Teach what you know

As a lightweight way to steer my life in the direction of making some small positive difference I’m a pretty big fan of that phrase. And if you are serious about developing yourself into a leader who makes a difference, you might want to consider adopting it for yourself.

Teaching as a way to recruit and expose your team’s talents

The obvious benefit of teaching what you know is that by sharing your knowledge with others you increase their skills and abilities. You make them more valuable as part of your potential team. Also, you’ll quickly find people who learn things in different ways, some of which will complement your own learning style. And you may find people who have strengths that you don’t have—strengths you may need later. This makes teaching a great way to recruit and an excellent tool for building a team and for exposing the talents of that team.

Teaching as a way to deepen your understanding

It is less obvious, but just as important, that the teacher derives substantial benefits from the very act of teaching. When we learn something new, we ideally learn it in two stages. First, we “head-learn” a new idea. At this stage, we intellectually understand a concept and can act upon our knowledge, but we have to think about it first. We have to tug these general concepts out of our memory and wrestle them into a particular form that applies in a particular situation.

The next, deeper, and much more important, stage of learning is “heart-learning.”

At this stage you have taken a concept and integrated it into your worldview. It is a part of who you are, and you can act upon this knowledge without having to activate it consciously. For most of us, knowing left from right is heart-learned: this distinction is instinctive to us and we know it without having to access the left/right memory and process it before making a choice in our actions.

Teaching is one of the best ways to heart-learn something.

Communicating a new concept to someone else forces you to address all the little details you skipped over when you were learning something the first time. Now you must put the whole picture together in a way that your student can adopt (and, if necessary, adapt). Your student will ask questions on aspects that didn’t occur to you, forcing you to shine light into the dark corners of your own understanding. He or she will stumble on things that were easy for you, and in explaining them you’ll realize that you perhaps didn’t understand them so well yourself the first time, and, prodded by the student’s need, you will finally figure them out fully only now.

Teaching is the best way to learn, and your knowledge and skills are some of the most precious resources you can share with others. Best of all, you can start developing this particular leadership trait right now.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.