Warren Buffett and his lifelong investing partner Charlie Munger have a secret: they have always been good at lifelong learning, believing that it gives people and organisations an advantage over those who don’t learn new things.
Munger hit upon his learning strategy when he was a young lawyer. He decided that whenever his legal work was not as intellectually stimulating as he’d like, he would “sell the best hour of the day to himself.”
He would take otherwise billable time and dedicate it to his own thinking and learning. “And only after improving my mind – only after I’d used my best hour improving myself – would I sell my time to my professional clients,” he says.
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time – none, zero,” he writes in his book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger.
“You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads – at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
Turn employees into learning machines
Before you begin to try to instil an understanding of and love for learning, you need to instil the idea that your staff members are accountable for their own futures, for their successes and failures and those of the business they work in.
Once you’ve succeeded in getting your employees to start thinking about their goals and what they need to do to achieve those goals, you can help them progress in a number of ways:
1. Take the initiative.
Lead by example, talk to your employees about your own approach to self-directed learning, and share experiences that show how easy it can be to apply.
2. Identify their learning needs.
If you don’t already have a performance management system, you need to implement one. It will provide a baseline that shows your staff what is expected of them and where there may be gaps in their knowledge or skills.
3. Formulating learning goals.
It‘s important that you show your staff the benefits of personal growth, perhaps through incentive programmes or career development opportunities.
4. Evaluating learning outcomes.
As part of your regular interactions with staff, ask them to outline something new that they have learnt every day, week or month.
Encourage them to reflect on when, where and how they learnt. Through this evaluation, you will begin to see trends in their self-directed learning and they will be motivated by what they now see as an environment rich with learning opportunities.
Usually, people stay narrowly focused on doing the work, rather than on learning what’s needed to improve the work. Top executives today understand that lifelong learning creates extraordinary value for their people, and their organisations.
