Author Note: Leader 2 Leader

The Cycle of Leadership
by Noel M. Tichy
with Nancy Cardwell

Generating Knowledge in the 21st Century Leadership at its essence is taking a set of assets, people, information and technology and adding value to them over time. You are a successful leader if the assets are worth more than when you got them; you are a great leader if the assets outperform comparable assets, beating your competitors in the market place. In today's knowledge economy, the asset that is most important to manage is human capital, the brains and energy of your workforce. Leaders must deliver results, consistently and over a sustained period of time by delighting customers.

In this environment, the key to winning is a leader's ability to raise the collective intelligence of his or her team and keep its members aligned, energized, and working to please customers. This last element is a critical one. To keep creating new value for the customers, team members must get smarter every day. Therefore, the teaching, the learning, the aligning and the energizing must be done on an ongoing basis while they are on the job, doing things to please customers.

The way to do this is by building a Teaching Organization, one in which everyone is a teacher, everyone is a learner, and teaching and learning are built into the fabric of everyday activities. The CEO must assume the role of head teacher. He or she must set the direction, shape the culture, and share the valuable insights and knowledge in his or her head that got them to the top job. But, while it is critical that everyone in the organization from the top down teach, the teaching cannot be one-way. It must be interactive teaching where the leader who is teaching continuously learns and modifies his/her teachable point of view based on the reactions and inputs from those being taught. The learners at all levels must also be teachers, both upward to the leaders above them as well down into the organization where they lead others. This creates a "virtuous teaching cycle," a self-reinforcing teaching and learning process that is the key to building a winning Teaching Organization.

This is not a new age, feel-good, touchy-feely approach to winning, but in fact a solid Teaching Organization. A virtuous teaching cycle generates smarter team members, who become aligned and emotionally energized through the interactive teaching and learning process. This, in turn, is what leads directly to the delivery of results. It is at the core of what Jack Welch created at GE. The discipline of regular teaching and learning sessions at GE's Crotonville leadership development institute are not optional for senior leaders. The quarterly CEC meetings at Crotonville where the members of the top team teach each other are never missed. The succession planning reviews that are held three times a year are very closely scripted. It is the structure that is built into the processes that allows the content to be creative and free flowing. GE's very disciplined, teaching-and-learning environment invites humor, constructive conflict, and dialogue with the understanding that effective action will follow. This book is about how to build a winning Teaching Organization.