Increasing your effectiveness is critical to overcoming the challenges we face today.
That's why you need to be in the driver's seat when we talk about development and guide your growth. You don't need to wait for someone else to provide you with resources, tools, or opportunities. You have to take responsibility for it. Nobody is going to be as interested as you in your own development. This is a personal commitment. You can decide when, how, and why you want to grow. You'll need to be proactive.
Building your personal effectiveness is a complex process that requires a thoughtful development plan that you need to put into action. It involves reflection on the process, evaluating successes and learnings, and the impact of our decisions. Jerry Colonna, a personal coach, says that growth is painful; that is why so few choose to do it. Growth and comfort rarely co-exist.
A study of highly successful managers showed that 70 percent of what they learned about how to be good managers they did from experience. So, learning by doing, when these assignments are high-challenge experiences, is the one that would promote maximal learning.
In her book The Power of Flexing, Susan Ashford shared some ideas on how the experience could be your best teacher:
Taking on unfamiliar responsibilities. An experience that involves unfamiliar responsibilities usually offers significant potential for personal challenge and growth.
Leading change. It has long been said that if you want to understand something truly, try to change it. Taking steps to create that change will require you to dive deeply into the nature of the status quo and its reasons. It will also require you to understand and deal with the psychological and emotional reasons why some team members will support the change while others resist it and to explore how you can be most influential with them.
Addressing a high-stakes challenge. Not all job assignments are equally important. Some involve levels of risk and reward that are unusually high, with potentially significant implications for the future of the entire organization.
Crossing Boundaries. Work across organizational or professional boundaries. Leading an initiative requires both support from top management and cooperation from colleagues in other departments of the organization. To succeed, you’ll need to learn how to influence people and groups over whom you have no direct authority and who may even have strong reasons to oppose your plans.
Working with Diversity. Anytime you have to work with people who differ from you and each other in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, background, values, and perspectives, the potential for misunderstanding and conflict increases —while at the same time, the potential for creative exchange and fruitful discovery also increases.
Facing Adversity. Usually, the most important lessons learned came from career lows, not the highs. It’s ironic since we spend most of our lives trying to avoid those lows. Of course, we often discover the lessons from adversity only later, after the adversity has been overcome, reframed, or resolved.
An important conclusion about how experience could be a good teacher is that experiences themselves don’t teach. Growth and learning don’t “just happen” automatically. People need to want to learn. That means that people need the right mindset and the motivation to learn.
But from another perspective, it’s profoundly empowering. You don’t need to wait around for others to choose you. You don't need to wait to be selected for a corporate program or special initiative, or assignment. Instead, you can use your current experiences, whatever they are, to begin growing yourself. You only need the commitment to learn.