Those who can't (do) teach - wait, what?!?

Don't let this poppycock muck up your leadership approach

“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

The famous line "Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach" comes from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, specifically from the "Don Juan in Hell" Act (Act 3). In this scene, the character of Don Juan is having a philosophical conversation in a symbolic hell, and the line is used to critique various societal roles, particularly the assumption that teaching is a lesser or inferior profession.

Shaw points out how some view teaching as something one only does if one cannot perform in other, more "practical" fields. Of course, Shaw was a master at irony and social critique and a sharp polemicist, so it's not necessarily a line he intended to be taken literally.

The play was published in 1905.

In 1905, Scientific Management changed how many thought about management and leadership. The “one best way” emphasized doing, and the one who could do the one best way won the day. If you couldn’t keep up with the one best way, management would find someone who could. The idea of human development in management wouldn’t appear until Taylor got under labor’s skin (editorial, for sure), and the Human Relations management movement took hold sometime in the 1920s.

Poppycock

As I said earlier, Shaw was a master of irony and social satire. This quip about teaching wasn’t a principle on which to build a management or leadership theory. To use it that way is pure poppycock. Yes, I have known my fair share of pure academics who have not practiced much of what they teach. However, their work—their doing what they can do—builds on what we know and how it is put into action. Now that I am a practitioner/academic, I value what the academy has done that I can test and put into action in real life. Teaching is a virtuous profession and a valuable life skill.

Leaders must be teacher-coaches while they are doing the doing

Rodger Lewis, my mentor for all things Toyota, coined the phrase “a leader is a teacher-coach.” With all due respect to my Japanese colleagues, I understand that sensei means teacher. Rodger, who was a master at bringing the Eastern-based principles and philosophies of the Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System into Western understanding, added the idea of the coach to the teacher. About a decade after Rodger shared the concept of leaders as teacher-coaches, Mike Rother—researcher at the University of Michigan—published his Toyota Kata, which codifies and operationalizes how Toyota uses teacher-coaching to develop people for continuous improvement (the coaching kata to establish the improvement kata).

In a recent book study, executives at one of my client organizations were surprised to learn that Toyota identified emerging leaders by assessing their self- and others-development orientations. At Toyota, a person must be a teacher-coach to manage and lead.

PSA for Bias: I am a teacher

Hello. My name is David. I am a teacher.

I wasn’t always a teacher. Well, I haven’t always had a formal role as a teacher or the moniker.

I have always valued being taught, which became an underlying assumption of mine: teachers are valuable to me. I have always taught people, and I’ve always associated teaching with leadership, too. I always assumed I was doing something valuable when I was teaching others.

Even now, when teaching leadership (so meta, right?), I often have to correct the misconception that military leaders are naturally authoritarian. On the contrary, the best leaders I experienced across several decades in the Navy and among other branches were teachers: they taught others by word and action. They were deliberate: you knew you were being taught.

It would seem that Toyota and I share a common point of view.

Toyota’s concept is for working managers/leaders. As I reflected earlier, I have encountered the occasional academic colleague whose head knowledge reflects little of the reality of a principle in practice. The pedantic professor’s fatal flaw is their rigid approach to how things should be, which smells a lot like “the one best way.” This is a dangerous point of view.

Adult learning

There is one best—or at least optimal—way to learn something deeply, especially as an adult: to teach it to someone else. The logical conclusion is this: if I want to learn something deeply, I must eventually have the skills to teach it.

This appears to be the case in Medicine. I am not a medical doctor, but I have friends who are. They assure me that teaching to others is a part of learning medicine.

I’ve already made the point that this is the case for Toyota. In their work on Toyota leadership, Liker and Convis argue that Toyota places high value on future leadership potential on “the key trait (of)… self-development” (2012, p. 39). They drive the point home: a second and equally important competency is developing others (Liker and Convis, 2012, p. 40). At Toyota, the measure of leadership is the ability of those you’ve developed.

Finally, isn’t it primarily true that we learn as we teach others because we are human? We are evolved to learn for our survival. Some of my most profound learning is happening right now as I coach my adult kids based on my own failures and mistakes.

Conclusion

Positive leadership is the overarching model for Operational Excellence. If you think operational excellence is merely a management concept or a way to improve continuously, you are missing the things that embed changes for the better. Positive leadership and positive culture are human systems that integrate with standardized management processes for improvement, production, and strategy execution, which lead to high performance.

While positive leadership is a broad term that includes approaches like transformational, authentic, ethical, and servant leadership, the themes across these approaches are similar: build trust, act with moral integrity, drive fear out of the daily experience as far as you can, encourage innovation from a base of stability, and develop people using teaching and coaching.

Take note that positive leaders must develop others through teaching and coaching. I’ve continued to honor Rodger’s use of teaching and coaching, not to split hairs but to make sure those I teach and coach see the pattern. Most transformation relies on change, which begins with learning about something new gradually over time and demands teaching scaffolded with coaching.

And learning, friends, happens when someone is teaching.

So, I am offering a new twist on an old adage: those who can do, do; those who lead, teach; those who can’t, learn…please.

References

Liker, J. K., & Convis, G. L. (2012). The Toyota way to lean leadership: Achieving and sustaining excellence through leadership development. (No Title).