Leading Learning, Unlearning and Re-learning in a Team

Leaders exist to help a group attain its mission goals. An increasingly important role of leaders that underlies successful Team Learning, is in helping team members engage in what futurist Alvin Toffler termed as learning, unlearning and relearning. Leaders have to take point in the learning processes that can help the team meet changes head-on.

• Learning

By far, for the individuals involved, learning is probably the easiest of the 3. Individuals will undertake the mastery of new knowledge and skills - essentially a 'new technology' - to overcome a team problem, if they are able to see a good reason for it. Do the new skills give better results? Save time? Increases the convenience level? Leaders will have to champion the new technology, justify why it should be adopted and finally, win over doubters and dissenters. It's easy to lead by 'decree' but authoritarian leadership behaviours do run a high risk of creating toxic workplaces.

• Unlearning

While learning something new is not a big deal for most of us, it is when we need to replace obsolete knowledge with the new, that issues arise. This especially becomes a case of new wine in old wine-skins - where new skills and knowledge, though learned, remain meshed with the old habits and attitudes, leading to continued poor results.

In addition, such a situation is a primary reason why training does not lead to discernible improvement, because the underlying causes for poor performance have not been solved. It's no small wonder, then that training budgets are often the first to be slashed in times of difficulty.

Leaders' facilitation skills are needed to build discussions to help team members identify the attitudinal factors and perspectives that limit performance at the individual and team levels. Further, the leader's EQ competencies such as empathy become necessary, when the team has to recognise that their progress can only proceed as fast as the slowest member.

• Re-learning

Re-learning requires the continued modification and manipulation of learned experiences and content to match the demands of the team's operating context. The pace of change in today's knowledge economy makes it critical that team members need to be able to engage in meta-learning - aka recognising how they learn and being able to incisively select information that is relevant for their mission success. The Team Leader has to merge the latest relevant information with the current intelligence and red-flag this for the Team to access and consume.

A team's capacity to attain its mission goals is dependent on the Team Leader's ability to engage members on the road to learn, unlearn and relearn. Now, more than ever, vital team leadership skills are required to ensure that teams and organisations can access and make sense of data - the currency of the Information Age - and remain nimble in the face of constant change.

Noel Tan

Resident Philosopher

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