Leadership: Creating a Learning Environment

Something which I’ve always liked when you create around you an environment of people who are willing to question a decision. Not each and every five minutes. Sometimes you just have to say, okay, this is a decision now and we now go. If you question your decision the next day, already that is not really very helpful for getting things done. At a certain point in time, to sit back with your people who report to you and ask yourself, did we take the right decision? Did we have to redo things around it? Did we have to refine it in one way or another? Or maybe even have to turn around because certain information which we didn’t have half a year ago shows now that we need to redetermine what we really want to do. This is something which I’ve always felt myself more comfortable with. I’ve always tried to create a leadership team around me who knew I was willing to listen to them when they came up with these kinds of things and not throw them out at the first resistance. That this was not something which I saw as disloyalty. I rather saw it as something, listen, maybe you have a point here which you should be aware of.

That’s really interesting in terms of how you create and cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable and willing to volunteer information, to volunteer critical thinking.

One of the things I’ve mentioned at least as some headline is when you are sitting together with your management team and you find yourself at the end of whatever, a one/two/three-hour meeting, you measure what percentage of the time did you speak and what percentage did the other ones speak? That already creates a certain first impression. When you’re talking too much, then that is discouraging the other ones to really speak up and give their opinion on certain things. I think that is one of the things which is important. Over time, people see that you take their comments and their suggestions into account. They see that they matter. That they really can give a certain decision-making process a certain direction. That these matters and that these decisions, these opinions are very welcome. If you do that over time, this is not something which goes from one second to the other, if you do that over time with a team of people working together with you, that again will create the trust that you need to have in order that people are willing to speak up.