Has Learning Become A Dirty Word?

Better Me + Better You = Better Us
~An Everyday Culture (by Robert Kegan, et al)

QUESTION: Has learning become a dirty word?

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and left all non-fiction reading and listening behind while I was gone. I didn’t have the headspace for taking in new information.

Now, that I am back, I am re-connected with the book An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, and three others.

One of the first premises of the book is that we are not doing one just job at work, but a second one as well. The second one consists of hiding and pretending that we are more capable, knowledgeable, confident, etc., than we really are. This hiding takes effort and energy that we could be using to improve ourselves and our work, while growing the business as the same time.

This isn’t so different from something Eduardo Brinceño mentioned in his book The Performance Paradox when he says:

 “I was handcuffed by my belief that I needed to appear knowledgeable, decisive, and confident in my opinions. After years of this, I got very good at looking like I knew what I was doing, but inside I felt disingenuous and inauthentic. I was constantly pretending.”

As I continue to have conversations and do research for my own book, I am confronted again and again and the idea that top-leaders don’t do learning. Learning is a weakness, and isn’t something necessary for top leaders — they’ve already arrived at the top, so what else is there to learn?

Yet, on the flip side, many top leaders engage in executive coaching, which can be a highly transformational learning experience.

Yes, to private, personalized coaching.
No, to public, collective learning.

It makes me wonder if it’s not that learning is weakness, but that learning can expose weakness and top leaders don’t want to experience that public vulnerability.

Which brings me back to An Everyone Culture. In the book, the authors describe several organizations with strong cultures, which they specifically call “Deliberately Developmental Organizations” or DDOs. Again, the word learning doesn’t come into play. It’s almost as if they are avoiding the word all together.

Why has learning gotten such a bad reputation?
As someone who works in the learning space, and has spent my entire career in learning, and considers herself a “life long learner” it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that not everyone is as nerdy about knowledge and learning as I am.

As I look around the world these days, it’s easy to see how and where we have gotten stuck in the same dreaded cycles over and over again due to powerful people refusing to look at themselves and learn.

Not learning has a cost.
It doesn’t just cost money.
It costs lives.

Originally posted on Substack with comments.

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