Teaching smart people how to learn

by Mitch Byers :: June 20th, 2008 :: Posted in Enhancing Your Career |

A business associate recently shared, Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris. Though the material was published in the Harvard Business Review back in May 1991, it still has relevance for today’s career professionals. As I was reading the article, two truths kept swirling in my mind:

1. Your strengths, when unchecked, become your weaknesses, or as author Michael Watkins (The First 90 Days) notes, “Every strength has it attendant pitfalls.” While someone’s independence and assertiveness may help them lead a company, if unbalanced with a good dose of social responsibility, integrity, and interpersonal understanding then we are left with the framework for a cavalier bully.
2. Someone constantly tripping over their own ego rarely wins the race. How many managers do you know that compromise their effectiveness because they put their needs before the company’s, or push their agenda without regard to the ideas of their peers?

The author’s interest is to make visible our counterproductive blind spots, come to grips with their negative impact and replace the cloak that shields us from reality with a healthy dose of continued self-awareness. Self-awareness will enable us to more easily discern and learn from our shortcomings. In short, Chris Argyris provides a lesson on life and sustained success.

Argyris takes a disciplined approach and insists on us taking full responsibility for our learning actions. This includes one of the most difficult aspects, learning from our life’s failures. Learning from our shortcomings is a simple concept, but a practice rarely seen in corporate environments. Because of the opaqueness of our blind spots, it is easier to learn from other people’s mistake because their errors are much easier to “see” and in many ways, more assessable.

For most of us, learning from our mistakes is not part of our everyday vernacular. We have enough worries without being pressed to be critical of our own behavior. Argyris argues it is particularly difficult for “Smart People” because these “professionals… rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never leaned how to learn from failure.” He concludes that when something goes “bad” the natural reaction is to “become defensive, screen our criticism, and put the blame on anyone and everyone” else. This inability to look inward is problematic not only for the individual, but for a company. The multiplying effects of one’s blindness can hit a company hard, like a punch in the stomach.

When you have a strong self-sense of “success” then covering up “failures” is a common response. Power-welding politicians and Fortune 500 executives have driven home this point for decades. Argyris explains that one’s “high aspiration for success” is shared with “an equally high fear of failure and a propensity to feel shame and guilt when [people]…fail to meet their high standards.” Personal embarrassment and guilt feelings driven by sub-par performance encourages the individual to protect themselves and play the blame game. Repeated, this pattern of “self-serving” results in “self-sealing.” This self-imposed inoculation creates diminishing returns on your efforts. While you see yourself as perfectly balanced on the tightrope, the outside world sees you as out of balance and out of touch.

Defense posturing is self-defeating. By focusing outward instead of inward, individuals are shortchanging themselves for “being a catalyst for real change.” The carnage caused by Smart People with “brittle” personalities includes a predisposition against learning and being hypersensitive during performance evaluations, something the author refers to as “the doom loop.” In my own experience, it becomes impossible to build an effective team or a culture of collaboration when people are following their own paths of glory.

The author discusses techniques for how companies can teach their employees to “reason productively.” Interestingly, the author’s insight of 1991 mirrors research of 2008.  A SHRM white-paper “Workplace Visions” concludes the number one skill employers expect to increase in importance in the next five years is critical thinking and problem solving.

While Argyris pushes companies to help employees with productive reasoning, I feel the workforce has become more self-reliant since the early 90s. Today, more workers are independent knowledge brokers. Their self-reliance means they will have to shoulder the responsibility for achieving effective productive reasoning. The challenge will be to maintain a healthy ego while engaging in on-going, honest self-assessments. This starts with a willingness to welcome critical dialogue from the outside.

Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. When I assist people in job transition, part of my challenge is to help people find their strengths and work through their shortcomings. Interviewing is rarely anyone’s strongest suit. Possibly, because they are in job transition and the future is fuzzy, they feel more vulnerable. With a little probing, a dialogue begins that might not otherwise have been possible. Their defense mechanisms are at ease.  This state of neutrality allows them to more quickly and more accurately come to a critical point of self-awareness and embrace new tools and concepts to help secure their next position. Once they pass over this threshold, then suddenly, many other doors become visible for exploration.

As the author concludes, when people are active participants in productive reasoning, “they are not just solving problems but developing a far deeper and more textured understanding of their role as members of the organization. They are laying the groundwork for continuous improvement that is truly continuous. They are learning how to learn.”