Teach It (if you can)

Happy Friday,

“What one fool can understand, another can.” Richard Feynman

If you have a leader title, you know something about being a leader. But how much do you really know about leadership? Especially highly effective leadership?

The best way to find out how much you know, and coincidently, the best way to learn what you don’t, is to try teaching leadership to a child. So enlist a real or imaginary child and tell them to set aside 15 minutes next week for you to teach them about leadership. Leadership is an invaluable life skill, so it's well worth their time and your effort.

The great physicist Richard Feynman developed this simple technique (in bold) for anyone to thoroughly learn, own, and convey any subject:

The Feynman Technique

1.     Identify the topic – Effective Leadership

2.     Explain the topic as if teaching a sixth-grader – Requires a bit of study. Then, practice making leadership simple, concise, and understandable for a child.

3.     Identify areas of improvement in your explanation - Focus on and improve areas where you struggled or didn’t easily retrieve something from memory.

4.     Improve and optimize your explanation – Based on #3, use simpler words and analogies to make leadership easily understandable.

5.     Repeat the steps until you’ve achieved mastery of the topic - The Feynman Technique requires you to zoom out, then focus on simplicity and understandability. It's hard to get that right the first time, so expect at least a few iterations. 

If the child walks away with a clear understanding of effective leadership, you'll have further refined your own understanding and your ability to communicate it confidently. The job of every leader is to create more leaders. So, having the ability to communicate what effective leadership is is a vital skill every leader should have. So, give a child this valuable life skill - the gift of good leadership. And when you teach it, you'll truly know it.

And have a terrific weekend!

Dave

By the way, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" is a great read.

Your feedback and blowback are always welcome here: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

If you're clever, you'll find all 56 past topics @ goodnewsfriday.com

Written by me, not ChatGPT: speed assist and blunder avoidance by Grammarly