ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
In times of great change, it’s more important than ever for people, teams, and organizations to focus on learning. We need to reskill and upskill, build new knowledge bases, and adapt to different ways of working. And given how quickly new technologies and tools like generative AI are advancing today, this isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore, it’s a must.
But how do leaders motivate and organize everyone for effective learning? How do you build a culture where people are eager for improvement and development and the training they get actually helps them achieve their personal and your collective goals?
Our guest today says there’s more than one way to do it well. Through interviews with executives who oversee learning at a range of companies around the world, he’s identified three models for leading those efforts. You can be a custodian, a challenger, or a connector. He’s here to outline the pros and cons of each style and to explain how any team can foster a stronger learning culture. Gianpiero Petriglieri is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and the of the HBR article, Three Ways to Lead Learning. Gianpiero, welcome.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Hello, great to be here.
ALISON BEARD: First, let’s talk about the demand for upskilling. Why has it been accelerating?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: I mean there are essentially external reasons and internal reasons in most corporations. The external reason is the increased pace of change. And so, the more external change there is, the more you become preoccupied with making sure the organization keeps adapting at a faster pace than the environment is changing.
And then there’s also an internal reason, which is, talent has become a lot more mobile over the last two, three decades. At most companies, the promise of loyalty is no longer expected or even desirable. And so the most attractive companies these days are not the ones that say, “You’ll come here and we’ll give you the highest salary. And if you do well, we’ll keep you here for 30 years,” but are actually the ones that promise learning, that say, “You’ll come here and you will learn faster, you will learn more, you will learn something unique that will help you move on, whether within the company or sometimes even outside the company.”
Paradoxically, one of the things we are seeing now is that in fact the companies that are better at attracting and retaining talent has the ones where talent feels their most portable. And learning is central to that, both to that external adaptation and to that internal attractiveness.
ALISON BEARD: And so should every leader at every level be thinking about ways to foster learning or is it really the purview of management or the HR department?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: I think every leader is a leader of learning. I have no doubt about it. People are learning all the time and they’re learning all the time from and with their leaders. The question is, what? And I think the key word you use there is “think about it.”
In my experience, very often we learn automatically unconsciously. And when we learn automatically unconsciously at work, we are learning every day. In every moment, most of what we learning is getting a little bit better at doing what we already do. That’s what we call incremental learning.
So the reason we have to think about learning is because we want to be more deliberate about what we and people will either learning also because we need some kind of change. In fact, one of the questions I ask executives all the time is, “What’s your curriculum?” And they say, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You know what your goal is for your team, for your division, for your company. And I’m sure you have a strategy. But all the time people are coming to work in your company, they’re not just performing, they’re also learning.
Implicitly, subtly, they’re learning how to be, what they can talk about, what they cannot talk about, what they’re supposed to do and what they’re not supposed to do. And in my view, that often happens automatically. I think every leader should think about it deliberately, “What have people learned with me and from me today and how have I taught it to them?”
ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like you’re saying each team, each organization needs a different curriculum based on their strategies and their goals. And then they might also need these types of different pathways to learning that you’re talking about.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Absolutely.
ALISON BEARD: So talk about the interaction of those two things and how you decide both on the curricula and the right pathway for it.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Let me take just a half step back because we often talk about learning and it’s often unclear what does it actually mean and what is it supposed to do. When we don’t ask those kind of more strategic questions, we get caught up in technical questions. How much time do we need to learn? What methodologies do we need? Generative AI versus this or that.
One important question to think about is what is the purpose of learning? What is the purpose of learning for individuals and what is the purpose of learning for a collective? And for me, it’s pretty clear. The purpose of learning for individuals is to change lives. Learning can change lives in different ways. And not all learning has to happen at once.
There is learning that helps you know and do things. There’s learning that helps you relate to people that you couldn’t relate or relate to the same people you related in a different way that changes your relationship. And then there’s learning that helps you imagine, that frees up your mind, that helps you think of yourself and maybe people around you or the work, the products, the company differently. And I think it’s important to ask in what way do individuals, what kind of learning do individual needs? And the same is true for the collective.
Now, the purpose of learning for a collective, in my mind, is to keep organizations alive. So changing lives and keeping organization alive. And you can keep organizations alive in different ways. As you said in the article, I unpack a little bit the three ways in which learning can really make a difference in organization. One, it can improve your efficiency, your alignment. One, it can make you more innovative. Or it can make you more inclusive. It can allow more people to feel part of the conversations that become processes, products, profits.
ALISON BEARD: So that’s a perfect introduction for us to dig deep into each of the three styles. Tell me what a custodian looks like in practice, that sort of more instrumental style.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: A custodian looks like in practice someone who’s really focused on helping people converge to a norm. It might be that the organization, it’s classic cases, a scale-up, right? We have become very diffused. People are all over the place, or we’ve had a period of global expansion and then we’re no longer sure whether we have a standard of behavior, whether we have certain processes.
And so what we’ll do is we will first develop a central model. It could be a culture model, it could be a value model, it could be a competency model. And then we’ll assess people to see what are the gaps between that model and their behavior. And then all the learning is designed to help people practice and acquire whatever competencies we have identified people need.
And so we’ll do all sorts of things that allow us to close those gaps for individuals so that they can accelerate in their career and so that the company can become a little bit more aligned.
I find alignment is the custodian’s favorite word. And usually they set up learning spaces. In the article, I call the boot camps. If you think of the boot camp, in the military boot camp or the medical boot camps, they are places where you go and in at a relatively lower risk, you can practice the kind of skills you might need under pressure.
And so I let you practice. And every time you deviate, I give you feedback and then I let you practice again. And slowly that gap closes. And if that gap has closed and if your behavior is similar to the model, learning has become successful. If the organization has become more aligned, if we’ve reduced cost, if people can move from one part of the company to the other and say, “My goodness, what I learned there is really helping me succeed here,” that’s amazing. And I find that this is perhaps the most popular… It’s still the most popular, the most seductive kind of learning, especially for business organizations because it’s learning that you can often quantify.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, so what about challenger?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Oh, the challengers are very different beasts, because the challengers don’t think the learning is a kind of tool that helps us deliver on the strategy. The challenger thinks of learning as a human right. They are a little bit more suspicious, I must say, of organizations and a little bit more committed to individuals. So they always feel that organizations by their nature tend to be a little oppressive, a little stifling, a little conservative. And therefore, learning is really the means to help individuals counter that tendency of the organization to become complacent.
If the enemy of the custodian is variance, the enemy of the challenger is complacency. The challenger is always thinking about how do we create learning spaces, I call them playgrounds, where people can actually question, “Why are we doing this? Why am I behaving a certain way? Why do we keep pushing this product?” And if they cannot find an answer that is related to the present, to the need of the work, to the need of the business, then they should challenge it. They should question it. They should try to figure out what’s a better way.
The challenger really thinks that learning is a way for us not to fall into routine because routines lead to complacency, and complacency leads to obsolescence. And learning is really this means to shake individual up. And some of the challengers in our research, they talk about, “I want to wake people up.” And usually challengers, I find, work really well in organizations that have become extremely successful and they have grown large. And there’s a sense that the spirit of innovation, of constant change might have disappeared and the challengers are really there to shake things up. And so it really works well when your culture is becoming a little bit stale.
When I work with challengers, which many leaders of learning do to quantify the value of a learning experience, they would often say, “How many people request a move? And from an organizational perspective, over time, what’s the percentage of our revenues that come from products that have come out or services that have been devised in the last three years?”
ALISON BEARD: Okay. And finally, what about connectors?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: The connectors are really interested in how do we build stronger bonds. The connectors are usually leaders who worry about the organization becoming fragmented or becoming siloed or different groups not having productive relations and therefore they think, “How do we create learning opportunities, learning spaces, I call this the town hall, where people can actually come together and look at some career problem or some organizational problem that they have in common?”
The more different the perspectives they bring, the better. The point is not necessarily to make a process more efficient or to come up with a more innovative product, but the point is actually to build relationships that the connectors believe will be extremely useful to make the organization both more efficient and more innovative.
And usually, the connectors tend to not want to accept the trade-off that the custodians and challengers tend to accept. The custodians say, “Look, we need to deliver on the strategy. And who cares if we lose a little bit of creativity? We need to align.” And the challengers say, “We need to wake people up. And if there’s a little bit of divergence, so be it. We want the divergence.”
But the connectors are dissatisfied with the idea that it should actually pick convergence or divergence. And they really constantly strive for what I call bounded divergence, “Let’s bring different groups together. Let them argue.” Ideally, they come up with something that is novel and consistent with what different groups are used to. But even if they don’t, the work they have done has made it easier for them to collaborate.
ALISON BEARD: Are any of these styles easier or more cost-effective than others in an environment when everyone is still trying to do their day jobs and deliver results?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Frankly, no, I don’t think so. I think when people think of costs, for me it’s really a cover story for familiarity. The reason why I did this study is because I found myself talking too often about learning methods and learning budgets without first having a conversation about what is the purpose of learning. And then once we know what the purpose of learning is within the budget, we can then think about what methods we use.
Let me use, as an example, a learning technology that you and I are very familiar with and probably a lot of our listeners, right? The case study, we recently celebrated a hundred years of the case study in management education. Now the case study is a learning method. And the case study costs the same. I think an HBS case cost the $11, something like that.
And I can use the same case study for all three purposes. In one case I say, “Well, let’s look at how Indra Nooyi did what she did at this company and let’s try to figure out what are the five competences she mastered and adopted so that we can practice them during the next two days.” And that will be a custodian way of using that case study.
I can use the exact same technology and say, “Now, I want you to look at this case and think about this leader who thinks and looks differently from most other leaders, most of our peers. What did it take for her to imagine herself and do it her way? And what would it mean for you to imagine yourself leading in a way that isn’t the same as the way everyone else leads?”
And then I would do the same case from a challenger perspective. Or I could look at the case and say, “Look at the relationships that are being built by this CEO in order to continue delivering efficiently a certain business, but also re-imagine some of the product lines and some of what the company means in the mind of people. How did she build these relationships and what kind of relationships would you need in order to broaden the appeal of your leadership and therefore of your company?”
And then I would teach the same case from a connector perspective. And so in my mind, it’s not a matter of methods. We can use very similar methods. And now with generative AI, it’s the talk of the town. Really the method is a tool. It’s what you use the tool for. Most learning methods that we are familiar with, case studies, experiential exercises, simulations, workshops, digital learning, they’re all pretty flexible and they can be used in different ways depending on your purpose.
And this is why we go back to this idea that learning is always an expression of leadership. Learning is usually something we do in order to either strengthen a leader vision or to challenge it or to broaden it. And I think you would find… I really came out of this study thinking, “I don’t know if there’s any other kind of leadership than these three kinds.” I think you can look at all leaders through these lenses.
ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like it’s also helpful for employees to understand what kind of learning they’re doing, sort of how they’re being led in this endeavor.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Yeah. I think one of the most frustrating things, which we encountered a lot in the study, is when we’re trying to achieve a certain goal, but then we use a learning approach that is incompatible with achieving that goal. And the classic thing is, we want the company to be more innovative and more inclusive, but we do instrumental learning all the way because that’s what we’ve always done, that’s what everyone does. That’s the most familiar, that’s the most measurable.
And at that point, you might, whatever you’re spending, you are wasting money. In fact, I’ve become convinced that one of the reasons why most of our companies struggle with innovation and inclusion is because instrumental learning is so dominant, and so we over-index on efficiency and alignment. And the lack of innovation and inclusion are not a problem we encounter. They are a side effect of our strategic choices.
And if you think of it this way, it’s not necessarily the job of a CEO, of a chief learning officer, everyone’s job to think about, “Are we learning what we need to learn and do we have the space to learn?” A classic complaint I hear when I do coaching, when I work with organization is, “In my companies, people talk about learning all the time, but then I’m constantly under pressure to deliver. I can’t take the time and space.”
So the rule of thumb is, the more divergence you need, the more you want people to imagine themselves differently, imagine their culture differently, or come up with different products or services, the more time and space you need to remove them from the daily habits, from the norm.
ALISON BEARD: How do you practically do that though? Because I mean, I absolutely feel that in my own work. I would love to do more experimenting with generative AI to see how it could help me edit articles and prepare for podcasts, but I also need to edit the articles and prepare for the podcast and that train doesn’t stop.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Yeah, I don’t really have a much of an answer to that other than you need to have the discipline and most importantly the support to do that. I think it’s very difficult for people to kind of take that space on their own without feeling they are betraying others or they’re letting people down. This is why we have these leaders of learning, because at the end of the day, Alison, we can break all the laws except the laws of physics.
One of the things we know from physics is that if you want a body to change direction, the change of direction is going to be easier if you slow it down. A body going at great speed will change direction, but the arc of its turn will be very slow. A body that slows down can turn more sharply and then reaccelerate.
And I think the appeal of all this retreats, tech-free spaces, meditation courses, is all that we need. We feel the need to slow down in order to come up with something different to rekindle, to come to life, to wake up, to rekindle our imagination.
And for me, time is only one part. When I talk about a learning space, I think of two variables. One is definitely time, but the other one is space. And I think of physical space and of social space because it’s a lot easier to learn if we are learning with others. Now, that might be a technologically mediated space or it might be a gathering, but we usually learn more easily when there is social reinforcement. And the social reinforcement can help us align, become more instrumental, or it can also help us diverge. So it’s important to think about what is the culture of that learning space. So when you want to do something different, what you need to do is to think about what is the space I can make for myself where I can do those things and do them with others, without me do them with pleasure. And without that thing that it’s the killer. It’s the killer of all learning, which is shame.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So it sounds like it needs to be an organizational or team mandate, but in the absence of that, an individual has to step up and say, “I’m going to take the time and space I need to do this because it will improve me.” So it’s a sort of pitch you need to make to your boss.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: It is a pitch you need to make. It is a pitch you need to make to your boss. It’s a community. And one of the things that breaks my heart is the prospect that learning has become a luxury. Because I know in most companies, people who are high performers, who are talented, have no hesitation to walk to their boss in their performance review and say, “Well, one of the things I would like this year is the opportunity to take a week to do a course or to take a mini-sabbaticals.”
What breaks my heart is that this should become only an opportunity offered to the very few because at the end of the day, all of us need space for learning that might upskill us, that might energize us, that might broaden our connections. And research says that all those three are essential not just for our career success, for getting the next promotion, but also for feeling safe and sane, for feeling looked after.
If we don’t feel work allows us at least a moment in which we can improve our skills, forge better or new relationship, or if we don’t feel confident, I mean we are going to burn out or we’re going to become cynical or we’re going to feel like the cogs in a machine. And I would bet that a lot of what people report these days, this lack of meaning at work is the result of not having enough space for learning, not having enough space for learning where they are the drivers.
ALISON BEARD: Which companies are leaders do you see doing learning really well right now? And what can we learn from them?
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: One company I mentioned in the article that I’ve had the pleasure of working with and I think has done this very interestingly and very well, very extremely successfully, Schneider Electric, the large global energy company.
When I started working with them, the chief HR officer at the time, Olivier Blum, I was thinking about them because he just recently became the CEO. Some of the people on his team really pushed me to think about how can we have both that instrumental and that humanistic kind of learning. How can we have both the kind of learning that keeps us together and aligned and more efficient, but also how do we make sure we speed up in the right direction, in the direction of the future, in the direction of innovation, in the direction of moving from selling products to kind of broader energy solutions technology?
And so we designed a learning system, where there were different moments for different groups, some of which were really giving them the space to actually think about, “What is your intent. Within this broader strategy of the company, what is your intent? How do you honor what you want to do in the world and use your role for that?”
And then there were other parts which were, these are some of the shifts we are trying to make. And these are the skills that we need to learn. You’re going to have a chance to hear about them, and then we are going to practice them. And then you’re going to do a little project, where you show that you brought those skills to your part of the organization and then your peers are going to assess that project. And then some of those that are particularly successful, we’re going to scale them up in the company.
I thought it was extremely powerful to combine in a learning journey, first, space. First, awaken. And then align. And I think the company has been doing exceptionally well, whether you’re looking at the kind of traditional measure of the share price, which has tripled ever since we did this initiative called Transforming Schneider Leadership. It’s also become a lot more attractive for talent. It’s gotten tons of awards. In fact, I believe is one of the large global companies that has the highest gender balance in its top executive cadre.
What it goes to show for me is that you don’t have to be ideological. And I think in learning, we talk a lot about budgets, but actually if you scratch that conversation, we are still very ideological. Now, that’s the kind of learning we need. That’s the kind of learning that works. What you have to think about is, “Look, it’s very simple. As a company, we got to run the machine and we got to energize the community.”
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, thank you for helping us get more excited about and effective at learning through this conversation. I appreciate you joining us today.
GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERI: Thank you very much, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and the author of the HBR article, Three Ways to Lead Learning.
And we have more than a thousand Idea cast episodes now, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
