Are Your employees self-directed learners?
In my last post, I wrote about a recent interview in the New York Times with Sabine Heller, chief executive of A Small World, an online travel and lifestyle community.
In the interview, Heller talked about what she looks for when meeting with potential employees. She said that intelligent candidates who are willing to teach themselves what they need to know to do the job well rise to the top.
“Are they willing to self-educate, because self-education has been a really important part of my process,” she said. “There are people in all sorts of fields who have no idea what they are doing. If someone has gaps in their knowledge, they need to be willing to fill them.”
In our affirmative leadership process, we call this self-directed learning. Self-directed learning is directly related to leadership. Because self-directed learners are more proactive and effective at defining and executing their own leadership development programs than passive learners, they are better at:
- Becoming great leaders
- Dealing with the constantly changing, increasingly complex world
- Staying ahead of the many pressures leaders face
- Modeling a willingness to learn
- Embracing change for the entire organization
