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Resourcefulness 111

5 Read the biographies of people you admire. Biographical writing often
contains insights into successful behavior that can be imitated.
6 Consciously spend time at lunch with the people you want to emulate at
work. Lunchtimes can often be wasted. If you can establish a social
relationship with people you admire, you have more chance of dis-
covering their success formulae.
7 Consciously cultivate friends from different walks of life who exhibit behav-
iors you are seeking to model. Often, it is when you are with people who
do not share your assumptions that you can pick up useful insights.
8 Avoid spending unnecessary time with people at work who are negative. You
will inevitably pick up some of their negativity.
9 When you see a difficult situation being well handled, make a note of the
ways in which this was done. Be prepared to capture your own per-
ceptions of what has worked well.
10 Look out for social or learning opportunities at work where you may be able
to extend your network of potential role models. This is the way to be sure
that you are “flocking with all kinds of birds.”

Like many of the leaders I have interviewed, Colin Marshall, chair-
man of British Airways, sees a powerful leadership role here:

It is a leader’s responsibility to share knowledge, expertise, and experience.
Otherwise, the organization would lose its corporate memory and fail to
grow. I share what I know through a formal process of review meetings and
informally by day-to-day dialog and example. The result is a productive
two-way flow because, as the man said, there’s nothing so good for learning
as teaching. One of the most important lessons to impart is the significance
of internal communication to any business. In a company like British
Airways, where much of the workforce is spread across the world at any one
time, good regular communication is a vital management practice.

Increasingly, managers are working formally with a coach or mentor
who will be able to be a critical friend to them, suggesting ways in
which they can learn by imitation. In the list of skills that Peter
Honey and I are developing, the ability to identify how much of
your learning is solitary and how much is collaborative was consid-
ered to be the most important of all the skills of learning to learn.