transactional Analysis is a theory of personality based on a model that portrays three distinct ego states. The three states are known as Parent, Adult and Child states of mind. When a person is in adult state of mind they are thinking and relating to the present. When in the parent state of mind the individual is in a telling, value judgement and past state of mind. Finally, when we are in a child state of mind we will tend to be in a feeling, past state.

Dr Eric Berne defined an ego-state as a consistent pattern of feeling and experience directly related to a corresponding consistent pattern of behaviour. This state of mind and corresponding behaviour is sometimes linked to the work we do and is known as ‘professional deformation’.

My experience is that an adult state of mind is the best for learning but that often intelligent people who are in a ‘telling’ profession such as teaching, the police or consultancy spend most of the