Skip to content

UXL Blog

“Creating Successful Leaders”

Tag Archives: Learning Agility

October 2, 2013 Author Ken Blanchard on Collaboration

Even if you’re an introvert, there comes a time for everyone where their own brain needs an outside boost for generating ideas. Author and management expert Ken Blanchard gives us a few of his experiences that showed him the power of working alongside others. It’s only a 16 minute talk, and well worth the watch.

A few quick takeaways from the talk:

1. As Blanchard puts it, “no one of us is as smart as all of us.” A team of diverse minds will always outdo a lone wolf. This isn’t just because of more manpower, but because each individual brings a unique perspective and voice, making for a much deeper product.

2. Collaboration isn’t always an instant success. You may have trouble at the get-go trying to get things done, especially if you’re a new team. You may also feel that your best ideas come when you’re on your own. Don’t get discouraged if collaboration seems unproductive at first. In fact, it is productive even at the “worst” meetings. Just by being around a group of people united behind a project, a seed will have been planted in your mind that wasn’t there before the collaboration began. And if you are one of those lone wolf idea-generators, you can use the time in between meetings to ponder and come back to the team rejuvenated.

3. Be open to all types of collaboration. In my experience, the best collaborations aren’t planned. As long as you have an open mind and an ear to the ground for potential projects, you’ll be surprised by all the opportunities you never knew were all around you.

Tags: , , , , ,

August 28, 2013 Learning Agility: Diving In Even When You’re Scared

When learning something new, we instinctively keep it close and secret until we feel confident that we’ve got it down pat. Usually this is because we feel embarrassed by our clumsiness with new skills. However, we can’t learn until we apply our skills, which means a bit of screwing up. You’ll find that even though screwing up might be hard on your ego, it’ll increase the rate at which you learn and respond in unique situations.

This is because of a special nerve in our bodies, called the vagus nerve. As Christopher Bergland explains in this article on Psychology Today, “When people say ‘trust your gut’ they are in many ways saying, ‘trust your vagus nerve.’ Visceral feelings and gut-instincts are literally emotional intuitions transferred up to your brain via the vagus nerve.”

Bergland goes on to say that we can teach ourselves to respond positively to the “gut-feeling” we get from the vagus nerve by being in tune with the loop between our bodies and minds and using this awareness to our advantage. Instead of choking under pressure, which comes from a negative response from the vagus nerve, we can control its signals and stay calm under stress.

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out and look for the most stressful situation you can find and purposely make your learning experience as intense as possible. Many people thrive under pressure, while others do much better using more gradual methods, and I understand that. I do want to encourage you to push the limits you think you have when you’re taking on something new, because:

1. Most of us underestimate ourselves.

2. Most of us overestimate the thing we’re learning.

3. You won’t really know how true either of the above are until you go out and see for yourself.

Examples of diving in:

-Giving a presentation using material you’re new to. Of course, don’t do this at your next big, job-on-the-line presentation, but do try out new materials, approaches and styles when you have a less career-defining presentation.

-Teaching yourself a skill that is outside your normal set of skills. If you’re a numbers wiz, try out some of the good literature. If you’re an extravert, try meditation. If you’re shy, try the above suggestion!

-Wearing your mistakes as badges, knowing that each falter invariably pushes you closer to mastery.

How do you deal with handling pressure? How does it impact your ability to learn?

Tags: , , , , , ,

July 24, 2013 Learning Agility In Practice

To wrap up this series on learning agility, I thought I’d provide some examples of how this set of attributes leads to greater success.

We can better understand what learning agility is when we set it up alongside what it is not. As outlined in the post from two weeks ago, learning agility can be broken down into four categories: Innovation, Reflection, Performance, and Risk-taking. The Center for Creative Leadership out of the Colombia Teachers College breaks it down in this way:

Innovation:

Do you challenge the status quo when trying to make improvements, OR, do you make do with what you have at your disposal?

There’s nothing wrong with making do with what you have. But when that becomes your M.O., then you are probably limiting yourself in vision. When it comes to all the major breakthroughs we see in history, they all shared the same characteristic of bravely pushing the envelope on what is possible.

Performance:

Do you stay calm in the face of a stressful situation, OR, do you use stress as energy to get things done more quickly?

This skill can be especially difficult. We all like to think that in stressful situations, we always remain calm and focused. But if we’re honest, we can point to many instances when our stress and emotions got the better of us.

Being an agile performer means that we release the rigid expectations we apply to ourselves and to those around us. The more we stay entrenched in a stubborn view of how everyone else ought to behave, the more stressed out we get. The more stressed out we get, the worse we perform. I’m sure you see how this can become a pretty miserable cycle.

Reflection:

Do you use past failures as lessons, OR, do you quickly put your failures behind you and focus on the next challenge?

If you tend toward the latter, you’re probably repeating many of the same mistakes without even knowing it. Examining how you screwed up is hard, since it shakes up our ego. But a good learner swallows their pride and uses their failures as lessons, which reduces failure in the long run.

Risk-taking:

Do you take on challenges that are ambiguous, new, or otherwise challenging, OR, do you take on challenges where you know you’ll be successful?

Too many of us avoid throwing ourselves into anything unfamiliar, but because an agile learner uses failure as a lesson, they know that new experiences may yield short-term discomfort and failure in return for long-term success. When failure is reduced to a necessary discomfort with a life lesson inside it, the idea of taking on something new becomes much less scary.

All these characteristics enable the agile learner to see opportunities and fearlessly pursue them, embracing failure as  a catalyst for insight, and new challenges as welcome motivation. And this can be you! It starts with the little challenges and reflections, a bit of open-mindedness, and it snowballs from there.

Tags: , , , , ,