All companies have leaders.

What is less obvious is that all companies also have a "leadership system." 

That system is either repeatably developing and producing quality leaders or it's leadership development is a random, "look-what-I-found" walk.

In this way, an organization's leadership system is similar to culture.  All companies have a culture, whether it is aligned to support the strategy or not, whether it is helping to deliver the desired employee, customer and shareholder outcomes or not.

In theory, organizations should want their leaders to teach more. It would force leaders to make conscious decisions about what matters and to subject those beliefs to public scrutiny.

And as a result, over time, the evolution of a company's leadership system would be more targeted, more efficient, and more aligned to the strategy.

Being intentional and systematic about leadership development is hard to argue against.

Steps Organizations Can Take to Improve the Amount and Quality of Leader Teachers

Here are four recommendations for organizations who want better leader teachers:

• Baseline
• Back declarations with actions
• Apply a teaching forge to teaching itself
• Make sure learning is actually a priority

Baseline. Before launching a change agenda and setting sail for a preferred future, it's a good idea to squarely face current reality. 

Here are some areas to begin your inquiry:  How good are your engagement scores? How much are leaders teaching?  How good are they at developing others? How strong is your bench and succession pipeline?  Overall, how well are you executing as a company? If you are not executing well, what role does your approach to development play?

This will help you get a clear 'why' and also a baseline you can measure progress against.

Starting is not hard. If you have an employee survey, add one item to it:  "I have grown significantly working for my current manager." 

I don't want to get into item wordsmith-ing.  Just find a way to measure if people feel they are learning from the leader they are working for.

If all you can get is an overall assessment of how employees feel they are learning from their managers, take it. 

But it's better if you can tie ratings back to each manager, stack rank them, and track improvements over time.  Then you will know which leaders are consistently good teachers & developers, who is improving their approach, and who can't get out of the basement.

Best of all, sometimes just "putting up the scoreboard" that signals what is expected will drive motivated managers to move in the desired direction.

Seneca said, "The Fates lead him who will.  Him who won't, they drag."

Power Declarations with Actions.  Just like any focused change you want your managers to drive...running more effective meetings or building high performing teams, or increasing employee engagement...going on the record that teaching others is an expectation for leaders is a needed step.

This will require you to say why it's important: what long term outcomes that you are not getting today will leaders being more effective teachers produce. 

While declarations and steady messaging are essential, they alone are, of course, not enough.  Here are some ways to back declarations with actions:

1) When communicating promotions, highlight the need for "force multipliers" and underline a leader's consistently high marks at developing others as a reason why you promoted him/her

2) For the managers whose "I've learned a lot working for my manager" scores are consistently bottom quin-tile, help them develop a focused plan of action to improve.  This will indicate that being a basement denizen on development is no longer OK.

I am a big fan of pointing and nudging people in the right direction so people can feel like they did it on their own. But, as Seneca said, "The Fates lead him who will.  Him who won't, they drag." 

If more and better teachers is an important initiative, don't be afraid to take a more directive approach, dragging as needed.

3) Consider an annual teacher/developer award.  Status at Universities is about research, publications, and grants, not really about teaching effectiveness.  Look no further than the high and steadily increasing percentage of adjuncts they hire to teach the classes. 

Still, they don't want it to seem like teaching doesn't matter, so they often have some kind of Teacher of the Year award to recognize outstanding contributions in the classroom. 

As the saying goes, that's not nothing.  Moreover, many of those consistently recognized for teaching excellence go on to teach in The Great Courses series, which can confer more status.

You might consider a similar kind of award or recognition for leaders in your company who are great at the How's you are trying to emphasize:  teaching, employee engagement, team building, etc.

I sung the praises of Cognitive Dissonance in my series Behavior Change IRL.  It is a powerful force for change and should be leveraged by all organizations trying to nudge the behavior of leaders.

Apply a Teaching Forge to Teaching Itself.  To say the least, managers have a lot on their plates. And if they think they can keep making their numbers and get by with inefficient meetings or teams that are far from high performing or employees who aren't engaged and aren't developing, they might try.

One step to overcome that inertia is to get leaders to stand up in front of other leaders and talk about what they are doing to teach and develop their teams: What is their leadership curriculum?  How and when do they teach it?  What teaching forges have they established?  How do they measure development progress?

This is the "Op Review as Dojo" idea from Part 3, applied to creating more leader teachers. 

A teaching forge around teaching here would accomplish three things.

First, it forces managers to get their game plan and curriculum together.  As mentioned in Part 4, spelling out a curriculum is a first step that can jump start this change.

Second, it is a great way to share best practices.  The group is, literally, teaching each other how to be better teachers.  How Sandra teaches one of the Corporate values or how Jose teaches a particular leadership competency will give me ideas I can use to improve my own approach.

Finally, by making leaders stand up in front of their peers and share their curriculum and approaches to developing their team, you are forcing them to publicly declare who they are and what they will do. 

This is important.  Most people like to behave consistently with who they say they are and what they say they will do because not doing so creates Cognitive Dissonance, defined simply as the stress created from the contradiction between beliefs and actions.

I sung the praises of cognitive dissonance in my series Behavior Change IRL.  It is a powerful force for change and should be leveraged by all organizations trying to nudge the behavior of leaders.

Hold this teaching dojo at whatever rhythm makes sense (quarterly might be too much but every six months isn't).  Leaders will start to get the message that staying heads down in their silos incanting "this too shall pass" won't work with this Leader as Teacher initiative. 

My view is that an antecedent priority is missing:  the reason leader teachers are in short supply in a given organization is because learning, both individual and organizational, is not really a priority.

Make Sure Learning is Important.  My former Six Sigma and process improvement colleagues reading this might be thinking, "these are interesting solutions, but what's the root cause of the lack of effective leader teachers?"

My view is that an antecedent priority is missing:  the reason leader teachers are in short supply in a given organization is because learning, both individual and organizational, is not really a priority.

Yeah, I said it.

You, in turn, might say, "That's ridiculous!  Of course learning is important...how could it not be?  It just 'goes without saying'."

But be anthropological about it.  Take a long hard look around you and inventory the indications that learning is actually critical to the organization's success.

Some home grown corporate training programs?  A once a year symposium? Money for coaching? Does that convince you that individual and organizational learning are high priorities?

It doesn't me.

Were I to see some of the following, I would be more convinced.

1) Public Learning Reflections and Intentions. If leaders were regularly and publicly sharing their own learning over the past X amount of time and their learning intentions going forward, I'd be impressed.

If you're interested in trying to get something like that off the ground, ask leaders to have the members of their teams put together two slides.  The first is a four-blocker.  The two columns are This Year and Next Year and the two rows are Organizational and Personal.  What did your organization learn to do differently this year?  What did you personally learn this year that changed your approach as a leader?  What do you want to learn next year, organizationally and personally?

The second slide is an explicit plan to accomplish that personal and organizational learning agenda.

You might wonder how often should you do this.  Doing it at an annual retreat would be a good sign.  But it would send a more powerful message to do this every six months or even quarterly.

Scotty Bowman, the legendary former coach of the NHL's Detroit Red Wings, used to bring each player into his office every 8-10 games.  Given an 82 game season this was about eight to ten times per season.

He would ask the player what aspects of his game and prep he felt had been most effective over the last eight games.  They would discuss until they were aligned. 

Then he would ask what aspects of his game the player wanted to work on over the next set of eight games.

Re: the frequency question, do you think if he had done that once a year it would have been enough to fine tune each player's performance?  Twice a season?

Being reflective and intentional, at a regular cadence, is key to learning and ultimately, effective performance.

2) Acknowledging Failure.  Many organizations talk about celebrating failure.  I don't need a celebration.  I would be happy if the organizations claiming to value learning just acknowledged failures.

Making a point of doing so publicly would be a clear signal that 1) the org knows it needs to, not only experiment, but take big swings, and 2) that those swings will occasionally fail.

And if the people involved are not seen walking out carrying boxes with their belongings, people will know it's a place where people bootstrap themselves by learning from mistakes.

You will never...can never...have a winning culture like Toto's if you aren't leveraging AARs.

3) After-Action Reviews (AARs).  Finally, I would especially be convinced that organizational learning in a particular company was a priority if AARs were up and running in at least some pocket of the business.

(I described AARs and lamented the dearth of them, despite knowing for over three decades (!) that they were a powerful tool for individual and collective learning, in Part 3.)

Toto Wolff, the team principal for Mercedes-AMG Petronas—arguably the most successful team in F1 racing history, says:

The days we lose are the days our competitors fear the most because they know those are the days we learn." 

What's your guess about how the kind of learning Toto says his competitors fear actually happens? 

Do you think he just assumes everyone saw the race and the reasons they lost the same way?  Do you think he is content with everyone concluding whatever they want to from whatever it was they thought happened?  Do you think their repeated success and competitive reputation comes from just leaving everyone to optimize their corner of the operation as they see fit?

You will never...can never...have a winning culture like the one Toto describes if you aren't leveraging AARs.

But what's so important to keep in mind about AARs, is that they are outcome-independent!  You do them 'after action,' all actions, whether they were a raging success or an abject failure. 

Whether they do them or not, most people would say postmortems...attempting to learn from mistakes...are worth doing.  But, the name implies you're only doing them after mortem, with a body lying around.

Ensuring a common, clear narrative of what actually happened while also reinforcing the key process steps and behaviors is as important when the surgery or mission or forecast or launch was successful as it is when the action was sub-optimal or a failure.

Not just more postmortems then. More post-vitas too.

Doing AARs after Wins will not only increase the amount of collective learning, but because reflecting on success can be so deeply satisfying, gleaning those insights will build real espirit.  It will also be a helluva lot of fun.

Finally, here's how you'll know the necessary antecedent to effective teaching...a real value placed on continuous learning...has really taken hold, and become an essential part of the culture: the AARs will be the meetings no one is willing to miss.

They want to be there, despite what can often be the ego-crushing nature of having to look at your mistakes or inadequate efforts and own them in front of others. 

They want to be there because they know those are the meetings where they come out better and tougher to beat. 

They want to be there because those are the meetings where they learn.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service that has helped hundreds of leaders get the best start of their careers and given them tools and templates for continued success long past their First Hundred Days.