If someone asked you, "What are the three biggest business lessons you've learned over the course of your career?" how easy would you find it to answer?

When I sat down to think about it, I didn’t find it easy at all. Hopefully, neither would you.

That’s because every leader and manager should continuously learn, upgrade their skills, and push themselves out of their comfort zone. If you don't, how can you expect your employees to? How can you keep yourself up to date with the latest industry trends, so you'll stay ahead of your competition and be able to pivot and adapt when the environment changes?

Photograph of a notepad next to a cup of a coffee and laptop

Different types of leadership learning

Learning for a leader comes in many different forms. There are always new books, reports and research publications to stay on top of, even though you've got to approach that form of learning carefully because it will never be tailored to your exact situation. Some of it will be useful, some of it won't fit your goals, some of it you might even have tried already. However, in my experience, the majority of reading you do will almost always contain a kernel of something you can use, even if it's just confirming your instincts are good and you’re on the right track.

Other ways leaders learn are by bringing in consultants and industry experts to help solve a specific business problem. Some leaders will be pretty dubious about doing that, believing in some way that bringing in outside help throws shade over their own ability to run things, but that's the mark of an insecure leader. Insecure leaders tend not to learn because they've already locked down the shutters, believing that no one knows more about their business than they do.

The fact is, a leader and their employees can learn a lot from hiring an outside consultant. The chances are the consultant will already have worked with many companies that are similar to yours, so if you pay close attention to what they are doing and really take time to understand why they’re doing it, you’ll pick up insider tools and knowledge that could make you a much more capable leader. The trouble is that a lot of leaders bring in a consultant, give them a problem to solve and ignore how the consultant solves it. As a result, the company might see some temporary benefit from what the consultant implements, but if another problem crops up, they'll be back to square one, needing to fly in a consultant again. As a leader, they’ll have wasted a valuable learning opportunity.

I’m not suggesting that the leader must always be the person who learns from the consultant. Depending on the size of your business, it's unlikely you'll have the time. However, an effective leader will delegate someone they trust to shadow the consultant and take their learning onboard, and they will keep a weather-eye on what the consultant is doing to ensure the changes they make are sustainable and long-lasting.

Good leaders also learn from their personal network and the experiences of their former colleagues and industry peers. Over the years, 'networking' has become such an over-used jargon that it’s easy to forget its importance as a learning tool. Maybe that’s because we’ve all attended poorly arranged networking sessions which have ended up being a complete waste of time. Either that or they become rudderless social get-togethers where the only thing you’ll learn is how Fred’s golf game’s improved since that new robot from Japan’s been hitting the ball for him.

Still, when personal networking is done correctly, it can be a massive learning opportunity and an invaluable way to gather 'outside' information from sources who might normally be cagey about giving that information up in a non-networking situation. External industry events like conferences and exhibitions can be fantastic learning opportunities too.

The important thing is to keep your learning diverse and don't close off any avenue that will expose you to new ideas. As a leader, you've got to cast your learning net as wide as possible because continuous learning comes from everywhere.

With that in mind, here are the three biggest business lessons I’ve learned:

1. Make yourself the dumbest person in the room.

As a leader, it's your job to have the vision and keep your ship moving towards its destination. It's not your job to pull the engine room levers or even know which ones to pull. You've hired engineers to do that, and they know the levers better than you do. So, tell your team the direction you want to go and then trust them to get you there. Never presume to tell them how to do their job because if you've done your own job well you'll have employed capable people who won't need or appreciate your guidance. If anything, forcing your less-expert opinion on them will put their backs up and make you the liability.

Give them direction, and then make yourself the dumbest person in the room.

2. Remove toxicity and mediocrity.

It's tempting to think that having a mediocre or toxic team member in place is better than having no one in place at all. At least the job will get done (eventually), even if it's not done exactly the way you'd have liked. Also, if push comes to shove, the other more capable members of your team will always be there to pick up the mediocre team member’s slack while, in the meantime, you can focus on the bigger leadership picture and leave everyone to it.

That doesn't work, and realising it doesn’t work is one of the biggest leadership lessons I’ve learned.

In his role as Head of Talent at Apple, Dan Jacobs legendarily said, "I'd rather have a hole in my team than an asshole in my team."

Throughout my career, I've seen many times when stubbornly holding onto toxic and mediocre team members has resulted in the best team members walking out the door because they can't deal with it anymore. However, if you remove the disruptive influence before it poisons everyone, the rest of the team always steps up. Your employees will be more productive and happier without mediocrity and toxicity holding them back, and they'll have more respect for you as a leader because you've proved you won't settle for toxicity and mediocrity. Just as importantly, they'll see you're supporting them and that you understand the value they bring.

3. A goal without a plan is only a dream.

Having a goal is essential, but you need a plan to make the goal a reality. Without a plan, you'll just be pie-in-the-sky dreaming, no one (including you) will know what they're doing, and you'll never get where you want to go. Or, in the very rare and pretty much impossible event that you do accidentally reach your goal, you can certainly bet it a) took you a lot longer to achieve than it should, b) cost you a lot more money and resources than it should, and c) still won't deliver all the results it could have done if you'd planned it properly and explored all its potential.

What’s the best way to make a plan? Break your ultimate goal down into smaller, measurable goals and then measure those goals weekly to make sure you stay on track and things are happening. Depending on how long it will take you to reach the ultimate goal, I've learned that breaking those smaller goals down into 60 or 90-day segments is the most useful way to approach it. Anything more than that, and you're likely to feel overwhelmed by what you still have to do, or you’ll start losing sight of the bigger picture because you're too micro-focused on the 60 or 90 days. Anything less than that, and you'll be more likely to procrastinate or wander off track.

Ask me the same question next week, and I might have thought of another example to replace one of those three lessons with, but those are the three biggest business lessons that I always try to keep at the forefront of my mind.

Now it's time you thought about yours because the whole point of learning a lesson is making sure it's locked in there and you don't forget it. Keep your eyes and ears open because business lessons can come from anywhere, and you never know when they'll prove useful.