Definition
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
This leadership principle is arguably the one that I have seen most differentiate the people I’ve worked with for a really long time and where they have grown their career substantially versus those that have stayed stagnant.
And I would say that for some people at a certain point, and I can’t tell you why—I have my own thesis—but, at a certain point, they find it too threatening or too difficult to keep learning.
And I will tell you that the second you think there’s little left for you to learn is the second that you are unwinding as an individual and as a learning professional. You have to be ravenous and hungry to find ways to learn.
And it’s not easy to do, even though if you have the right mindset, it’s quite simple to do. You have to think about the idea that you don’t know everything and that there’s a lot to learn and even if you spent many months or years learning a certain area, that it may flip upside down very quickly. Instead of that feeling threatening and scary, you have to think about that as being part of the fun of what you do.
And by the way, our jobs and our lives would be so much more boring if we knew everything there was to know. And so what you have to do is you have to think about, you have to be honest at looking at a situation and what customers care about and you have to be able to self-assess and be self-aware. What am I doing well? And what’s the team doing well? And what do we need to get better at? And you have to think about what do you want to change and then you actually have to build a real plan to change.
There are actually a lot of people I know that are terrific about speaking about how they’re going to learn and what they’ve learned and what they’re going to change, who are really lousy at actually affecting the change. You have to both have a plan on how you’re going to change and then make that change.
But that is the difference between often continuing to build great customer experiences and businesses and not and growing and not. Try to get better, even a little bit better every single day, every single week that you come into work.