Cultures change when leaders teach

By Kim Jong-nam

The more I visit corporations, government organizations, and universities to teach specific subjects, the more I learn how to become a better influencer. This requires me to develop many different abilities: teaching, being aware of myself, empathizing with my audience, and creating an environment. What I do as a corporate instructor and consultant makes me feel that I am impacting an organization and changing it, whether these changes are big or small. Based on my observations and experiences so far, I would like to think about how leaders in organizations can gain more influence through becoming better teachers.

Through preparing and conducting trainings, I find myself expanding my knowledge and awareness about the organization, its employees, and its industry. Since every organization has its own business situation, culture, and unique composition of generations, digging deeper at what an organization truly looks like helps me to understand who they are, where they are headed, and what they need to do to create a brighter future.

Thus, I think teaching is the process of understanding an organization, its people, and their plausible futures ― good or bad. Furthermore, teaching gives me an opportunity to look at myself and think over what type of person I am, what strengths and weaknesses people discover in me, and what I need to do to help the whole group have a more successful experience. This will be true for leaders as well.

As Sydney Finkelstein, management professor of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, said, "Teaching is not merely an extra for good managers; it's an integral responsibility. If you're not teaching, you're not really leading." A good leader is a leader who has a very thorough diagnosis and understanding of their organization. Teaching employees will help leaders look at their organizations more clearly and concretely, as though they are using a magnifying glass.

However, the benefits of teaching are not only limited to gaining a more expansive knowledge and awareness about an organization: teaching has also helped me develop my communication abilities through all of my talking with workshop participants. I find myself monitoring the participants' smiles, expressions or absence of expressions, and collective emotions.

I try to modulate my tone of voice, body language, attitude and even mindset in order to be a more effective messenger. In particular, how actively participants spend time with me, what kind of feedback they give about me, and how satisfied they are when the workshop ends matters to me a lot because it reflects what type of leader I am as well as how much I belong to the group. It also demonstrates whether we, as a group, were successful in our attempts to create something together. The more I teach, the more I recognize that teaching gives me opportunities to develop my communication and empathy.

I think this can be applied to leaders in organizations. If they begin teaching, they are likely to become better communicators and so their leadership will become stronger, since teaching requires you to become serious about the way you communicate.

This is not the end. Teaching also provides me the benefit of becoming an organizational culture expert. If I visit an organization where performance creation is more valuable than anything else, it gives me the impression that the cohesion between employees is so weak that their employees will turn into enemies some day. On the other hand, if I visit an organization in which relationships are more important than anything else, I usually find that the main cause of their poor performance results from an under-emphasis on a goal-achievement mindset. Additionally, when I visit an organization where overemphasis on change is prevalent, the workshop participants tend to complain about their fatigue, depression, and nervousness. They are usually anxious about what new mandates will be thrown at them the next day by their superiors.

There are also organizations where employees pretend to be close to each other and avoid confrontation, but these thorny relationships become exposed through covert dynamics that I observe during workshops. When dealing with this type of organization, I try to understand what factors make them so distant and what their hidden needs and wants are, and I hope to guide them to authentically talking to each other. When I come to any organization to conduct trainings, I become an organizational diagnostician and also a creator of new culture. Leaders in organizations can have this experience by teaching their employees more often. Through acting like an outside instructor and doing the "hands-on" work that is teaching, they will have a clearer picture of their organization's culture: leaders may be surprised to learn, during workshops, that their idea of the organization's culture diverges sharply from that of their employees.

I am sometimes called in to an organization that is trying to transform itself into a learning organization. The leadership wants to do this because they wish to see changes in their employees that will result in, ultimately, better performances. However, almost all of the time, I have found that it is actually the leaders who are the hidden roadblocks on the path that the organization wants their employees to begin marching down. Thus, the true object of change is actually the leaders, not their employees.

Creating a learning organization without the participation of leaders is nonsense. Leaders think their organization will change if their employees change, but changes in those who direct, force, and model will have incomparably bigger impacts. Leaders can lead their organization to be a learning organization through their participative leadership. Thus, I think the best way to become a learning organization is to take the time to improve the organizational culture and make it a true culture of learning, instead of simply having employees pursue more knowledge.

A true culture of learning can be created through leaders' modeling both what teaching looks like, as they teach their employees, as well as what learning looks like, as they learn about themselves, their organization, and their employees.
Many organizations want to improve their productivity, engagement, and culture. When leaders become teachers, they will naturally have time to meet their employees, listen actively to them, and deeply empathize with and more clearly understand them.

This will enable leaders to become true leaders who will make efforts to assess their organization as a collective group, think over and provide the right direction, and use their influence in order to improve the effectiveness of their organization's culture, which will have a ripple effect on the whole organization. When leaders become teachers, they will become culture changers. I strongly assert this from my own experience.

Kim Jong-nam (www.imeta.co.kr) is the founding CEO of META and the author of two books, "Organizations without Meetings" and "Breaking the Silent Rules."