Learning Journal New York Times Corner Office Article:

The New York Times has a feature called Corner Office, which offers highlights from conversations about leadership and management.

Using the Corner Office site, select an article related to personal biases, gender and culture in leadership, or social and emotional intelligence.

Take a moment to scroll through the articles to find one that piques your personal interest. Once you have finished reading your selected article, address the following:
Provide the title of the article you selected.
Provide a response to each of the critical thinking questions at the bottom of your article.
Provide responses to the following reflective questions:
What is your takeaway from the article?
Why did this interview resonate with you personally?
How can you apply what you have learned from the article to your professional and personal life in terms of the five practices?

Article is Below:

Conger: Leaders Learning to Lead (Alexa von Tobel, LearnVest)
Read the Corner Office interview on NYTimes.com
Alexa von Tobel (photo)
Connecting Theory to Practice
By Gama Perruci
How do leaders learn? While the leadership literature has paid attention in recent decades to how organizations learn, a much older question has centered on the process by which leaders learn. In the beginning of the 20th century, a debate raged on the nature v. nurture dichotomy. Are leaders born or made? By the middle of that century, consensus fell on the nurture side – we can develop leaders. The proliferation of leadership programs during the second half of the century brought with it the need to understand how leaders learn.
In the 1990s, Jay Conger provided a comprehensive study of popular leadership development programs. In his Learning to Lead (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), he suggested four categories of learning processes found in those programs: (1) Personal Growth (“finding my true self” – learning associated with self-exploration and higher levels of self awareness); (2) Understanding Conceptual Approaches (learning through the formal acquisition of theoretical knowledge); (3) Feedback (“looking through the mirror” – the use of assessment instruments that the leaders can use to gain knowledge of how their leading is viewed by others); and (4) Skill Building (“mastering the Zen of leadership” – helping leaders master certain desirable skills through training and practice). Leaders learn how to lead through formal means (such as their participation in structured leadership training programs) and informal means (developing insights through experience). While Conger’s study focused mainly on formal means, the four categories can also be applied to the informal means of learning.
Alexa von Tobel, chief executive of LearnVest, the financial planning company, provides insights about “learning to lead” through both her video and the transcript interviews. In the video interview, she is asked about her decision to drop out of Harvard Business School when she was 25 in order to pursue a “big dream” – the founding of LearnVest. She admits that she had to learn to be a leader “on the job.” By eschewing formal leadership training at a young age, her informal training encompassed, in particular, three of Conger’s categories: personal growth, feedback, and skill building.
Regarding personal growth, she says, “Developing management skills is hard for everybody, and it’s about making mistakes, and trial and error. It’s about trying to figure out who you are as a manager and your own genuine strengths and weaknesses.” However, she was not alone. She stresses the importance of gaining feedback through mentors from several generations. As she has gained more experience, she is now in a position to also mentor others. In her transcript interview, she says that she tells her mentees about a “filter” she uses to help her make decisions: “When I’m 90, will I regret this?” When she was in undergraduate school (pursuing a psychology major), she recalls learning about a study of 90-year-olds in the psychology lab: “What they found is that no one ever regretted anything they did. They just regretted the things they didn’t do. That just gave me license to be bold.”
Through experience, she also sharpened her leadership skills – the fourth category in Conger’s list. For instance, she learned that as the size of her organization grew, she had to modify her communication style: “The impact of me saying something grew very quickly, as the company went from a team of five people to 20 and then 150. I had to become more thoughtful about my opinions.”
In the video interview, von Tobel argues that she is not done learning. That is an important point to underline. Even after going through a formal leadership development program, leaders continue to learn. As she says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be done learning.” She stresses that the more she learns to be a leader, the humbler she gets, and the more she knows that she does not know – a sobering thought as you go through your own developmental journey.

Critical Thinking Questions:
1. Assess the pros and cons of learning “on the job.” In what ways can formal leadership training be more advantageous than an informal setting? Conversely, how can informal training be more preferable?
2. Consider Conger’s four categories. How have you learned to lead so far? Use specific examples to illustrate some of these categories.
3. What is the connection between having a “big dream” and learning to lead? How are the two connected?

Related “Connecting Theory to Practice” Columns:
Bennis’ On Becoming a Leader (Corner Office Interview: Cindi Leive, Glamour)
Mentoring Theory and Research (Corner Office Interview: Vivek Gupta, Zensar Technologies)
Conger: Empowering Leadership (Corner Office Interview: Penny Herscher, FirstRain)

Additional Resources:
Scott Snook, Nitin Nohria, and Rakesh Khurana, eds., The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 2012).
Graham Tyrer, Learning to Lead (New York: Continuum International Pub. Group, 2010).
Jay A. Conger and Beth Benjamin, Building Leaders: How Successful Companies Develop the Next Generation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

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