What Has Been Your Most Inspirational Learning Experience?
This week I'm posting positive questions from the Encyclopedia of Positive Questions by Dianna Whitney and I'm inviting you to respond to those questions via comments so we can gather positive stories of our career growth and leadership.
Continuous Learning
In a changing world, competitive advantages goes to those organizations and individuals that can change, grow or learn fasters than others. When at their best, organizations embrace continuous learning and become learning organizations in which people continuously challenges themselves to move out of their comfort zone, think in new ways and acquire new knowledge and experiment with different ways of working.
Continuous learning creates an exciting work environment, full of creative possibilities for the organization and its members. It stimulates people to go beyond the usual to discover and create better, more financially and socially effective ways of doing things.
- Describe an organization or environment that you've been in that has most inspired you and others to want to learn.
- What made this such a favorable place for learning?
- How did you and others grow and change as a result of being in this environment?
- What contributions were you able to bring back to one another, the organization, or the world at large as a result of having been part of this system?
- Every time we learn, we become bigger people. Even if we learn something that seems to have nothing to do with our work, the changes we experience as we learn make a difference in our work performance.
- What are your personal learning challenges--the things that you're curious about, that you'd like to learn more about, that will help you become a bigger human being?
- In what ways will you change as you grow into these new aspects of who you are?
- How do you see this new you contributing within your organization?
If this question seems like too much, respond to just one aspect of it in comments. Let's get out of discussions of deficits and learn from what's positive and strong in our lives.
Join Rebecca Fabiano and I tomorrow, January 14, at 7 p.m. (EST) on Blab when we'll be talking Leadership 2016 Resolutions. How do you want to grow as a leader this year? What are your goals and how do you plan to get there? What are your favorite resources for leadership growth? It will be a fun, interesting conversation--we hope you can be there!
I'll be first to chip in! I love learning new things but I find the challenge to be choosing between large scale new skills (such as a non-coder learning to code) versus doing easier things that would benefit me more at work in the short term (such as an eLearning course on some of our software platforms or a generic skill like using excel in more advanced ways). The boss is more likely to favour the latter whereas I would rather learn the former, albeit it would mean having to do it entirely in my own time!
Posted by: Shane | July 04, 2017 at 11:00 AM
Thanks for sharing, Shane! I would suggest that in today's economy, taking the time to learn to code (as a non-coder) would actually be a much better learning project for you to pursue. One of the things I see frequently is that people focus on learning the things that would help them in their current employment, when they should really be focused on keeping themselves competitive in the longer term. Also, everyone should know how to do some coding as increasingly we are seeing this becoming necessary for most higher-level, higher-skilled jobs. Plus, it sounds like you'd enjoy it. So I say, start learning to code! :-)
Posted by: Michele | July 05, 2017 at 07:11 AM