Teachability - a Significant Soft Skill for Leaders

"If You Want to Learn, Be Teachable" -- By John C. Maxwell

There is an old saying that “you can't teach an old dog new tricks,” but the concept called “teachability” remains a key component for ensuring that the professionals of all walks are successful in their pursuit. This is all the more important in the IT because the "Change" here happens at a faster pace and those being teachable get better in their career towards becoming a leader.


Today's educational methods and curriculum are designed with a basic assumption that the students are teachabile. But when teachers find few students who lack this skill, they get into frustration. This makes the gap between teaching and teachability widening. The teachability factor should form part of the early school curriculum, so that it pays the fruits as the student pass through the further stages of education. 

Today's kids are smarter and they are born with Smart gadgets and devices and they handle these devices far better than their grandfathers. But this smartness does not mean that they are teachable. Being teachable is closely related to adaptability and being Curious. To be teachable, one has to be: quick to learn and observe; take direction, advice, correction when you make a mistake, etc.; and learn from all of those. Both parents and the teachers should be trained to improve these teachability traits of the students right from the childhood.

The character of Teachability has two aspects to it; one is being a learner and the other is to pass it on, to share insights and what we have learned with others. It is first being a learner, absorbing and applying what one has come through, then replicating that in others. To be a person who can teach we have to be a person who is teachable. Being teachable is a choice. We choose whether we are open or closed to new ideas, new experiences, others’ ideas, people’s feedback, and willingness to change. The key to teachability is not just that we try ideas on for size, but that we actually learn from others and change our point of view, process, and future decision making based on the what we have learned.


We all know that "Change is the only Constant thing" and the change is happening every where. For IT, the change happens in a faster pace. Newer tools and technologies emerge quite faster, needing the IT professionals on the run to learn things continuously. One of the important characteristic required to adapt change is being Teachable. Today’s competitive advantage goes to those who can learn and adapt faster, which are the important traits of being teachable. 

The work and decision making enviornment is different across work places. One should be willing to adapt and learn to these changing enviornment and circumstances and simply put be teachable.

Here are the important traits of Teachability:

Conducive to Learning - Approach each day as an opportunity for new learning experience. Have open minded and listen to people. There is a certain learning opportunity from every person you meet. Teachable persons remain alert for new ideas and always expect something to learn in every problem they face. They know that success has less to do with possessing natural talent and more to do with choosing to learn.

Be a Beginner for ever - When people are actually beginners, they have the mind set to be trained and learn. But as we all know, once they get better in the subject and reap more and more successes, they tend to get carried away and get to a state of closed minded. To be teachable, one has to stay in the beginner's mind-set for ever. The more success you have, the harder it is to maintain the beginner's mind-set because you are much more likely to think you know the answer and have less to learn. Believing in and practicing the following will help one to keep the beginners' mind-set: everyone has something to teach me; every day I have something to learn; and every time I learn something, I benefit.

Reflect and Change -Becoming and remaining teachable requires people to honestly and openly reflect and evaluate themselves continuously. Any time you face a challenge, loss, or problem, one of the first things you need to ask yourself is, “Am I the cause?” If the answer is yes, then you need to be ready to make changes. Recognizing your own part in your failings, no matter how painful, and working hard to correct your mistakes, leads to the ability to change, grow, and move forward in life.

Inter-Personal Skill - Inter-Personal skill will help nurture the art of learning from perople around. Be open minded and freely speaking to those around you to openly, yet honestly share the facts of not only work but also personal life. This will help strengthen the relationship, being approachable with those around and thus help get honest feedback. This will also make them courageous and honest enough to speak freely. Be willing to accept such feedback and criticism.

Learn Unto Death - The secret to any person’s success can be found in his or her daily agenda. People grow and improve, not by huge leaps and bounds, but by small, incremental changes. Teachable people try to leverage this truth by learning something new every day. A single day is enough to make us a little larger or a little smaller. Several single days strung together will make us a lot larger or a lot smaller. If we do that every day, day upon day, there is great power for change.

Non-Defensive - After you receive any form of constructive criticism, think about it and decide how you will act differently in the future. Don't get defensive when called out. Instead, learn from it and improve, so you don't make the same mistake again. Many of these lessons will come from the school of hard knocks. A teachable person is non-defensive. When they are wrong they quickly admit their wrongdoing and seek to learn how to be better next time. A teachable person allows others to speak truths learned from experience into their lives. A teachable person does not make unilateral decisions but seeks wisdom and knowledge from multiple people.

As you would have observed, Teachability requires certain soft skills, which are not easy to acquire. Though this is not to "born-with" skill, one can put in efforts to become teachable. Most of the organizations today are considering soft skills as most valuable than the hard skills, because, hard skills can be acquired on the job, but soft skills are not as easy to acquire. Thougn many of the recruiters are looking for Teachability as a soft skill, they are certainly looking for the traits that form part of Teachability. Like for instance, for most of the recruiters, the above mentioned traits figure in their evaluation checklist.

John C Maxwell suggests the following to pursue Teachability:

Learn to Listen - As the old saying goes, “There’s a reason you have one mouth and two ears.” Listen to others and remain humble, and you will learn things that can help you expand your talent.

Understand the Learning Process - Act, Reflect, Improve and Repeat

Look for and Plan Teachable Moments - By reading books, visiting places that inspire you, attending events that prompt you to pursue change, and spending time with people who stretch you and expose you to new experiences.

Make your teachable moments count - Pay attention to:

• Points they need to think about
• Changes they need to make
• Lessons they need to apply
• Information that they need to share

Ask yourself, “Am I really teachable?” - Ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I open to other people’s ideas?
• Do I listen more than I talk?
• Am I open to changing my opinion based on new information?
• Do I readily admit when I am wrong?
• Do I observe before acting on a situation?
• Do I ask questions?
• Am I willing to ask a question that will expose my ignorance?
• Am I open to doing things in a way I haven’t done before?
• Am I willing to ask for directions?
• Do I act defensive when criticized, or do I listen openly for truth?

A "no" to one or more questions above would mean that you have something to work on.

Leveraging Lessons Learned

Success = failure + failure + failure … Sounds familiar?

Leadership experts and management gurus have said enough about how failures lead to success. That is very true for the individuals when the respective person takes it in the right context and work on the causes of the failure to overcome it in the next opportunity. But how does this work in reality for the organization?

 

If you have been part of a project, which has failed to deliver the promised features on time or at the agreed cost, you are most likely out of that organization, as the management want to penalize those involved in it. In the process, the organization loses as it did not want to capitalize on the lessons learned by the team through the failed project and the new team that takes over might commit same or even different mistakes, which could again lead to failure. 

 

Agile projects are likely to fare better in this space as Agile project management calls for identifying things that went well and those did not went well at the end of every sprints. Here again the one question that remains to be answered is, how does the scrum master and the teams deal with the things that did not went well in the earlier sprint. Yet another question that needs to be answered is how open are the project team members in openly admitting their own errors and omissions, which could have adversely impacted the project. 

 

 

As far as the development teams, there are so much to be learnt on a daily basis, for example, the defects uncovered in unit testing, findings in the requirements, design and code reviews and even the project issues could lead to a great lesson to be learned by every other member of the team. 

 

 

Here are few ideas that will help the organization in leveraging the lessons learned by the teams through various errors, mistakes and omissions.

 

• Mentor the teams to the effect that they demonstrate accountability and responsibility and that admitting a mistake early on is a good thing. The earlier, the triggers are known, it is better as other members of the team would stay away from committing the same mistakes.
• Coach the teams to share, share and share with their peers and even across the teams. This can be accomplished by removing the mind blocks within the employees in admitting their own mistakes and they should be encouraged to share those for the good of themselves and the organization. It is the tendency of the employees that when they uncover any issues during unit testing and reviews, they would just fix it themselves and do not report it further.
• Encourage teams to share their previous experiences every now and then and for sure there will be some takeaways from such experiences for some members of the team.
• Bring in a culture within the organization which will discourage egos and emotions which are found to be the barriers for sharing.
• Promote risk management and encourage every employee to participate in it. It is needless to say that every identified risk has the potential of becoming an issue and soon can come in way to prevent the project from being successful. Past experience and lessons learned is a great source of risk identification.
• Above all, make the sharing the lessons easy by putting in place an appropriate knowledge base platform and train and encourage employees to use it.

 

Though the above ideas are more suitable for IT services organization, they can be practiced in any other organization as well with some tweaks.

 

Here is an interesting article to read on, where in Ken Bruss discusses about leveraging lessons learned for competitive advantage.

Taking over - stay away from wrong battles

 If you are about to take up a Senior Managerial role in an different organization, it is important that you are able to settle down at the right pace and pick up the right battle to make a mark in the first few weeks of taking over. While it is true that the management has through multiple rounds of discussions have tried their best to understand your abilities and have got convinced that you are the person to take the organization further down the roadmap, there could be challenges which you would not have faced before and you should take little care about few things like the following.

The takeover session

 

 

Usually, you might have a chance to have few rounds of discussions with your predecessor as part of the handing over process. It is important to use this very effectively. Among other things, the important items to pick up in this session are 

• Get to know why your predecessor is leaving, and this would help you to plan and carefully handle such pain areas so that you also don’t end up getting into a battle.
• Get to know from your predecessor as to his opinions about people, process and technology in the organization and this would give you certain handles to pick up and carry on with.
• Get to know as to what he has been upto in the past three to six months period so that to understand his unfinished initiatives and if certain initiatives failed why so. This will help you to understand the various constraints with which he has been operating and most likely those constraints would hold on for you too to deal with.
• Get to know about the strategy, vision and goals of the organization and the roadmap to achieve those. It might be possible for you to identify certain areas to work on, but again don’t jump into action plans you need to get 360 degree view of the issues.

 

 

Just in case, you don’t have this opportunity of a smooth hand over, try to get same inputs from the next level executives, but use such inputs with care as you might want to validate the same from few other sources.

 

 

The Cultural Values

 

 

Each organization has its own culture that suits the most for the teams and the business. As part of your taking over, it is important that you understand he organizational culture, the morale of the employees and if required you may spend little more time to make yourself a fit into the prevalent culture and gain the confidence of the teams. While there is a chance that the given culture could be the cause of certain pain points and may need a change, you may not want to pick up such battles so soon as it could lead to the teams not accepting you as a leader. As you might have come with a different cultural background, it is so easy for you to get carried away and make missteps.

 

 

Spot the problem areas and the pain points

 

 

While you would have got to know some of the priority areas that need immediate attention, before jumping into action, spend more time to talk to various teams to understand completely as to the current state of various projects and initiatives that they are upto. Depending on your approach, style and your experience, you would spot certain pain points that need attention. Capture those for later action. Sooner you identify those it will help you to settle down quickly. It would also be a good idea to spend some time in understanding the failed projects or initiatives in the recent times, which would help you pick up certain process areas to revisit and work on. You might have to use your tactical and people skills here so that the teams open up to you freely and you get a good handle of the areas to work on.

 

 

Perform a careful analysis of these items for their impact on other aspects like, culture, process and technology which will help you to categorize and prioritize these areas and come up with a revised roadmap for the near term and the longer term.

 

 

In the process of settling in, it is very much likely that you will try to use your experience and suggest course correction or jump into actions in the middle, which if not done well could land you into trouble as might start facing resistance from some quarters. Though these could be overcome with authority, it may not work well if you use it early on. In such cases, you should be convincingly demonstrate to such teams that the course correction is much needed given the situation and take them into confidence that way. Picking up wrong battle early on could prove costly.

 

 

As many leaders say, a good leader is a good listener. So listen more early on to get to know the perspective better and try to pick up some lessons. For a while, you should forget your experience and expertise and try to be a learner and keep listening. Once you are done listening, do an alnalysis and in that process, you may use your experience. Keep in mind that there is no single best way to accomplish a thing and there could be multiple ways and means and it could be so that you might have a chance to pick up certain new things that might work well too.

 

 

Please understand that this is not a complete guide for you to just practice blindly. This could be completely out of context in some situations and may not hold good at all. However, what is to be taken out this is that try to stay away from picking wrong battles early on.

Developers’ take away from a support project

Developers usually tend to prefer development projects over production support projects. Developers always want new challenges in terms of technology and would like to be using the latest tech tools and platforms. As most development projects offer them this advantage, they usually prefer to get away from production support projects.  But in reality, the production support projects do offer them certain key benefits, which are very much required as they move up in their career path. Let us examine some of these here.

The real life business scenarios

A software project begins with perceived business requirements as drafted by the Business Analysts and approved by customers. In most cases, the requirements are far from complete and that leads the developers to live with ambiguity giving room for more defects in the product that they develop. How much ever the software is tested, when it hits the production use, the real life business scenarios will for sure throw the software out of gear and makes it fail. Thus, those involved in the support projects get the opportunity to deal with production business scenarios which will sharpen their business / domain knowledge. Given that the world has started embracing the cloud and SaaS applications, there will be less of development and more of customization and managing the configurations. That means that the need for domain skills with the developers will rank very high amongst the SaaS providers and consumers.

Better product / domain knowledge

In product development, it is quite possible that a developer or a team of developers would be working on just a small part of a product. That means, the developers associated with development projects have very little opportunity to have complete understanding of the product. Whereas the developers involved in the production support would get opportunities to work with all parts of the product and some times across other products too. They get better visibility on the operating processes / practices associated with a use case, there by getting a better product / domain knowledge.

Solution design skill

Developers tend to believe that support projects do not have much opportunity in the solution design space, which is a myth. A production defect is far more difficult to deal with than a defect identified during the development life cycle. Resolution of a production defect involves at a high level the following steps:

• Quickly come up with a data fix to maintain the data integrity if impacted by the defect.
• Perform a root-cause analysis and come up with the real life scenarios that could lead to this defect being encountered.
• Come up with an interim work around if any available to prevent it from recurring in the shorter term.
• Identify a best solution to prevent it from recurring – This is rather challenging as the solution has to be designed within the existing product architecture, with lesser efforts and least impact to the already working software.

Each of the steps when done well in combination with the real life scenarios add tremendous value to the abilities of the developers and that will lead them towards software or solution architects. Solutions in support project see production quicker than the development projects and as such high appreciation from business teams. 

Code Re-factoring

Learning from one’s own mistake is a good way of learning. But, learning from other’s mistake is a smart way of learning. Every time a developer attempts to resolve a production defect, he might be looking into the code written by someone else and may come across many different ways of achieving a result. Taking it positively, a support developer may enjoy reading through the code written by others and pick up some better algorithms and at the same time, how not to write codes. This will for sure better their coding abilities.

The developers in the supporting a production instance of a software product will realize how important the readability of the code is and hopefully they will be making it their habits to write readable code with appropriate comments and indents.

Trouble shooting expertise

Usually software products are moved to production environment after atleast three levels of testing. A defect in production means that it has slipped through all the testing phases during development. So the scenario under which this comes to surface is not something that has been visualized during the development phases. Some of such defects would be very difficult to reproduce without which resolving it would be a nightmare. Those involved in support projects would quite often exposed to such scenarios and they will over a period gain good trouble shooting expertise. Read one of my other blog on Debugging performance problems.

Collaboration with other teams

During development phase, a software developer would be looking up to his lead for any clarifications on the work that is assigned to him and would not get exposed to other teams. Whereas, those involved in production support get to work with various other teams like the infrastructure, IT security, subject matter experts, quality assurance, business analysts, end users, third party vendors when any of their components are used, etc. This collaboration and interaction brings room for acquiring some additional skills both in technical space and also on the soft skill space.

Conclusion

Being in production, support projects facilitates the enterprise to perform its operations and earn profits on an ongoing basis. They play a vital part in the business continuity of the enterprise. As long as a production software is well supported and maintained, the IT heads would not think of replacing it unless a major technology overhaul is expected.

Of course, there are certain downsides of being support projects too. For instance, one may have to be on call to support any emergency and some times, a hard to crack defect could result in tremendous pressure and stress. 

High Performance Workforce

For a sustained success of an IT services organization, it is important to have a high performance workforce backing the leaders. A quick peek into various resources on what is high performance workforce, found that the following are the three fundamental building blocks to setup a High Performance Workforce:

1. Accountability for Right Results, which requires the employees to have the ability to focus on the right priorities and in turn achieve the right results at right time.

2. Earn Trust, which requires continuous mentoring and recognition of people whom the organization depend on, so that they feel valued, confident and ready to give their best.

3. Talent Development, a continuous skill assessment and development program, with which, the workforce is always on the edge of the needed skills and is ready to tap the opportunities that comes through its way.