Key to succeeding at leadership in today is our ability to learn new skills to improve the way we lead. But how can we consistently apply these new skills over the long run, instead of falling back on old habits? In this episode of Leadership Biz Cafe, I share 3 simple steps that will make your learning more effective.
As I share in this episode of my leadership podcast, this topic was inspired by a question I got from one of my listeners about how to make sure that when leaders at his organization attend conferences or corporate training events, they take what they’ve learned and apply it to how they lead their divisions, and not slowly revert back to their previous day-to-day work routines
Now I’ve been asked this question many times at the various leadership keynotes and corporate training events I lead. In fact, I even have a leadership keynote, “Shifting from Training People to Continuously Improving Talent” that I created in response to fielding this question from so many leaders on how to ensure their learning and development initiatives they provide to their employees truly pay off over the long run.
Granted, there’s no way I can distill an hour leadership keynote into a short 15 minute episode. So what I decided to do was use the wonderful book “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath, research from a Stanford neuroscientist and a Harvard psychologist who was a guest on a previous episode of my leadership podcast, along with the productivity secret of a well known, highly successful person to create a framework of 3 simple steps that will make the insights and skills you learn stick.
(It’s so good I’m actually thinking of adapting it into some of my leadership keynotes and corporate training programs).
The simple fact is that part of dealing with change and change management is our ability to be adaptive and resilient. And that requires we not only be able to make time to learn about new insights, behaviours and skills that can help facilitate us with these changes, but that we retain that learning so we can change our perception and outlook and with it, how we operate on a given day.
While I can’t give you a detailed map of how you’re going to achieve this from start to finish, the 3 steps I share in this episode will help make sure that whatever skill or behaviour you want to adapt as part of your leadership toolkit not only sticks, but helps you drive the outcomes that will fuel your organization’s success and longevity.
It’s a power-packed 15 minutes that will no doubt change both the way you view learning, as well as how you learn. So be sure to grab a pen and paper and let the learning begin!