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Malcolm Knowles's adult learning theory aims to stimulate and encourage adults to educate themselves in ways that suit their needs and learning styles. In this episode, I break down his pillars and give real-life examples of how we can lead and teach adults better. Being a people leader, whether that is an executive, manager, or parent, is less about telling people what to do and more about helping them discover what they can do.
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Malcolm Knowles's adult learning theory aims to stimulate and encourage adults to educate themselves in ways that suit their needs and learning styles. In this episode, I break down his pillars and give real-life examples of how we can lead and teach adults better. Being a people leader, whether that is an executive, manager, or parent, is less about telling people what to do and more about helping them discover what they can do.
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Lange Mielke, a leadership coach, shares lessons on adult learning theory. He explains the five assumptions of adult learning: self-concept, adult learning experience, readiness to learn, orientation to learning, and motivation to learn. He emphasizes the importance of autonomy and independence in adult learning and highlights the need to connect past experiences with future goals. He also discusses the significance of building readiness to learn and providing a clear purpose for learning. Overall, the goal is to help adults discover their capabilities and empower them to reach their full potential. Hello, and welcome to Shareable. I love helping my clients achieve their goals and surpass what they thought was possible. I want us to do the same with you, too. I have served hundreds of senior leaders of Fortune 500 companies, U.S. military leaders, small business owners, doctors, dentists, managing directors, nonprofit executives, and frontline managers. My name is Lange Mielke, and I want to let you know you are not alone dealing with the common issues of adult life and work. That's why I want to share lessons I've learned and continue to learn with you. I want to provide new questions to help you think more comprehensively about life and bring interesting and inspiring insights that will help you get the results you want with a lot less stress and maybe a little more fun. Today, I'm excited to share with you how adults and maybe even teenagers learn. Why would you want to know this? Well, a few reasons. Knowing this information can shorten the time it takes you to supervise people and relay ideas into action. Knowing this information can help you ask the right questions to the person you are teaching, training, managing, or negotiating with. And knowing this can help you grow your teams with self-agency, so that helps build motivation, morale, and meaning in work, which, of course, helps with retention and reputation. Yes, adult education is amazing, and it's not the same as it is with kiddos. In my master's program, we were able to explore this information, and I use it all the time. When I started working with leaders, this information is not something the majority of people have ever been exposed to. And when I share it, wow, has it helped my clients. It has transformed how they communicate with their staff with great results and how they influence their peers, partners, and clients, and even family. And now I'm going to pass this information on to you, and hopefully it works for you, too. Maya Angelou said, do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better. Well, I think this information will help us do better, so let's get to it. Adult learning theory came from Malcolm Knowles. Malcolm Knowles was born in Montana and in the 60s helped adopt the ideas of andragogy, meaning adult education. He helped create adult learning theory and helped guide adult education. The goal of adult learning theory is to stimulate or encourage adults to educate themselves in ways that suit their needs and learning styles. Being a people leader, whether this is an executive, a manager, or a parent, is less about telling people what to do and more about helping people discover what they can do. Let me repeat this. Being a people leader is less about telling people what to do and more about helping people discover what they can do. He set out five assumptions about adult learning, and they are self-concept, adult learning experience, readiness to learn, orientation to learning, and motivation to learn. Now I'm going to break each of these down for you so you can have an understanding of what he means. First, self-concept. Adults want to have more autonomy and independence in what, how, and when they learn. Unlike being a child when you are made to go to school and learn in a very ritualized way, adults want to be in charge of what, how, and when they learn. Have you ever had someone offer you unsolicited advice? How often do we take it? Really close to never. This education principle shows us why. We were not invited or asked, and we didn't have any of the opportunity to say, yes, we'd like to be a part of it. So we don't listen. One of my clients was so nervous about a huge project that he was overseeing because he felt his reputation was on the line as well as a huge portion of the sales budget was riding on the successful delivery of this project. He was telling all of his staff what to do and how to do it. As you can imagine, the 360 review that he got was pretty grim. His staff called him a micromanager and overly critical. His team didn't feel seen or heard or appreciated. Rather, they were worried and frustrated coming to work. He wanted to be a better manager, and that's why we connected. His boss didn't tell him to. He wasn't prescribed this. He wanted to find a way to be a better boss. When he realized that he was treating his staff without self-agency and trust, he felt awful. He then found ways to create smaller tasks for them to work on with more autonomy and create meaningful guardrails so he could keep up to date with what was happening or what wasn't happening. I'll be sharing a delegation formula in another podcast. His team started to flourish and became confident. A year later, he was blown away with what his staff was able to do. When he let go of trying to control everything and gave his team more autonomy and more independence, he got better results, higher employee engagement scores, and more time. Now he's zappier. He's able to do more strategic work, and his team gave him a much more favorable rate with his 360 review. I've had other clients whose bosses told them they need to get coaching and work on A, B, or C, and I can tell you I will no longer accept clients who are told to get coaching, only clients who want to get coaching because of this education principle. The next one is adult learner experience. You as an adult have a wealth of experience compared to when you were a child, meaning you'd prefer to connect what you want to do in life with different perspectives and the knowledge that you've gained in your life. If someone wants to change your opinion based on their own experiences or knowledge, we'll likely dig our feet into the sand because we don't have the same experiences, and just because it works for them doesn't mean it would work for us. When my brother and I co-founded our first business, I had a friend once tell me, Laney, I have the perfect idea for your business. You should. Any sentence starting with these words will be met with resistance. My head first went to, well, how do you know we're not doing this or have tried this? What experience do you have? Why do you think this would be a good fit for our strategy? All of my walls went up. Many people think that they should know that they know what you should do without knowing what you've done, what you want to do, where you're going. We need to be aware of this. As a leader, you may know more than your staff. You've had more business-related experiences. You may know more and think you know what they should do, but if you start sharing your ideas, you'll be met with resistance. It is much more powerful to ask questions on what they're doing or could be doing. When we want to help adults learn, consider new ideas, or try something new, how can we connect their past experiences with where they want to go? How can we refrain from assuming that our ideas are better and help them get to their best ideas for where they want to go? This may sound like, hey, Lainey, I heard you started a business. Tell me about it. Do you mind if I ask more questions? What is your marketing strategy? How did you come up with your target audience? You know, I've been doing marketing for about 20 years. If you ever want to run ideas by me, I'd be happy to help you think things through. If someone had approached me this way, it would probably be a lot more interesting and I might even be open to learning. Readiness to learn is the next one. Digital learners are much more selective about the information they consume, and so if they're learning something new, it has to help them in some way. Most learning is targeted towards advancing and improvement. If someone sent you a 20-minute tutorial on how to fix a sink, you'd probably skip the video. However, if your sink was broken, this would help create a readiness and willingness to learn that then you might actually watch the video. The same goes for work or personal life. Unless we have a need or desire to grow, our readiness to learn will likely remain low. But the flip side is also true. When there is a need or readiness to learn, then adults will willingly learn and learn fast. So, if we need to teach someone something, first we need to help them build their need to know. Why and what is in it for them? It's so critical. How will it help them solve a problem or how can this help them grow into something they're interested in? As a leader, we need to prime the pump to get people ready for what's coming next. When my clients came from a Fortune 500 company, they hired a big name to come help their staff grow and learn to improve their company culture. Their current workload was so high that the leaders were already feeling like they didn't have time for the work that they were billing out. Many people took the class by checking boxes and getting it done rather than taking the time to learn this. Why is this? The team presenting this information had a high barrier to acceptance unless there was a deep readiness to learn this information. That would overcome the time barriers in place. And there was not a big enough why for people to learn this new information. They didn't know how this class and the presenter would help them find solutions to their immediate or urgent problems. As people leaders, we will need to be able to explain what will someone learn from this training that will be so meaningful so that they'll get the time and energy to commit to it. What will they gain from this learning? Why is it important? How will this training help them now and in the future? We need to be able to answer these questions. Another example on the personal front is when I ask my teenager to clean his room. I know the benefits and reasons for a clean room, but he doesn't see the same benefits for himself as he has more time and energy to look for things. So he does not have a high readiness to learn. The next pillar is orientation to learning. Adults learn by applying problem-solving skills, which can engage them and aid them in performing better in their roles. This is not the only way adults learn, but it is a preferred method. Sure, many people can read, listen, and watch for information, but if you want adults to learn or initiate their own learning, let's help them solve real problems so that their time and energy are feeling productive. How can you challenge your team to solve problems? How are we framing the work that needs to be done? Let's take an example. Let's say a client, Mark, wanted to increase their efficiency with how long it takes to design software solutions. He could tell his team what he wants, or he could challenge his team to find new solutions to efficiencies, which empowers his team to problem-solving and learning. The next pillar is motivation to learn. Internal motivation is the biggest reason that moves adult learners. These internal motivation factors could be anything from your career, family, life situations, and they're individual to each of us. Perhaps you've had a new college graduate that you've hired, and he has a desire to travel the world, experience different cultures, and have an adventure. He wants to get promoted and have a higher salary. You maybe have another more senior employee who is married with two kids whose motivation is to be around his family, save money for a new house. He likes work, but he doesn't want to add too much to his plate as he wants to be home most evenings. He wants to grow, but is not meeting the speed of growth as he had earlier in his career. Motivations for these two employees is very different, and knowing this will help you help them get where they want to go. It helps adults to know what motivates them when they're pursuing learning or education. If you don't know why you want to learn this, the likelihood of it being worth your time or attention is diluted. Understanding your motivation will influence how quickly and comprehensively your learning experience should be. Now let's put all of these together for our final example. Let's say Marcy is a senior director of operations. She and the leadership team decided they need to improve safety protocols for their staff. How could Marcy go about this? Let's explore two possible solutions. One, she could come up with exactly what her team needs to do and give them a list of the changes she wants to see. What would her team's reaction to this be? Would they feel empowered, inspired, or involved? Or she could learn from adult learning theory, and she could reach out to her managers, ask them if they've seen any safety issues lately, if they'd be willing to work on ways to ensure their staff go home safe at the end of each day. This is getting buy-in and seeing if there's readiness for the change. She then could share the problem with them and then ask them to work with their teams to learn what are the major and minor issues, and then have them get back to her by a desired date. She could ask her staff the following questions. What are the major safety concerns you've noticed in the last 60 days, six months? What's causing this problem? What are three to five different solutions to these problems? What could happen if these safety problems were nonexistent? What are the barriers to making these changes? What are the consequences of these changes? What have you seen done successfully in the past that could help make the changes now? What are the most important changes you think we could make? We could go on and on with questions. But now, being Marcy's employee, if she gave you a plan what to do that you had to put through your team, how would that make you feel? Rather than if you had questions that she asked you and got your team involved in, how would that make you feel? I'm sure you said, I would love to do number two. It would feel better. I would have more buy-in. I'm sure I would get better results, but I don't have the time. Well, I want to help you discover how to get more time, but that will have to wait for another episode. Until then, how can you give your staff, your team, your older kids a say in what, when, and how they learn? How can you help them connect with what they're learning to their own experiences and knowledge? How can you connect this information with what will help them either personally or professionally? How can you create problem-based opportunities for your team or family to solve? And how can you find people's motivation for where they want to grow? Now, having an understanding of these pillars of adult learning, how can you use them for your team and for yourself? Now, before I end this episode, I want to say thank you for sharing your time with me. Thank you for listening. And if you found this helpful or have a friend, family member, or colleague that may benefit from this knowledge, will you please share the show? Thank you so much for listening to Shareable. Have a great day.
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