A reflection from our editorial team
CEOs are increasingly taking a one-stop approach to their top jobs due to factors such as increased pressure, scrutiny, and the challenging business environment. This contrasts with the old trend of moving from company to company in search of new perspectives, as CEOs now prioritize avoiding the possibility of a performance decline after a successful tenure.
The Importance of Lifelong Learning for CEOs
The following contribution is from the Chief Executives Council™ portal, the leading community and platform for CEOs, chairmen, founders, and senior executives in the United States and globally. We focus on professional development and training, best practice resources, peer networking, recognition, and more.
The mission of the Chief Executives Council is to be the leading community and resource for CEO and senior executive best practices globally. To support this important mission, the Chief Executives Council offers a wide range of professional resources and ongoing programs developed specifically for CEOs, including expert roundtables on topical issues, research studies for senior executives, the CEO Insights™ interview series, the annual CEO Pinnacle™ Awards, as well as informative articles, white papers, newsletters, and a carefully curated vendor resource directory.
The Chief Executives Council annually publishes the CEO Sentiment Study™, which quantifies the CEO Financial Performance Index™ (FPI) and the CEO Spend/Budget Index™ (SBI).
For CEOs, it’s rarely a one-size-fits-all solution. Implemented systems must be constantly reviewed to ensure they stay current with the latest trends. They must be continually examined for efficiency.
This approach requires a lifelong learning strategy.
CEOs must learn about market trends and the latest technologies. They should also open their minds to aspects of learning beyond their industry to improve their problem-solving and decision-making skills.
What are the benefits of lifelong learning?
It helps you keep up with an ever-evolving business landscape.
When leaders learn within their industry, they become familiar with market trends, technology, and efficient systems.
They ensure their business remains competitive in an ever-evolving landscape.
CEOs can also use this information to stay ahead of change and become thought leaders in their industry.
Improves problem-solving and decision-making.
Opening your mind to all types of learning opens you up to new perspectives, helping you see things from different perspectives.
It also supports mental processes so you can find innovative solutions.
Learning allows you to think outside the box to achieve innovative problem-solving and smart decision-making.
Inspires teams.
Leaders committed to lifelong learning inspire their teams to follow suit. This approach strengthens businesses. When everyone participates in active learning, teams become more powerful and companies more successful.
Fosters Personal and Professional Growth
The learning experience helps leaders develop new skills. These skills can make their personal lives more fulfilling.
It can also help them advance in their careers. Learning boosts emotional intelligence, fostering better personal and professional relationships.
How to Commit to Continuous Learning
Set Goals
Leaders should start by setting goals about what they want to learn.
The topic can range from a specific skill set to a psychological concept. Setting goals helps determine what to study and focus on achieving it.
Prioritize Learning
CEOs are busy people, but they must set aside time for learning if they want to be successful.
You may be more motivated to learn by attending workshops or taking online courses. A fixed schedule can facilitate accountability.
But even if your learning approach is more independent, be sure to incorporate it into your schedule.
Explore Various Learning Formats and Topics
Leaders shouldn’t feel limited in what they learn or how they learn it.
They don’t need to limit their training to industry-related topics or specific formats.
CEOs can learn by reading books, talking to other professionals, listening to podcasts, and taking courses. They can learn about art, science, and market trends.
The more leaders address diverse topics, the more they open their minds and see different perspectives.
Create a Learning Culture in Your Organization
Leaders must lead by example and create a learning culture in their organization.
This promotes innovation, ensuring everyone improves processes and develops better ideas.
While leading by example can be inspiring, leaders can also provide the means for teams to learn.
They can offer workshops and in-house training programs or suggest learning resources to employees.
Connect to Learn from Others
Networking experiences can also be learning experiences.
Attend conferences and events to learn about innovations in your industry and beyond. Turn every meeting into a learning experience by practicing active listening and asking questions.
Stay curious and open-minded
Learning goes beyond participating in a workshop or reading a book.
You must stay curious and open-minded to learn from what’s around you.
You never know when the next learning experience might arise.
Learning Activities Leaders Should Explore
Project-Based Learning: Leaders can learn by working on open-ended projects that require design, development, and creative problem-solving.
Inquiry-Based Learning: Inquiry-based learning involves independent research and asking questions that encourage critical thinking.
Collaborative Learning: Leaders should seek opportunities to collaborate with others. This allows them to understand diverse perspectives that can lead to innovative solutions.
Artistic Integration: Your industry may not be arts-oriented, but exploring the arts can stimulate creativity and open your mind to different modes of communication.
Modeling Creativity: This learning method encourages risk-taking and experimenting with new ideas.
Putting Lifelong Learning on the CEO Agenda
The following contribution is from the McKinsey portal and the authors are Amy Edmondson and Bror Saxberg.
About the author(s): Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Bror Saxberg is vice president of learning sciences at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Edmondson and Saxberg are members of the Consortium for the Advancement of Adult Learning and Development (CAALD), convened by McKinsey & Company.
In an open letter to business leaders, a Harvard Business School professor and a learning engineer from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative make a compelling case for making learning a corporate priority.
If you’re like most corporate leaders we know, you say (and think) the right things when it comes to learning, like, «Our people are our most valuable asset, and their development is our top priority.» But if you’re honest with yourself, you also know that your actions often prioritize financial capital over human capital, and you can let people find the learning opportunities they need. This worked, to some extent, when people spent most of their time «doing» rather than «thinking,» «creating,» or «deciding.»
But times are changing. Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are making it easier to automate a growing number of «action» tasks.
Today’s AI-powered, information-rich tools are increasingly capable of handling jobs once performed exclusively by people, such as tax returns, translations, accounting, and even some types of surgery.
These changes will produce massive disruptions in employment and have enormous implications for you as a business leader.
We are both educators, with decades of experience working with businesses. We write this letter not to criticize, but to explain why a new emphasis on lifelong learning will be increasingly critical to your work: maximizing your organization’s value and impact.
Cognitive Skills
We are not visionaries. Still, one thing is clear: in the future, more and more staff will need to use complex cognitive skills for longer periods of time.
Some are already comfortable with this; others are not.
As managers of your company’s value, you need to understand how to prepare your staff, not because it’s a nice-to-have, but because the competitive advantage of early adopters of advanced algorithms and robotics will rapidly diminish.
In short, companies will differentiate themselves not just by having the tools, but by how their staff interact with them and make the complex decisions they must make in the performance of their jobs.
The greater the use of information-rich tools, the more important the decisions still made by people will become.
This, in turn, increases the importance of lifelong learning. Workers, managers, and executives need to keep up with machines and be able to interpret their results.
Future Challenges
You may wonder if it’s possible to adapt to technological changes simply by finding new people capable of doing new things.
The answer is no. There’s a kind of Moore’s Law, according to which the capabilities of these information tools double every two years or less.
You can’t achieve success simply by firing and hiring if you have to renew staff every 9 to 18 months to incorporate new skills.
There are other issues to consider as well.
One of them is that we live in a world where companies must quickly adapt their strategies in response to competition, structural changes brought about by digitalization, and the conflicting insights revealed by advanced analytics.
This means that the old division between strategy development and execution, if it ever made sense, is obsolete: organizations must continually adapt and therefore learn while they execute.
In such a world, the future of learning is not in the classroom.
It’s in the field: finding ways to improve while working. This won’t happen by chance.
It’s necessary to model learning behaviors and invest in the development of learning processes and tools.
It’s necessary to adopt the necessary humility in the face of future challenges, both for oneself as a leader and for the organization.
In a highly dynamic and uncertain world, there is simply no room for arrogance.
It’s also necessary to create a psychologically safe environment where people feel comfortable taking the risks that come with experimentation and practice, giving and receiving honest feedback, asking questions, and acknowledging failures.
Learning must be embedded in every aspect of the organization.
Another uncomfortable truth is that, historically, the education and training sector has been unsuccessful in implementing iterative, evidence-based improvements in the learning processes and outcomes it emphasizes.
The science of learning exists. It’s just not always, or even frequently, applied in the workplace. There is very little «learning engineering.»
As a senior leader, you must rethink how to continually improve your employees’ skills beyond conventional training and education.
You must insist on experimenting with new learning methods and seeking approaches based on solid evidence.
In addition, you must identify and support learning leaders who are deeply connected to the science of learning and who can champion the implementation of appropriate measures.
Soft Priorities
When we talk about learning, the emphasis is often on «hard» skills, such as programming, analytics, and data science.
While these skills will be crucial, they are only part of the story. The dynamic we described at the beginning, in which information-rich tools become ubiquitous and people are a differentiating factor, paradoxically increases the importance of «soft» attributes such as collaboration, empathy, and meaning-making.
Collaboration
In most organizations, teamwork will be more important and valuable than ever.
In both scientific discovery and commercial innovation, for example, the size of innovative teams has increased, and the skills being combined are more diverse than ever.
This is because, as knowledge expands, expertise deepens and narrows, requiring collaboration across fields to achieve great results.
In ways that would have seemed unlikely 20 years ago, building a car requires integrating interdisciplinary knowledge in artificial intelligence, computer science, advanced lighting, and materials, in addition to the classic disciplines of automotive engineering: design and manufacturing.
Or consider the rescue of the Chilean miners in 2010. The miners themselves formed an extraordinary team to support their mutual survival.
But they also required the interdisciplinary expertise of the surface rescue team, which integrated the expertise of geologists, engineers, doctors, and naval special forces.
Teamwork doesn’t necessarily mean collaborating within teams in the classic sense of limited groups of people working together on specific tasks. Instead, it’s often about teamwork: communicating and collaborating with people across boundaries, such as experience or distance, spontaneously and continuously. Your people need to have, or develop, the skills for effective teamwork.
Empathy
Global markets can threaten the ability to empathize spontaneously, especially when we can’t see each other’s faces, for example, in geographically dispersed work teams or remote service encounters.
Genuine human connections can be forged—and broken—quickly.
Both customers and employees feel deep loyalty to organizations that treat them with respect.
To some extent, empathy can be taught through perspective-taking exercises and brief but insightful exchanges between people.
For this to happen, leaders at all levels of the organization must be committed and model appropriate behavior.
This can start with something as simple as asking managers to put themselves in someone else’s shoes in a given situation.
Offer experiences where success can only be achieved by practicing empathy.
Some companies encourage this by requiring managers to work on the front lines, at the store counter or on the production floor, before assuming an office role.
You should also monitor feedback blogs. Praise your staff, publicly, when they get things right.
Observe your customers and how they interact with your company. Use design thinking tools, such as empathy maps, as a starting point for conceiving new products and features and identifying customer pain points.
In the age of personalization, empathy is more important because it requires putting yourself in the minds of different types of customers, not just those for whom a product or service was designed.
Meaning Creation
Meaning creation in the age of AI begins with understanding what machines can and cannot do.
For example, a machine may be able to make certain types of diagnoses more accurately than a person.
But it will be up to nurses, doctors, and therapists to help patients understand the implications and manage the consequences. This is the difference between knowledge and meaning.
The Search for Meaning
The search for meaning guides many types of decisions: it may be overcoming a work challenge, a way to advance professionally, solving a personal problem, or matters related to health and well-being.
As information-rich tools help provide better solutions to complex situations, organizations will need to understand what is important to each person.
Meaningfully connecting decisions, even those made by algorithms, to individual circumstances will likely be the work of skilled people for a long time to come, if we prepare our organi
