Best Leaders Are Insatiable Learners: Professionalisation of the public service

“It takes a real sense of personal commitment, especially after you’ve arrived at a position of power and responsibility, to push yourself to grow and challenge conventional wisdom. Which is why two of the most important questions leaders face are as simple as they are profound: Are you learning, as an organisation and as an individual, as fast as the world is changing? Are you as determined to stay interested as to be interesting? Remember, it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” – Bill Taylor, author of How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways.

By Vusi Shongwe

John W Gardner, the legendary public intellectual and civic reformer—a celebrated Stanford professor, an architect of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, founder of Common Cause and Independent Sector—delivered a speech that may be one of the most quietly influential speeches in the history of American business.

The speech was delivered at a meeting of McKinsey & Co, the consulting firm whose advice has influenced the world’s richest and most powerful companies. However, his focus that day was neither on money nor power. It was on what he called personal renewal—the urgent need for leaders who wish to make a difference and remain effective to commit themselves to continue learning and growing.

Gardner was so serious about this learning imperative, so determined that the message would get through, that he wrote the speech out in advance because he wanted “every sentence to hit its target”.

What was his message? “We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit,” he said. “Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organisations. Someone said to me the other day: ‘How can I be so bored when I’m so busy?’ I said: ‘Let me count the ways.’ Look around you. How many people whom you know well—people even younger than yourselves—are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits?”

So what is the opposite of boredom, the personal attribute that allows individuals to keep learning, growing, and changing to escape their fixed attitudes and habits? “Not anything as narrow as ambition,” Gardner told the ambitious McKinsey strategists. “After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die.”

He then offered a simple maxim to guide the accomplished leaders in the room. “Be interested,” he urged. “Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalising thing is to be interested… As the proverb goes: ‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’”

In his article, The Best Leaders Are Insatiable Learners, Bill Taylor states that in these head-spinning times, even more so than when John Gardner offered his timeless advice, the challenge for leaders is not to out-hustle, out-muscle, or out-manoeuvre the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways both big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future, and to get there before anyone else does. Taylor points out that the best leaders he has come to know are not just the boldest thinkers; they are the most insatiable learners.

Taylor cites Roy Spence, the author of The 10 Essential Hugs of Life, a humorous and moving take on the roots of success. Among Spence’s wise and folksy pieces of advice (hug your failures, hug your fears, hug yourself) is a call to “hug your firsts”—to seek out new sources of inspiration, to visit a lab whose work you don’t really understand, to attend a conference you shouldn’t be at. “When you’re a kid,” Spence posits, “every day is full of firsts, full of new experiences. As you get older, your firsts become fewer and fewer. If you want to stay young, you have to work to keep trying new things.”

Spence cites as one of his inspirations management guru Jim Collins, who, as a young Stanford professor, sought advice and counsel from his learned colleague John Gardner. What did Spence learn from Collins? “You’re only as young as the new things you do,” he writes, “the number of ‘firsts’ in your days and weeks.”

Ask any educator, and they will agree: We learn the most when we encounter people who are the least like us. Then ask yourself: Don’t you spend most of your time with people who are exactly like you? Colleagues from the same company, peers from the same industry, friends from the same profession and neighbourhood?

According to Taylor, it takes a real sense of personal commitment, especially after you’ve arrived at a position of power and responsibility, to push yourself to grow and challenge conventional wisdom. Which is why two of the most important questions leaders face are as simple as they are profound: Are you learning, as an organisation and as an individual, as fast as the world is changing? Are you as determined to stay interested as to be interesting? Remember, it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Not so long ago, it was acceptable in the public service, especially in government, to have an A-strategy and a B-team, or a B-strategy and an A-team. Not anymore. The public sector has transformed. What is needed now are both the A-strategy and the A-team.

For effective service delivery, what is required is for the right people to be on the bus. The phrase “the right people on the bus” is a concept from Jim Collins’s book Good to Great. It means prioritising who is on the bus over where the bus is going. Indeed, Collins puts it aptly when he says, the right people on the bus… the wrong people off the bus… and the right people in the right seats.

Those who build great organisations ensure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before determining where to drive the bus. They always think first about who and then about what. When facing chaos and uncertainty, and when you cannot possibly predict what is coming around the corner, your best strategy is to have a busload of people who can adapt and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with “who” rather than “what”, you can more easily adapt to a changing world. If people join the bus primarily because of where it is going, what happens if you get ten miles down the road and need to change direction? You’ve got a problem. But if people are on the bus because of who else is on the bus, then it’s much easier to change direction: “Hey, I got on this bus because of who else is on it; if we need to change direction to be more successful, fine with me.”

Second, if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by their inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.

Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have great company.

Let me close by quoting what the immortal Hawkeye had to say about making choices in life.

“Sometimes you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. But what you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”

* Dr Vusi Shongwe works in the Department of Arts and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media or IOL.