Here is an excerpt from an article written by Gianpiero Petriglieri for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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When I am invited to “teach leadership” to managers in corporations, I use the first few minutes to address the issue of where and how one learns to lead—and what gets in the way. I usually begin with a confession and a question.

My confession is always the same. That I am hoping to learn something from our encounter, brief as it may be, that I will remember and use. This is what I believe good leaders and good teachers have in common—the commitment to keep learning as they practice.

I have never met a manager who disagrees. Good leaders, they tell me, like good teachers, raise tough questions and make others feel stretched, empowered, inspired. Mediocre ones issue commands and make others feel overlooked, bored, underutilized.

My question is different every time. It usually has to do with some aspect of leading that people in the room will have divergent views about. Is honesty necessary to lead, or just desirable? Or: What makes a responsible follower?

Raising a controversial question is not an unusual way to begin a presentation. It energizes the audience. But keep the debate going for more than a few minutes, and regardless of how informative it is, restlessness begins to set in. There’s inevitably a challenge like, “We are spending precious time here, you are getting paid for yours, and we are no closer to a clear answer.”

I have come to wait, if with some trepidation, for such remarks.

I am a professor. Learning is, broadly speaking, my job. And yet no matter how enthusiastically we agree that good teachers and good leaders are perpetual learners, and that being offered a difficult question is empowering, it does not take long before I am reminded that I am not supposed to keep questioning and learning—not so publicly at least—on the company’s dime.

I am supposed to deliver.

The reminder is hardly surprising but how quickly it comes is revealing. It is a great illustration of a contradiction that affects most managers every day: learning is the most celebrated neglected activity in the workplace.

Everyone says that learning is essential for companies’ success—and for your own. And yet, on a daily basis, who cares for your learning? No one. People care about what you have learned. They care about your results. Learning is great as long as you do it quietly, in your own time.

This is only fair, you may say. In business, after all, delivering is what counts. Learning matters to the extent that it helps one deliver and does not get in the way.

But learning [begin] does get in the way of delivering. Especially learning of the transformational kind—that makes us tentative, confused, and ineffective for a while. And we do not neglect it just because we lack time.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders. He also has a Medical Doctorate and a specialization in psychiatry. You can find him on Twitter@gpetriglieri.