The most important leadership skill to develop is not how to become a better leader.  It’s not how to hire more effectively or build business plans or budgets. It’s not even (big gulp here for me) developing better communication skills.  THE leadership skill you need to focus on to become a better leader is to become a good and constant learner.

Statistics show that leaders who are in constant learning mode develop stronger leadership skills overall.  

It just makes sense this would be the case and let’s explore it a bit. If you are in the mode of constantly learning you are more willing to experiment and consider alternative strategies.  Your way of thinking is ‘how can we improve what I/we as an organization are doing’ and ‘what might I not know that would influence my thinking’ and ‘who else might have insights and ideas we can consider’?  Leaders who are in learning mode don’t believe they have all the answers and thus turn to others for ideas, perceptions, and suggestions, which in itself broadens their knowledge and thinking and helps them learn even more.

Leaders who value being a constant learner approach learning differently.  

They embrace the idea of being a constant learner and ask themselves how they can use what they just learned to improve their own performance and the performance of their team and organization?  They want to share what they learned with others so these others can benefit from their learning and thus learning for them has a domino effect on others around them.

Because these leader value learning they don’t simply focus on improving one aspect of themselves (personally or professionally), they are routinely evaluating what next they need to improve and learn.  So it’s not a surprise that they become better managers, better communicators, better decision makers, better planners and have improved team building skills. And even once they have taken a class, read a book, attended a conference or talked to others they have an innate curiosity about wanting to learn more about the topic how they can use what they learned.  

I often talk about these leaders as having ‘beginner’s minds’ meaning for them they are often curious about everything, they ask lots and lots of questions and love learning for the sheer joy it brings them.  

This is as opposed to leaders who take courses or hire consultants to help them do things differently because something isn’t working well and they are looking for a quick fix. These leaders aren’t really interested in learning for the power it brings them, they look to the learner as a method of problem-solving.  

Two other comments before I close out this article.  People who focus on being a constant learner will also learn from their mistakes, and learn what worked well and explore to understand what made it work well.  This is learning for them just as much as reading a book or attending a workshop. And those who place value on learning will also develop pattern recognition skills that will improve their ability to further learn.

If you want to become a great leader focus on learning.  

Learning to become a constant learner will move you and your team forward more quickly than any other skills you develop.

However, if you can’t or don’t want to truly embrace learning simply for the joy it brings you and how you can use what you learned to transform people, relationships and organizations then perhaps it’s better if you focus on fixing problems.