Premise: The Ultimate Leadership Superpower
In a world defined by constant change and emergent challenges, leaders face a difficult reality – the specific tactics that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow.
In this environment, the most critical skill isn’t mastery of a single strategy, but something more fundamental — the ability to learn quickly . And even more important is the knowledge of how we learn.
This foundational ability enables a host of other skills and makes it easier to adapt, grow, and lead effectively.
How Leaders Learn
Recently, I had the chance to synthesize insights from a preview of the HBR book How Leaders Learn with my own lived experience.
The book outlines three core modes of learning: “learning from,” “learning by,” and “learning to.”
While “learning to” often involves acquiring specific technical skills like using a new CRM or giving feedback, the other two modes offer a more profound path to leadership growth.
Mastering learning how to learn is not about cramming more information. It’s about adopting a specific mindset and a set of powerful, non-obvious methods for continuous growth.
Let’s explores four of these methods that can help any leader master the art of learning and be on the path to becoming a Leader Worth Following.
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1. The Paradox: Learning Often Begins with Unlearning
For seasoned leaders, the first barrier to new knowledge is often old knowledge. Experience builds powerful mental models, but when the context shifts, those same models can become rigid, ineffective and sometimes detrimental to our goals.
The initial, and often most difficult, step in acquiring new skills is not learning, but unlearning. This process of consciously setting aside outdated assumptions and once-effective habits can be more challenging than learning something entirely new.
It requires humility and a willingness to question what has worked in the past and reflect on why it worked, which then helps us understand why it may not work in the current context.
However, this is a crucial first step. Unlearning creates the necessary mental and strategic space for new, more relevant skills and mindsets to take root, allowing for genuine growth rather than just layering new information on top of an old foundation.
2. The Curriculum is Everywhere: Learn From Experience—All of It
The most profound lessons are rarely confined to a classroom. For a leader committed to learning, the curriculum is everywhere. The key is to develop a mindset of actively seeking out lessons from every available source, especially the unexpected ones.
Your Own Story
The most accessible source of learning is your own daily experience. The practice of structured reflection transforms routine actions into powerful insights. Leaders can make this a daily exercise by asking a series of simple but revealing questions about important events:
- What we did,
- Why we did it,
- What did we expect to happen,
- What actually happened,
- What we got right,
- What we got wrong, and
- Why?
The answers to these reflective questions can help us understand the shifting complexity of the world that we operate in and can help us in navigating the context.
The Stories of Others
Wisdom can be found in the lived experiences of others. This includes learning from mentors, reading biographies and autobiographies, and listening to interviews.
I’ve learned an immense amount from the brilliant people I’ve had the opportunity to interview for my podcast—luminaries like Kevin Kelly and Mitch Joel. I know I am a much better person simply by having the opportunity to listen to them.
The Anti-Role Model
Learning isn’t limited to emulating success. There is immense value in studying the “anti-role model”—people you don’t want to become. By analyzing their actions, you can learn what to avoid.
Understanding what they did that you should never do, or what they failed to do that you should always do, provides a powerful and often overlooked source of learning.
The Crisis Classroom
Crises are not just setbacks; they are potent learning opportunities. While difficult, these moments reveal systemic weaknesses, test leadership capabilities, and force innovation. The key is to look beyond the immediate challenge and actively search for the lesson within.
Hidden in each crisis is a significant opportunity all we need to do is go looking for that opportunity. As they say, Never let a crisis go waste.
3. The Scientist’s Mindset: Learn By Experimenting
Learning is most effective when it is an active process. Adopting a “scientist’s mindset” allows leaders to move from passive observation to active experimentation. This involves treating your work and leadership approach as a series of hypotheses that need to be tested.
As I discuss in my own book, Thrive, this can be done by designing and running small, micro-experiments to test assumptions, gather real-world data, and iterate your way toward better solutions.
This approach also encourages you to intentionally seek out new and bigger challenges—projects you don’t feel entirely ready for—and learn along the way. Through this iterative, experimental process, leaders can simplify complexity, mitigate risks, and develop effective solutions to systemic problems.
4. The Teacher’s Secret: The Best Way to Learn is to Teach
Perhaps the most active and powerful form of learning, however, is not just doing, but teaching. To teach, mentor, or coach others is one of the most effective methods for a leader to solidify their own knowledge and clarify their own thinking.
The mechanism behind this is simple but profound. When someone asks you a question, you are forced to articulate a coherent answer. In that moment, your subconscious mind organizes your reasoning, connects disparate ideas, and often reveals your own thinking to you for the first time.
This process serves as a potent form of reflection that can uncover more about your own beliefs and mental models than almost any other method.
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In Conclusion: Always Be Learning
Ultimately, the specific mode of learning—whether from experience, through experimentation, or by teaching—is less important than the unwavering commitment to being a continuous learner. The true power comes from using a variety of modes, as this creates greater depth and makes the process itself easier and more intuitive.
When leaders consistently model this behavior, the impact extends far beyond their own effectiveness. The people they lead see the commitment to growth and are inspired to do the same, fostering a new generation of leaders who understand the importance of learning. This puts us in the path of becoming a leader worth following.
What better way can we improve our effectiveness than by inspiring the next generation of leaders to become better leaders, don’t you agree?
