Have you ever tried to understand where your know-how come from? Where did you learn the skills you use today? What were the circumstances and people that were instrumental in learning this or that technique?
I would like to share here, in a somewhat personal form, the analysis that I have done for my own account by drawing some conclusions that I hope will be useful to you.
This Newsletter is the English version of “Un pas dans l’inconnu”, a french Newsletter for entrepreneurs and managers.
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Learning through observation
My father was a very gifted cabinetmaker, able to make with his hands anything he wanted. As a child, I liked to go to his workshop, smell the good smell of freshly sawn wood, watch him plane, turn, or mill pieces of wood into chair legs or buffet doors.
When I was eleven years old my parents bought an old house. For five years, every weekend, I had to help my father renovate it from top to bottom. Although at that time I would often have preferred to do something else, I realized later on that I had learned practically all the basic building trades. Building a stone wall, plastering, laying bathroom tiles, making an electrical network, welding, installing a kitchen, so many gestures that I witnessed, contributed to, and that I finally learned. Much later, when I myself bought an old house to renovate, I understood that I knew how to do it.
Learning through participatory observation is perhaps the most painless way to acquire knowledge. This approach based on companionship, which was abandoned in the 20th-century school, is, fortunately, being revived today with Youtube tutorials.
Learning through repetition
I probably had one of the worst English teachers in my years of intermediate school. Yet I owe him one essential thing: the mastery of irregular verbs and conjugations at all tenses. For several years, he made us repeat these famous conjugation tables thousands of times.
My French teacher in high school was a Stakhanovite of text analysis and summarization. I've been through a lot of these exercises, but I owe him one of the most useful skills I've used throughout my whole career.
In university college, I spent thousands of hours doing and redoing math exercises, demonstrating theorems, calculating the limits of geometric sequences, and triple integrals. I ended up having a lot of fun doing it and made it my profession for 15 years.
As an adult, I learned Chinese in 6 months. I had two teachers who took turns in daily private lessons. For 2 hours, in a mechanical way, they made me repeat the 4 tones and the vocabulary until I was exhausted. It was torture, but the result is there, I’m fluent in Chinese mandarin.
At first boring, then tiring, repetition finally becomes pleasant when you reach fluency. This is true for languages, mathematics, music (but here I never succeeded!), dance (there either, but I didn't repeat much!), sports, painting, sculpture, and finally any intellectual or manual activity.
Learning through engagement
At the age of fourteen, I became the treasurer of my village's athletic club. There was a shortage of volunteers and the club was in danger. I wanted to keep running, so I got involved without knowing anything about accounting. I knew I could count on the help of my grandmother, a math teacher, and another association treasurer. I learned more in accounting from this experience than in all my schooling.
At the age of 18, I was elected as a representative of the high school students in a national youth movement. Once on the board of directors, I volunteered to take care of the magazine of this movement. I learned the role of editor-in-chief, the relationship with the printer, the layout. That's when I learned to use a computer for the first time in my life - it was in 1983!.
I was 25 years old when I had the opportunity to live in Taiwan for 16 months. I had sworn to myself that I would not make any associative commitments, but I was offered (and I accepted) the leadership of a youth fellowship in an English-speaking church in Taipei. In one year, after having structured a team of leaders and set up a dynamic program, the fellowship grew from 40 to 180 participants. There I learned about leadership, facilitating cross-cultural meetings in English, the basics of American culture, and much more.
Engaging in a responsibility that is beyond your present capacity is a great opportunity to learn by doing, to innovate without knowing it, to exercise common sense, and to gain confidence.
Learning by being pushed in the pool
At the age of 17, eager to discover the world, I signed up for an international youth camp in Germany. We were 8 French-speaking young people and an adult Belgian animator. Many of us spoke English poorly, but that was not a problem because the organizer provided simultaneous translation.
Once on-site, we discovered that there were no translators for French because there were too few of us. With the Belgian animator, I was the only one who could get by in English. So I had to share the burden of doing the simultaneous interpretation. I was scared to death but I had no choice. I came out of the 5 days exhausted, but happy to have done it. My English and my confidence improved a lot on this occasion.
Sometimes you have to be pushed to be able to learn because alone you wouldn't dare. Likewise, you must discern when to push others to give them this opportunity without destroying them.
Learning by scaling
At the age of 26, I became a scout leader without ever having been a scout before. I had to learn quickly the technical and cultural basics of the scout movement, with an experienced leader who passed on his knowledge to me. Then I became a troop leader. Having taken a taste for it, I became Paris region leader, before joining the national board of the movement and becoming secretary for several years.
The activity I preferred was the organization of big games: treasure hunts, goose games, Olympic games, naval battles (the image at the top of this article is the game board created for a naval battle with 400 young people). Learning by trial and error is particularly effective with children who do not tolerate any approximation. Each error in the design or animation of a game is paid for in cash. The corrective measures are automatically integrated into the next game, in a fast learning curve. After having mastered games for 20 or 30 young people in the troop, I had to organize games for 300 at the regional level and 1500 at the national level. I had to learn the parameters of success or failure which vary with the number! and there are many of them!
It is not possible to rehearse a game with more than 1000 young people. It is not allowed to fail massively either, because a bug quickly becomes unmanageable. To succeed, I had to learn the technique of mental rehearsal. It is a great tool that I use today in many professional and personal situations. It consists of visualizing before the actual unfolding everything that can go wrong and correcting it in advance. By doing this several times with the organizing team, you can practically eliminate all major dysfunctions.
The experience consists of learning from situations that are repeated and become more complex each time.
Learn from a leader
At the age of forty, a pastor friend of mine challenged me to join him to start a new church from scratch. It is without a doubt, the most formidable adventure of my life and one of the most learning. In less than 10 years, we went from 10 to 100 participants in the services, and from the pastor's living room to a new 500 m² building that we built. This is the kind of project that requires a leader and a strong team. I learned about collegial decision-making, strategic vision, and how to gradually structure governance while keeping the group's support. I also learned how to keep all options open as long as there are no clear indications of a "dead end".
Following a leader, learning alongside him is the best way to learn what is not in the books, which can only be learned by living.
Learning by taking a step into the unknown
I was hired as a researcher at the French National Research Center in the early 90s. A few months later, my boss organized an international workshop with the 50 best world experts on the subject I was working on. He offered me the opportunity to give the opening lecture, the classic "review paper" that presents the state of the art of the discipline. Basically, as a beginner, I had to synthesize in front of the world's experts their favorite subject. I had only 2 months to prepare, and I was crazy enough to accept the challenge.
I began my presentation with a Chinese proverb that says "you can't teach an old woodcutter how to handle an ax", hoping to clear up my naivety. In the end, everything went well and the enthusiastic experts invited me to visit their labs, which I did in the following months. This world trip saved me several months in my research. For 6 years, I was the specialist of the "review paper" of the discipline, and today, my articles are still cited as introductory references on the subject.
In 2001, after 15 years of physics research, I felt it was enough. I decided that I should start a new career, though it was not that easy. I ended up at the French Bank for Innovation in charge of financing startups and innovative companies.
On October 31 I left my lab. On November 2nd I arrived at the bank and on the 3rd, I was in a startup to process its innovation funding application. Never before have I experienced impostor syndrome as much as on that day.
The only thing I had to do was to listen humbly and learn quickly. I had 3 uncomfortable months to go through.
Daring to do something for which you are not legitimate, is a great opportunity to learn. It is certainly very risky, but when you succeed, it is a great gas pedal.
What do you get out of it as a manager?
I'm sorry for telling you my life story. I did it to concretely illustrate that the most important things are not only learned at school or at work, but also in your private activities.
The quality of a manager is to be able to discern all these learnings in himself and in the people he manages and to be able to draw lessons from them.
The most important role of a manager is to make the people under his responsibility growing. The few indirect means of learning described here are great management tools:
taking someone with you to observe and learn when he starts out.
letting someone repeat a task several times when it is not well done rather than assigning it to someone else
responding favorably to volunteers who offer themselves for tasks that appear to be above their qualifications
pushing someone towards a task he has never done before, even if it seems insurmountable. (Be careful, this requires a lot of discernment, because it is also possible to destroy someone by putting him in a situation of failure. It is, therefore, necessary to anticipate that he or she will succeed, and to be there as a safety net in case he or she does not).
entrusting increasingly difficult tasks as successes occur
offering a junior to work in pairs with a senior on a difficult mission.
not hesitating to entrust employees with potential with missions that are radically different from those they have already accomplished.
Learning is an expression of life. He who no longer learns is already dead. The manager's responsibility for the learning of his team is essential. But allowing others to learn is not teaching, it is giving the chance to be in a learning situation. I've shown you a few ideas. It's up to you to seize them.
Further resources
The Strategic Side Gig, Harvard Business Review article, that shows the advantage of extra-professional engagements for managers
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)