The connecting leader: Learning mindset

In 2014, when Satya Nadella took over as CEO at Microsoft, it wasn’t long before he embarked on a wide-reaching culture shift. The core message he delivered to some 120,000-plus employees? Don’t be a know-it-all. Be a learn-it-all.

That mindset is not just a cultural guidepost, but a tenet of effective leadership. Change in today’s world happens at lightspeed. Leaders who don’t embrace learning may soon see their companies begin to wilt, failing to find competitive advantage in the flurry of disruption.

Nadella’s message helped Microsoft reinvent itself as a dominant force in the world of AI and cloud computing, adding to the payroll over the last decade. And he is far from the only one to find success in adopting a culture of learning. When Garry Ridge took over as CEO of WD-40 in 1997, he quickly recognized that embracing failure and learning had played a key role in creating the company’s iconic product in the first place: It had been the fortieth attempt that netted the successful formula. Ridge built upon that heritage to promote a “forever learning” mindset across the company, with an expectation that leaders coach and encourage team members to grow from failure.¹  

There is clear evidence that a learning culture fosters innovation, future readiness, speed to market, and productivity. Leaders set the tone, but not enough of them are doing so effectively—only 10% of organizations have successfully created a productive learning culture and just 20% of workers demonstrate effective workplace learning behaviors, some research has shown.² For any organization, future success hinges on a willingness to be disciplined in learning from success and failure, a humility to own and widely share instructive lessons, and an ability to pivot quickly to take advantage of new knowledge.

Developing the capabilities to build and maintain a learning mindset

Based on our ongoing work and research, we have identified four³ key characteristics that are most important for developing and maintaining a learning mindset. Leaders need to be:

• Curious—Seeking new ideas, having an open mind, challenging the status quo, actively listening to others
• Agile—Spotting opportunities and threats and then adapting and pivoting at a faster pace than competitors to create a competitive advantage
• Entrepreneurial—Willing to take risks in an uncertain environment, being resourceful, creative, and solution-oriented.
• Humble—Exhibiting a low-ego leadership style; willing to re-examine personal beliefs in light of new evidence, accepting that they have more to learn and don’t know it all. 

To help leaders develop these capabilities, companies can support leaders to:

Be curious

• Start with questions, not answers. In changing environments, those who ask better questions and learn faster get the prize. The best strategic thinkers, leaders, and entrepreneurs distinguish themselves by how they frame problems, the questions they ask, and a passion for inquiry.
• Make time to cultivate relationships. This includes learning about team members, customers, competitors, and all other stakeholders. Leaders who seek to understand people on a deeper level, including what they’re passionate and concerned about, can expand their horizons and meet others where they are.
• Seek out contrarians with disconfirming views. Find ways to understand how people with different perspectives or backgrounds think, including mavericks whose views are contrarian.

Be agile

• Identify weak signals at the boundaries of your business. Agile leaders ask questions about the external and scout the periphery for emerging trends that have far-reaching implications for their strategic choices.
• Deploy a devil’s advocate. Ask someone on the team to prepare the case against the prevailing view. Train people to question the status quo and get them prepared to pivot quickly as things change. 
• Do pre-mortems. Anticipate what could go wrong before implementing big decisions and develop contingency plans.

Be entrepreneurial

• Run little experiments rather than big bets. A time-limited experiment can quickly test new ideas. Gather feedback quickly, iterate, and test again.
• Do after-action reviews of success or failure. Think, What can we learn? How can we get better? Be rigorous with data and analytics. Promote candid, courageous conversations to create a rapid feedback loop. Kill dead ends immediately.
• Think options, not either/or. Rather than relying on binary go/no-go decisions, reframe your approach to support little bets in parallel.

Be humble

• Be transparent and vulnerable. Leaders should be self-aware and acknowledge their limitations as a way to instill the value of learning. When you feel especially sure, take a step back to assess for overconfidence.
• Deliberately challenge long-standing assumptions and conventional wisdom. Ask yourself and your team to list out operating assumptions that should be questioned or challenged because they may no longer apply.
• Shine a light on mistakes as sources of new learning. In an unpredictable world, we’re all wrong as much as we are right. Create a culture in which teammates ask probing questions when things go wrong, rather than react with defensiveness. Praise people who learn from their errors and extract learning from near misses.

Conclusion

We can all become more curious, agile, entrepreneurial, and humble—we can practice better learning. Companies that encourage their leaders toward specific learning-based approaches will accelerate past their competitors. Indeed, a learn-it-all approach can trickle down to supercharge the culture of the entire organization.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dr. Regis Chasse for his contributions to this article.

About the authors

Steven Krupp (skrupp@heidrick.com) is a partner in the Philadelphia office and a member of Heidrick Consulting and the CEO & Board of Directors and Healthcare & Life Sciences practices.

David Seijas (dseijas@heidrick.com) is an engagement leader in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office.

References

¹ Regis Chasse, Steven Krupp, and TA Mitchell, “The connecting leader: Five imperatives for leaders today,” Heidrick & Struggles, September 25, 2024.

² For more, see Robert J. Grossman, “How to create a learning culture,” SHRM, May 1, 2015.

³ In our original article, we did not include humility; as our work has evolved it has become clear that this is a fourth key to learning.