How To Lead Like the Best Learners

Photo by Chinmay Singh from Pexels

I took five years of Spanish from 8th grade to my senior year of highschool. Now 10 years later, I can recite about 25 vocabulary words including how to say my name and the word for luggage. I don’t know why that word, in particular, has always stuck.

The point is, I dedicated years of my life towards learning this skill only to have forgotten 99% of it a relatively short time later.

Many leaders and young professionals focus on the learning curve associated with new materials and new skills. We know that everyone learns in different ways and at different speeds. Because of this, our teaching and leadership must be broad enough to cover a wide array of learning preferences and styles.

But if we stop there, we’re shortchanging our leadership and professional development.

There is a learning curve for all new ideas. But there is also a forgetting curve as well. Failing to address the forgetting curve is a critical mistake in leadership and as such, should be explored in much further detail.

What have you forgotten recently?

Leaders love the question: “what have you been learning recently?”

We take this question and we parse out the answers to highlight your commitment to growth, your curiosity, your determination, and innovation when it comes to finding new topics and tidbits of interest.

Leaders like to ask questions like: “what have you been reading recently?” And “what’s something that has been fascinating to you?” Learning and growth have become important metrics in evaluating the success or capability of an individual.

These are great questions. You should be focused on learning new and fascinating materials. You should be pushing yourself to grow and get better at your craft.

But we should also be asking ourselves another, perhaps, even more important question: “What have you been forgetting recently?”

Research shows that within one hour, the average person will forget 50% of the information you present to them. Within 24 hours, they will forget up to 70% and within 1 week of hearing new information, people will have forgotten up to 90% of the information they learned.

That means you are only getting about 10% of your leadership through to your followers.

People are forgetting things at a much faster pace than they are learning. Learning Solutions puts it this way:

“Although corporations spend 60 billion dollars a year on training, this investment is like pumping gas into a car that has a hole in the tank.”

Instead of trying to get everyone to learn 100% of the material you are presenting, a better goal may be to get everyone you are leading to remember more than 10% of what they are learning.

Source: The Performance Factor by Pat MacMillan

In his book The Performance Factor, leadership expert and coach Pat MacMillan writes that the traditional learning curve needs to be adapted to reflect two additional stages: the forgetting curve and the re-learning curve.

Young leaders faced with the reality of how forgetful people truly are may feel overwhelmed or even despairing. If people are forgetting that much of what is being taught to them, what hope is there for the future growth and development of your team?

That’s where Pat’s adapted learning curve comes in.

Let’s say for the purpose of your leadership, everyone at your company starts at a baseline of 0 knowledge. MacMillan writes that after any professional learns something, there is a bell-shaped rise in knowledge. Let’s call the high-water mark 50 knowledge and the minimum needed knowledge line resting at 20. Your people will rise on a scale up to that high-water mark, some hitting 25, some hitting 40, some great learners going all the way to the top.

But here’s the catch. After they are done learning, almost everyone will instantly begin forgetting. So that high knowledge scores drop back to an average of 10 or 15, below the medium standard of needed knowledge. And as we saw above, that forgetting curve, unfortunately, happens way faster than most people give it credit.

Therefore, in order to move forward, you have to create opportunities to re-learn, accounting for re-forgetting along the way. Mastering a skill is never a one-time investment but a long journey characterized ultimately by learning a bit more than you forget.

Mastering a skill is never a one-time investment but a long journey characterized ultimately by learning a bit more than you forget.

This means that a leader, you must be just as mindful of what your people are forgetting as what they are learning. If you never ask the question of what people are forgetting, you will find yourself dependent on skills and knowledge that your people do not in fact possess as you have overestimated their abilities to retain critical information.

Many people believe that forgetting something makes them look bad or is a poor representation of their skills and professionalism. As leaders, we need to break that belief.

While it is important to encourage our teams to work hard to remember essential details, we also must make them feel comfortable that forgetting information is a very natural and common part of the learning process. People are not machines and that are unable to retain the gigabytes worth of information thrown at them on a daily basis.

If you never talk about the fact that people are actually very forgetful, your team will start to see forgetting as a sign of weakness and will begin to implement other tactics to avoid being seen as forgetful.

People who aim to avoid being forgetful are more likely to falsify information, stop volunteering their knowledge or even stop learning altogether. None of these behaviors are beneficial to your organization.

Making a point to normalize forgetfulness is a crucial step towards great leadership as the sooner you normalize forgetfulness, the faster you can begin working on implementing re-learning curves for your team.

A re-learning opportunity is not a way to shame your team. We’ve done a bad job corporately by creating a climate where remediation is seen as a punishment or a penalty.

Re-learning should be the standard on your team, not the outlier. Everyone should aim to become an expert re-learner as it will be mostly through your re-learning efforts that your axe will be sharpened to effectively and efficiently chop down the obstacles in your way.

Pretending that you know everything and that you never forget anything is the same as trying to chop down an oak tree with an axe that is so dull that it’s effectively a hammer. You may get your result eventually, but you’ll waste an enormous amount of potential along the way.