What Have You Learned Lately?
Source: Partner Insights
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by August Aquila.
Everyone in your firm – and this includes you – should have an individual development plan. Learning or development takes place at three levels: Taking courses, learning from others, and on-the-job training.
Perhaps the least effective way is learning from courses. If you are going to send your people to outside courses, make sure that the courses tie into work that the people are currently doing.
Learning from others requires that we receive effective and timely feedback on our performance. Feedback is information that we can use to evaluate and redirect, if necessary, our behavior.
Finally, we learn from ourselves by constantly asking questions about what we are doing, what we have learned and how we can improve from our experiences.
Using all three options in your learning and development plan will make it more effective. See the following learning checklist.
Learning Checklist:
- Why have I been successful in the past?
- Will it make me successful in the future?
- What do I need to do differently today?
- Why do I need to do things differently?
- What do others who work with me say and think about my performance?
- Do I have a list of my short-term and long-term goals posted where I see them every day?
- Do I learn from my mistakes?
- Do I search for innovative ways to approach new situations?
- Do I avoid confronting problems?
- Am I a lifelong learner?
- Do I constantly ask myself “What can I learn?”
- Do I share my goals with others?
- Do I visualize myself attaining my goals?
For the complete article, read “Develop Partners and Staff.”
From Partner Insights, Aquila Global Advisors, LLC, December 2013, http://www.aquilaadvisors.com.