Salman Khan became famous for teaching. Now he’s in a different role: Learner.

His Khan Academy is a free online education platform founded in 2006. Its 15 million registered users complete four million math problems per day.

But lately he’s facing a challenge unrelated to long division or polynomials. Khan Academy now counts 80 employees, and its boss has to figure out how to lead a growing organization.

“I’m not an expert manager,” admits the 38-year-old visionary, whose mission is to educate the world for free.

Although he’s achieved great individual success in his short career, Khan knows his organization won’t succeed on vision alone. So recently he’s begun meeting with his top people to develop a leadership and management strategy. “We’re this organization that’s all about learning,” he says. “But I find myself at a spot where it’s like, wow, there’s this whole thing called management. There’s a whole art to it. We’re asking ‘What does management training at Khan Academy mean?’ ”

Salman Khan

Rest assured it won’t mean creating a traditional corporate learning culture. The Khan Academy is about blowing up traditional models. His learning platform gives teachers a completely new way to teach children math, science and other subjects. His challenge now is to figure out a better way to teach his adult leadership team how to motivate, delegate, set goals, monitor performance, hold people accountable, and so on.

The one thing he knows is that the manager is “the most powerful teaching role in an organization” and that managers will be at the center of his learning culture. “It’s an 18th or 19th century phenomenon to say the role of a manager is to get someone to do work,” he explains. “That’s wrong. The role of a modern manager is, ‘How do I develop my people?’ ”

Interesting story: When Khan worked as a senior analyst at a hedge fund before founding Khan Academy, the firm hired some junior analysts. “They were from top Ivy League schools with 4.0 GPAs in economics,” he recalls. “But they didn’t understand the basics of reading a financial statement.”

So Khan, being Khan, created a series of micro lectures on video. One day his boss noticed and Khan’s first reaction was to apologize. That time spent teaching, after all, was time not spent getting stuff done. “But my boss said, ‘No, this is great. I haven’t seen this happening at a hedge fund before.’ “

Khan’s evangelism about putting the manager at the center of organizational learning is anchored in a driving principle that spawned the Khan Academy and sustains it today: People don’t all learn at the same pace.

Which means what Khan calls “the Prussian model” for teaching kids never really worked, and neither does the classroom-style “sage-on-the-stage” model that currently dominates corporate training.

It never made sense to Khan that the kid who’d already figured out long division had to listen to the same math lecture as the kid who was totally lost. The key to successful education is to coach that lost kid, fill in his “gaps,” and get him to achieve mastery of long division before letting him move on to the next thing.

Khan proved this model back in 2004 when he created his first video tutorials for his niece, a seventh-grader who’d been excluded from the advanced math track. She was a thousand miles away, so Khan filled her gaps with short video tutorials. She got into advanced math. And the model for the Khan Academy was born.

Today Khan Academy has half a million registered teachers. Many of them are “filling gaps” in schools using his bite-size learning method. There’s no question he’s changing the way education works.

But Khan laments that today most companies “have formal training programs that mirror traditional academic models,” and they’re making the same mistakes schools did. “There are two things that are even more true about the workplace than the classroom,” he says. “The first is that the differences between people’s gaps in understanding are more diverse. The second is that there is even more need for people to learn asynchronously.”

It’s true that a given workplace team will have wildly varied backgrounds and lack a shared knowledge base to build on. The “gaps” will be huge. While it’s efficient to gather the team for a “synchronous” classroom-style training event where they all learn together, Khan is saying that in the workplace it’s likely to be ineffective. Even more ineffective than it is in schools.

The only alternative to that model is the manager/teacher role. Managers need to assess the gaps of the people they oversee, then coach them at their own pace and help them achieve mastery of skills.

That takes time and effort. And most managers, even those who really want to develop people, will struggle to get it done. So I asked Khan, given the time constraints , and the mindset of most managers, what leaders can do to create a learning culture with the manager/teacher at its center. He suggested three strategies:

Strategy #1: Motivate managers by linking talent development to their compensation. Khan believes most managers aren’t motivated to develop people. And that senior executives, who “have all the levers at their disposal” to incentivize managers, are missing a huge opportunity.

“The main lever is how people are compensated,” Khan says. “Management can make the rubric for how managers are rewarded and promoted. And part of that rubric is, you go to our corporate intranet and you achieve mastery of certain skills, and if you do that you get rewarded.”

The idea of measuring training behavior rather than training results doesn’t sit well with traditional learning professionals. But as I pointed out in a previous article, demonstrating a “training ROI” is often impossible because there are so many variables. More and more companies, including GE, have recognized the futility of correlating soft-skills training to business results. Instead, they’re measuring the behaviors that should logically lead to better results. Engaging in training activity is one such behavior, and it’s relatively easy to measure.

Strategy #2: Make it easier for managers by giving them tools. Khan’s vision of people development at Khan Academy is all about “artifacts,” his word for learning tools. He wants to create a library of internal videos that capture the Khan approach to every imaginable challenge, from “How do you read a financial statement?” to “How do you delegate but not over-delegate?” or “How do you keep a balance between strategic and tactical?”

The idea is to mimic the “flipped classroom” concept that many teachers have adopted using Khan Academy. The teacher assigns an online math module to be watched at home, then coaches students as they do problems in class. So students do classwork at home, and homework in class. The workplace version of this model has managers assigning a training module to their team, then conducting a meeting where they discuss the learning concept and the manager plays the role of coach.

Strategy #3: Set an example. Two years ago Khan sort of accidentally modeled the way for future leaders at his organization. His CEO coach suggested a 360-degree feedback survey, where his team rated Khan (anonymously) on various aspects of leadership. Subjecting yourself to 360 feedback is scary. It’s designed to raise self-awareness by revealing things you don’t know about yourself.

Khan’s results were mixed, and he resisted when his coach suggested he show them to his team. “I’m like ‘Really? How about I just share the positives?’ As a manager I’m this person people are supposed to respect. If I go out there and tell them all my weaknesses, are they going to respect and listen to me? Everyone has that insecurity.”

Eventually Khan revealed the results to his team. They showed that he was a good communicator and visionary, but sometimes didn’t prioritize goals and follow through. “None of us like to hear negative feedback, but it’s powerful,” Khan says. “And my team appreciated me sharing my 360. They were, like, ‘That meant so much to us. That makes us more comfortable. That makes us eager to improve ourselves more.’ ”

Khan lives and works in Silicon Valley, a place where “talent is everything” and personal development is a high priority. Despite the fact he can’t offer huge comp packages with stock options, he’s recruited a world-class staff from elite schools and marquee companies by leveraging his reputation as a teacher. “Only 1% of applicants get through our interview process,” he claims. “And although most of those we accept have offers from Google GOOGL -0.31%, Dropbox, Facebook and other start-ups, we get 70% of them to join us. The reason is that the pitch we make is that ‘We’re a learning organization and we’re going to invest in you. Five, 10, 15 years down the road you’re going to be unstoppable.’ We don’t just say that; we genuinely believe it.”

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemeyer/2014/12/03/salman-khan-the-worlds-best-known-teacher-is-learning-to-lead/

Isn’t it amazing that some people you know always seem to be working hard, but never seem to get anything done? As an entrepreneur, you need to avoid partnering with these people, or hiring them at your startup. The challenge is to find people who get things done, as well as work hard. LinkedIn profiles and resumes still focus too much on responsibilities rather than results.

The best entrepreneurs never confuse motion with results. It’s easy to find people in every organization rushing around from one meeting to the next, often working overtime to generate more work for themselves and other people, but rarely taking the action to close an issue or contract. We all need more people around us who make every motion mean something.

Related: The 3 Qualities of Likable People

So how do you recognize those few people on your team who are getting things done, or even recognize ahead of time those who have that potential? Such people are different, but are not necessarily the smartest or the most skilled. But they do seem to have some common characteristics and approaches that you can look for.

1. Possess street smarts, as well as skills and experience.
People like this quickly figure out how businesses really work, and how to resolve the challenges in their business. They have a special ability to cut through the confusion, dodge any head-on collisions, and negotiate compromises leading to required actions and resolution.

2. Able to avoid or navigate the politics of the organization.
Understanding politics is not the same as being a politician, or using political clout. People who get things done don’t worry about building their own image, but they are politically astute enough to find alternate routes around the political and power bastions.

3. Recognize what it takes to get leverage, but don’t blatantly use it.
The key is to be open and listen to recommendations from those who have to be moved, and find a way to create win-win situations, rather than win-lose. They get things done by using their power to get recognition for key players, rather than for themselves.

4. Maintain a laser focus on narrowing the scope, rather than expanding it.
This means effective negotiating to eliminate sidetracks, combat opinions with facts and finding the glass half-full. It requires being able to accurately assess the position of others, find some common ground and snapping people back to reality.

Related: 8 Entrepreneurial Qualities That Contribute to Success

5. Able to negotiate agreements without committing to future paybacks.
People who get things done are driven by an insatiable desire to make progress and help others. They are not looking to build a cache of favors or special attention, and are not willing to make deals that compromise the solutions and can come back to haunt them.

6. See every problem as an opportunity to innovate, rather than a chance to fail.
Obstacles are seen as innovative and creative challenges, not barriers. All the reasons something can’t be done are replaced by better ways to get it done, quicker and at less cost. Nothing is immutable, even the culture of the organization or the business.

7. Able to balance the paradoxes of highly effective leaders.
People who know how to get things done can be analytical as well as intuitive, aggressive or patient as required, and confident and humble at the same time. They instinctively know when and how to escalate issues to the right level, without stubbornly entrenching their position.

To get things done more effectively, people need to really think about each element of their work before they make a move. By culture and habit, many of us expect most of our daily work and personal activities to be pre-defined, and we just go through the paces (the way it’s always been done). We need to practice overt thinking about desired outcomes to make them a reality.

If your desired outcome is to move up in the organization, or just to get more satisfaction from your daily efforts, now is the time focus on the attributes listed above, and emulate the people on your team who get things done.

If you are the entrepreneur or executive in the organization, make sure you are the role model in execution and in hiring. That’s the only way to win in the long run.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239944