Something I’ve noticed about my best clients is that they are fast learners. By this I mean:

• The leaders in those organizations are constantly curious, teachable and open to new perspectives and information.
• The organization itself is a place that values growth and has processes that encourage growth from both success and failures.

The specific behaviors that I’ve noticed with these clients are that they:

• Love to learn: They regularly and frequently find ways to be exposed to new ideas or insights.
• Implement quickly: They learn to use – not to store. They will immediately put what they’ve learned to the test.
• Focus their attention: They don’t try to learn everything all at once. They understand what they need to learn and how they intend to use it. Then they create time and space to make it happen.

Speed is necessary

Many management and leadership skills stand the test of time: Be a good listener. Inspire a shared vision. Clarify expectations. Encourage and acknowledge your people.

But some skills are situational or tied to an era. One such skill, that is critical for the effective leader of today, is to be a quick study.

The environment is changing quickly. Technology is changing faster. In this context, expertise and contextual knowledge can quickly go stale.

Organizations filled with quick learners will out-perform everyone else. They’ll be able to adapt, adjust and innovate in environments that require institutional nimbleness and agility.

Make learning the norm

Leaders or organizations who view learning as “an event” or a periodic “investment” will be left behind.

Those who view learning as a chore or remedial or something you do at the beginning of your career are already sucking everyone else’s dust.

Learning needs to be baked into your normal culture and processes. It needs to be the norm. Here is how you create that norm:

• Model Learning: Be an example of a learner. Don’t delegate out all the learning to others. Expose yourself to new thinking within and outside your field. Bring that learning to your team.
• Invest in learning: Some of this is obvious – invest in having your people trained. But this also means investing in spending the time to understand your organization or your stakeholders. Building in regular time to explore questions such as:
  • Are we being effective? How do we know?
  • Is there anything we can do or change to make it easier for our people to succeed?
  • What do our stakeholders want from us and to what degree are we delivering?
  • What needs or adjustments should we be making?

• Build learning rhythms: Some of the most important organizational learning doesn’t come from workshops or training programs. It comes from the regular discipline of setting goals, assessing progress towards goals, evaluating your approach, adjusting, and capturing the lessons learned.

These learning rhythms nurture the habits of curiosity, humility, and adaptability. It takes work but it has the advantage of keeping your “learning muscles” toned and supple.

• Clarify what you need to know: To learn fast, you can’t learn everything. You can’t ask your team to learn everything. You need to prioritize.

Identify the top needs for the organization, the team and the individual. These should be in alignment.

• Quickly filter what is useful and what isn’t: Many organizations get stuck trying to integrate information that isn’t 100% useful for them.

Fast learners quickly identify what is useful and leave the rest behind.

• Progress not perfection: Perfectionism kills the ability to learn well. Perfectionism in learning makes you overly cautious about what you learn, about trying to learn it all and then being too slow with implementation.

This is like having your finest filter at the mouth of your funnel – and then trying to make use of everything that makes its way in. You end up with a clogged funnel.

Learn fast, implement imperfectly, go back and refine.

Unless you are building nuclear reactors. But you probably aren’t.

• Focus on principles: Most training programs are selling a technique or a method. By all means – learn them. But focus on understanding principles, or the fundamental truths, of whatever it is you are learning. To do this, it is helpful to avoid getting stuck in one particular methodology, approach or system.

By being exposed to several methods from several experts and even from several different fields you’ll start to see the principles emerge.

The more you learn, the faster you’ll learn

It might not be fair but it’s how it works: The more you or your team knows, the easier it is to learn. The more you practice the seven tips above, the more efficient and effective you’ll become in them.

You’ll develop a framework for managing knowledge. You’ll find that you are able to focus on the nuanced or finesse side of learning as opposed to grappling with basic concepts.

The leaders of the future will be those who can learn quickly. Don’t get left behind.