Ed Betof is a senior fellow and academic director of executive programs in Workplace Learning Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania and also teaches in the Wharton Executive Education High Potential Leadership program.  Ed’s newest book is entitled, “Leaders as Teachers, Unleashing the Teaching Potential of your Best and your Brightest.”

T/D: The title of your book is a very compelling title and one that I am proponent of.  What’s the major concept behind, “Leaders as Teachers”?  It’s not new, right?

EB: The idea is not new.  In fact, the idea of leaders serving as teachers goes back centuries.  If you think of elders, shamans, and artisans bringing up apprentices behind them, and today, so many different organizations that are human service organizations such as scouts and 4-H, you’ll see it, too.  But in the corporate world, it’s very inconsistent.

I decided to build on some initial concepts and principles put forward a number of years ago by Noel Tichy and build a book that was both a strategic book as well as a how-to book.

T/D:  Noel Tichy used to be the Director of the Leadership Development Center for GE years ago.

EB: Yes and he is a professor at the University of Michigan.

T/D: My very first thought when I read the title of your book, “Leaders as Teachers”, was Jack Welch. He was so well known for going to his up-and-coming managers training programs and being an interactive part of their leadership development.   Who can argue with the success of GE? Why hasn’t the concept of leaders as teachers taken off as much?  I assume the book is filled with examples.

EB: The book is filled with hundreds of examples of ways that it can be done.  They actually fall into just over 50 categories.  I call them 5 buckets and about 50 categories within the buckets.  One of the reasons that it is inconsistent is that when people think of a leader as teacher, they think of somebody maybe teaching a whole course or standing up and lecturing for an hour or hours on end - it’s quite to the contrary. The approaches that we suggest in the book are very practical.  They’re forms of active teaching, active training, and active learning and we know that they work because I spent the last ten and a half years of my corporate career building a leaders-as-teachers process at Becton Dickinson and Company where we had over 550 leaders, managers, and professionals teaching around the world. Not that many years before, we had only 9.

T/D:  Who’s perspective is the book written from?  Is it from a trainer’s perspective that you need to harness the value of the leaders in your organization or is it speaking to the leader saying, you need to add value to your organization by contributing to the development of people?

EB: That’s an excellent question!  I’ve tried to write the book so that it could be read in several voices by several different types of people.  On one hand, senior executives could read this book and it could help them reach out into their organizations.  In fact, the forward of the book is written by the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at BD, Ed Ludwig, who to me, epitomizes a senior level leader-teacher.

On the other hand, a very major audience for the book would be learning executives, learning leaders, and day-to-day people who are training, and trying to involve others in their organizations to be involved in that training, learning, teaching process.

T/D: You just gave an example of someone that you say epitomizes a senior leader in a teaching position.  Tell us what that looks like.

EB: It could range from Jack Welch coming in and teaching as part of leadership programs, to conducting town meetings, to facilitating sessions, to being involved ahead of time in needs assessments in the organization.  There are a few different ways that leaders can contribute as teachers and they break down into five categories. One is the identification of learning needs and the design of learning solutions and programs, and working with those who are professionals to do that by providing a lot of input.

T/D: I won’t stop you from telling us about the other four but I want to ask, how time intensive is that role?

EB: It can be very small to more significant. One of the objections that people frequently hear in organizations is, “I don’t have time to teach.”

T/D:  But I would think to help design it, that’s too minutia for a leader.

EB:  I would say quite to the contrary because in today’s organizations, Noel Tichy and his original work back in the 90’s made the point that teaching organizations are winning organizations and I couldn’t emphasize that point more. In companies that believe that their leaders have a responsibility to teach, to coach, and to mentor others, that is not only part of their job, it’s a very significant part of their job.  So my answer to the question of how much time does it take is, “it depends;” but I don’t answer in percentages, I answer as what role does a leader have and how is that best carried out?  Part of that role should be a teaching, coaching, mentoring role

T/D: What are the other buckets?

EB: I started with the identification of learning needs and design of learning solutions and programs.  Second is live teaching.  There’s probably 20 different ways or more that that could take place.  Teaching through the use of media or technology.  A good example for that is an interview like this, or in some organizations where they will do a video of leaders and stream it, or podcasts and things like that.’

The fourth category I call pre-program and post-program teaching and coaching to help ensure applications.  Very frequently somebody will attend a training or learning course and they don’t even know why they’re there.  But if you pre-coach a person before they leave for that learning process we know very clearly that there will be impact and follow through on learning. The “pre” part is much more important than we ever even knew..

The fifth category is training, coaching, and mentoring leader teachers.  So after one becomes experienced themselves in teaching, facilitation or in any of these categories or buckets that we’re discussing right now, then we want multiples of yourself. Just like you’re developing a pipeline of talent in technology, a pipeline of talent in leadership, develop a pipeline of teachers in your organization. 

TD:  The book is full of ideas to help you get that pipeline started to grow exponentially.