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Personal Business Coach
Inspired Development and Coaching |
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Learning for peak performance
Here at Inspire our number one objective is to help organisations and individuals achieve superior performance. Normally this is achieved by helping people to learn to think and behave in new ways, as well as unlearning old, habitual and ineffective ways.
This begs an interesting and fundamental question. How do highly effective individuals and teams learn to think and behave as they do? The answer is not immediately evident, but it is extremely important. If we do not know how managers learn, then how can we design learning and development interventions that we can be confident will deliver the payback we require.
I have on many occasions asked a room full of experience managers and leaders how specifically they gained the knowledge, skills and experience that now allows them to perform as well as they do. Interestingly, in all the years I have posed this question, I have rarely ever heard managers mention training courses or classroom experiences as important sources of learning for them. Instead, most examples are about surmounting challenges and / or working with a valued mentor.
From this exercise, I have found a number of common characteristics that are repeatedly mentioned by excellent learners. The best learners seem to be:
Ready to try new things
Prepared to fail
Aware of their shortcomings
Clear about what they want to achieve
Setting themselves a series of targets and being clear about when that are/ are not reaching them
Questioning how they are approaching a task or problem
Identifying new ways of doing things
Identifying new needs that occur
Looking creatively at ways of fulfilling those needs, evaluating their progress against pre set targets
Effectively, what it seems to boil down to is that they are fully engaged in a mindful way in everything that they do. They do not take things for granted. This can take more effort, but it also creates more energy, more motivation and more personal reward.
In our view, this means that all effective development interventions must make sure that learners are able to do the following:
Establish effectiveness criteria for themselves
Measure their effectiveness
Identify their learning needs
Planning their personal learning
Taking advantage of learning opportunities
Reviewing their own learning process
Listening to others
Accepting help
Facing unwelcome information
Taking risks and tolerating anxieties
Analyse what other successful performers do
Know themselves
Share information
These design principles apply equally to on the job development, coaching, leadership programmes and formal training programmes. All such interventions must be fully tailored to the needs of given individuals and groups and then designed to incorporate as many of the above principles as possible.
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