原文作者：Gianpiero Petriglieri 翻译：蒋齐仕
（译文仅供学习参考）
当我应邀为公司里的经理们讲授“领导力”时，我常常会在课程的开始阶段，花些时间谈论一个人在哪里和如何学习引领他人，以及在学习中会受到什么干扰。我常常会使用一个坦白和一个作为开头。
我的那个坦白总是一样的：就是我希望向自己遇到的人学习到一些能够被我记住和运用的东西，无论那些东西多么简单。我认为好的领导者和好的老师一样，他们都希望在日常生活和工作中坚持学习。
我从来没有遇到不赞同这一点的经理。他们告诉我，好的领导者就像好的老师一样，会向人提出那些能够让人觉得被拉伸、被鼓舞和更有能量去应对的问题。而那些平庸的领导人，则会让人感觉无聊、被忽略和被低估。
我用于课程开场的问题呢，每次都会不一样。我提出的问题常常与领导力相关，但同时又能在课堂上引发不同观点。比如，诚实是可以通过领导获得的吗？或者它只是领导者的一种期望？如何培养有责任心的下属呢？用一个有争议的问题开始课程是老师常用的手段之一，因为它可以激发学员参与。但只要老师坚持将问题的讨论继续几分钟，则不管讨论的信息量有多大，学员的不耐烦情绪就会出现。课堂上几乎总会出现这样的挑战：“我们把宝贵的时间花在这里学习，你作为老师也因此获利，为什么我们却没有得到清晰的答案？”
作为老师，我常常心怀不安地等待这样的挑战出现。
我是教授。从广义而言，学习，就是我的工作。然而不管我们多么认可“好的老师和好的领导者一样，都是永不停歇的学习者，难题对于他们常常意味着对其潜能的激发”这一观点，我依然会很快就被人提醒：作为老师，我的角色并不是提出问题和推动学习——至少在商业领域不要这样明显地去做。
人们期望我提供答案。
人们对我这样的提醒并不让我意外，但提醒本身到来的速度，却能够揭示这样的一个每天都影响着管理者的悖论：学习是工作场合中最显著的被忽略的活动。
每个人都说学习是一个公司和个人成功的关键要素。但是在日常工作中，有谁关心你的学习呢？没有。人们只关心你“学到了什么”，他们在意你学习的结果。学习本身是很重要，但前提是你默默在用你自己的时间去完成它。
也许你会说，这是公平的。毕竟在商业领域，结果才是最重要的。学习，只有在它对达成结果有帮助而且不会对达成结果造成打扰的情况下，才有意义。
但学习的确会干扰结果的达成。尤其是学习与一个人的转型相关时，它常会让我们经历暂时的困惑和低效。而且我们并不能因为缺乏时间而消除这种现象。
想一想那个流行的70:20:10“公式”吧：它声称一个人70%的学习发生在工作中，20%来自他人的辅导和交流，10%来自课堂学习。
尽管几乎没有例证支持这个流行的公式，而且提出这一公式的学者最近也认为这个公式属于“非学术结果”，然而还是有很多公司愿意相信它并将其作为公司学习战略的基本假设。
我认为，我们将一个“非学术结果”或民间传说当作严肃的公式对待的原因，是因为它的确反应了那些不需挑战的、安全而且高效的学习——那些渐进式的改进型学习——的特点。在那样的学习中，我们先获得一个想法，接下来去练习它并在过程中获得反馈。这样我们最终就会变得熟练。这种学习是增量式的，也是上瘾式的。
变革或转型式的学习常常不能如此高效，因为它不只是让我们变得更有知识。它甚至会提示什么样的“熟练”恰恰阻碍了我们的认知。它不仅仅让我们的技巧得以提升。它改变我们看待问题的视角。而这不只与时间有关。
一堂课，一次阅读，一次与同事的困难谈话，也许只会占用我们1%的时间。但它却会极大地影响我们如何运用其他的99%的时间，去思考那些日常工作中让我们吃惊的新东西。相反地，一项具有挑战性的任务，也许会占用我们很多的时间，却常常不能带给我们新的见解。
想想你的工作吧。它给你留下了反思自己的经历以获得一些结论或寻找新的做法的空间了吗？你有机会接触用不同视角看待世界的人们吗？或者你只是听到了老调重弹的那些反馈？你所在的团队一起就你的工作进行真正坦诚的沟通吗？多久才会有那么一次？
另外，在工作之余，你有否拥有足够的睡眠时间，不用智能手机工作的时间，发呆、散步和锻练的时间，以及所有那些有助于你变得更加有成和更具想象力的东西？
接下来的问题不是我们是否有时间在工作中或其他地方学习，而是我们被鼓励进行什么样的学习，以及我们自己是否有勇气是追逐那些不一样的变革或转型式的学习。
在感受不到威胁和处境困难，或者难为情的情况下，我们很少会去了解我们的知识和能力的边界之外的东西。（这是为什么当我们遇到了一个友善宽容从而让我们的学习变得容易的面孔时，我们称之为“导师（Mentor）”的理由。）人们只会在鼓舞人心的演讲中才喜欢提及失败，在真实的生活中我们则尽可能忍受它，直到它所带来的教训变得真正清晰。工作中的压力和常识，只是将我们回避失败的本能变成了习惯。
透过各种现象，你可以发现忽略变革或转型式学习的现象无处不在。无论是在工作中还是在很多的商学院课堂上，人们都在强调将周末学到的工具用到周一的工作中去。我们看重的是那些安全的、增量式的学习，是那些能够把手中的事情做得更好和更加熟练，但却无法帮助我们反思为什么我们要那样做，或者下次更应该做些什么的学习。
难怪创新滞后。我们的改变常常背离我们的初衷，对于那些有利于帮助我们更好地去领导和开创的行动，我们总是犹豫再三地回避它们。
这是这些经理们最真实的写照：他们的工作节奏是如此之快，可见度又那么高，以至于他们需要证明自己的压力，强烈地压制了他们退后一步反思自己的愿望。然而，他们令人窒息的困境并非偶然。
他们就像我这样的被人提醒要快速提供答案的教授一样：在希望推动学习的同时，也在为学习制造障碍。
尽管充满矛盾，历史上的很多领导者就是在这样的真实生活中产生的。在这些领导者中，也只有少数人能够真正克服学习的障碍继续前行。但那些真正卓越的领导者，因为他们真正关注学习，所以不仅能够吸引依赖型的跟随者，而且还能够将他人培养成领导者。
即使是在这样的困境中，依然存在着最宝贵的学习机会，这需要我们理解，变革型的学习常常意味着对自满、遵从和规范的蔑视。这样的学习需要的不只是时间，而是勇气。而这种勇气，则常常需要一定的支持才容易获得和维持。企业的日常运营当然可以在一定程度上提供这种支持，但很难做到让人在进行变革或转型式学习时感到足够的安全。
最后，优秀的领导者很少是被“喂大”的，他们常常拥有很强的个性。他们深究那些真正有价值的原因和疑问，即使那样做充满风险且无人关心。过于轻松的学习，不可能教会我们如何去引领。
原文：
Learning Is the Most Celebrated Neglected Activity in the Workplace
Gianpiero Petriglieri
When I am invited to “teach leadership” to managers in corporations, I use the first few minutes to address the issue of where and how one learns to lead—and what gets in the way. I usually begin with a confession and a question.
My confession is always the same. That I am hoping to learn something from our encounter, brief as it may be, that I will remember and use. This is what I believe good leaders and good teachers have in common—the commitment to keep learning as they practice.
I have never met a manager who disagrees. Good leaders, they tell me, like good teachers, raise tough questions and make others feel stretched, empowered, inspired. Mediocre ones issue commands and make others feel overlooked, bored, underutilized.
My question is different every time. It usually has to do with some aspect of leading that people in the room will have divergent views about. Is honesty necessary to lead, or just desirable? Or: What makes a responsible follower.
Raising a controversial question is not an unusual way to begin a presentation. It energizes the audience. But keep the debate going for more than a few minutes, and regardless of how informative it is, restlessness begins to set in. There’s inevitably a challenge like, “We are spending precious time here, you are getting paid for yours, and we are no closer to a clear answer.”
I have come to wait, if with some trepidation, for such remarks.
I am a professor. Learning is, broadly speaking, my job. And yet no matter how enthusiastically we agree that good teachers and good leaders are perpetual learners, and that being offered a difficult question is empowering, it does not take long before I am reminded that I am not supposed to keep questioning and learning—not so publicly at least—on the company’s dime.
I am supposed to deliver.
The reminder is hardly surprising but how quickly it comes is revealing. It is a great illustration of a contradiction that affects most managers every day: learning is the most celebrated neglected activity in the workplace.
Everyone says that learning is essential for companies’ success—and for your own. And yet, on a daily basis, who cares for your learning? No one. People care about what you have learned. They care about your results. Learning is great as long as you do it quietly, in your own time.
This is only fair, you may say. In business, after all, delivering is what counts. Learning matters to the extent that it helps one deliver and does not get in the way.
But learning does get in the way of delivering. Especially learning of the transformational kind—that makes us tentative, confused, and ineffective for a while. And we do not neglect it just because we lack time.
Consider the popular 70:20:10 “formula” stating that 70% of learning happens on the job, 20% through coaching and mentoring, and 10% takes place in classrooms.
While little empirical evidence supports it—the scholar to whom the formula is often attributed recently described it as “folklore”—plenty of organizations invoke it as a cornerstone of their learning strategies.
The reason we have turned folklore into a formula, I believe, is because it resonates with the safest, most efficient kind of learning—the incremental kind. We acquire an idea and we practice it with some feedback on the way. That eventually results in mastery. That kind of learning is additive—and addictive.
Transformational learning rarely builds up so smoothly. It does not just make us more knowledgeable. It reveals what mastery prevents us from knowing. It does not just refine our skills. It changes our perspective. And it is not just a matter of time.
A class, a reading, a difficult conversation with a colleague, may take 1% of our time. And yet they may radically alter how we approach the other 99%, raising questions that jolt us into learning new things from everyday experiences. A challenging assignment, conversely, may take most of our time and yield little new insights.
Take your job’s design. Does it leave space for you to process your experiences and draw a few conclusions or imagine alternatives? Do you have access to people who see the world from another perspective—or just to good old feedback? How often does your team have open conversations about your work together?
And outside of work, are you getting enough sleep, time off your smartphone, idle breaks, walks, exercise, and all those other things known to make you more productive and imaginative—let alone live a more decent existence?
The question then is not whether we have time for learning, at work or elsewhere. It is what kind of learning we are encouraged, and have the courage, to pursue.
We seldom visit the periphery of our knowledge and competence—the region where transformational learning happens—without feeling threatened, exposed, or ashamed. (That is why when we meet a friendly, forgiving face out there—which makes learning easier—we cherish it. We call that a mentor.) People like failure only in inspirational speeches. In real life we endure it, at best, and come to value it only if and when its lessons become clear. Workplace pressures and norms just turn our instinct to steer clear of failure into a habit.
Look past the rhetoric and you will find signs of the neglect of transformational learning everywhere. In the workplace as well as in many business school courses, with their emphasis on tools that can be taught in a weekend and applied on Monday morning. The learning that we privilege is the safer, incremental kind. Learning that makes us better at what we do but hardly frees us up to revisit why we do it that way or what, say, we may want to do next.
No wonder innovation lags, personal change eludes us despite our best intentions, and we hesitate to make the moves that would most help us lead.
This is most true for those managers whose work is so fast and visible that the pressure to keep up and prove oneself all but overwhelms the aspiration to step back and reflect. Their stifling predicament, however, is hardly a misfortune.
Like a professor reminded to deliver rather too quickly, they are in a position that requires them to keep learning and makes it harder at the same time.
Contradictory as they may be, those are the very circumstances that, throughout history, have forged many a leader. Few may be able to keep learning despite the pull not to. But those who do become the kind of leaders who, because they care for learning, don’t just attract dependent followers. They develop other leaders.
In that predicament lies, in short, the most valuable learning opportunity of all: the opportunity to recognize that transformational learning always involves defiance—of complacency, conformity, and norms. As such, it takes courage, not just time. And courage, in turn, is easier to muster and sustain with some support. Surely organizations could make it a bit easier. But it will never feel entirely safe.
In the end, good leaders are seldom spoon-fed. They are usually tempered. They pursue causes and questions that matter — even when it feels risky and no one else seems to care. When learning is too easy, it doesn’t teach us to lead.
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