The New Brain for Business Institute Diane Marentette and Richard Trafton, Ph.D.

Our thinking has shifted a great deal over the past decade with regard to holding our leaders accountable for their employees’ performance and learning capabilities.

Unfortunately, with the best of intentions, we have implemented many, many organizational change initiatives that have reduced our leaders’ abilities in this arena.

We would like to call out a new initiative that is having the same deleterious effect.

This new initiative is teaching our leaders to help others learn to learn. This is an excellent idea, one that will help our organizational efforts result in greater profits and success.

There are a number of ways to go about it. However, it will be a very slow, incremental and painful process for most organizations, because current cultures likely do not support this undertaking. And, most leaders are ill equipped to take on the challenge.

Should Your Leaders be Accountable for Learning?

Here is how you know that your culture is not poised for this change: the general thought about how to do this includes the idea that leaders should be held accountable for it.

Formula for disaster: Put “teaching” or “developing others” in the leader’s performance goals. Tie pay to it. This is an extremely blunt instrument that will rarely deliver results as expected. Just ask folks who have tried it.

Holding leaders accountable for helping others in the learning process is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. It will involve considerable pain and you will likely limp for the rest of your life.

We know this approach is a formula for failure from an abundance of brain research. This is not a “feeling” we have about it. Here is what we know:

• When we pay people to do something they already have an appetite to do, they lose their appetite for doing it.

If you are lucky enough to have leaders who actually like teaching, you are about to lose them. “I am no longer doing what I like to do. I am doing what you like me to do.” This triggers an Old Brain territorial reaction - Get out of my yard! And when my territory continues to be invaded, I shed that part of the property. There is a drop in motivation, not an increase.

• When we pay people to do something, they do it slower, less effectively and with less creativity.

In fact, they do the minimum required to check the “task done” box. An Old Brain fear reaction results in our looking for simplicity and a “quick fix.” Performance drops, it does not increase.

• When we pay people to do something as challenging as helping others learning to learn, the chance of failure is high.

You know this already, because you have not yet been able to do it. Failure (or the threat of failure) breeds fear and resentment. The Old Brain reaction can drive new stories about how ineffective the organization is. Instead of increasing learning effectiveness, we have alienated the people who can best move the organization forward.

If you want to increase learning in your organization, you are embracing a great and wonderful idea that requires a very complex set of initiatives.

Here is a great starting place based on New Brain thinking: Consider working harder at helping people understand how their journey and the journey of the company are similar. Help increase true alignment by creating an organization worth working for.

By Diane Marentette and Richard Trafton, Ph.D., authors of “A New Brain for Business” and founders of The New Brain for Business Institute, www.newbrainforbusiness.com, where they translate good science into good business. For more information, please write to us at info@newbrainforbusiness.com.