Destination: Success | Get Engaged in your Learning
Last week we got immersed in our learning. This week we get engaged. With so much information out there on any and ALL topics, it is easy to gain knowledge and insight. However, it is just as easy to stop our learning process there. We might invest time looking at training videos online for managing conflict, goal setting, or thousands of other content areas, or we might invest time in offsite training where great information and concepts are shared. But then we look up from our video-based learning or come back from the training session and let the whirlwind of our daily work engulf us and the opportunity to implement what we learned has passed.
Don’t let that happen to you! For sustained personal and team growth and development it is imperative that we engage. Take the concepts, ideas, and lectures and immediately find ways to turn knowledge into action and change. If we don’t, rarely do we change, and our learning efforts are lost or almost certainly minimized. So how do you engage? At Cornerstone Learning all of our training and learning content has the engagement built in so it is easy to engage.
However, if you don’t have engagement opportunities built into the training and development you are participating in, here are some ways for you to turn concept into action:
- Meet with your manager, coach, or mentor and discuss the video, offsite training, book, or article you just completed and highlight the 2-3 core takeaways you feel will help you and have them hold you accountable to implementing those.
- Take your learning and teach others.
- Proactively schedule 15-20 minutes each month with your leader to report on your personal/team learning and change progress from your invested time.
These are just a few ideas that takes knowledge and turns it into meaningful results.
Never stop engaging in your learning! Next week it's time to bring in reinforcement!
To get engaged in our five core leadership skills, check out our Lead Where You Are Passport! It contains courses and other resources focused on accountability, change, performance, relationships, and leading with purpose. And best of all, we're always adding new content, so the learning never stops!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Engaged Learning - Get Immersed!
In developing hundreds of hours of leadership content, learning resources, training, coaching, and learning experiences over the last 25 years, we have learned a lot! The ability to effectively retain knowledge and sustain any long-term change requires an iterative process that immerses, engages, and reinforces the learning over time. The old training model of “spray and pray” wasted time and resources and produced little sustained learning or individual/team growth.
Our experience and success working with hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals show that effective learning, retention, and personal growth starts with establishing a foundation of content, concept awareness, a vision for what future state success looks like after the engaged learning experience is complete and reinforced. This immersion phase is vital to set the right building blocks for learning and change.
As an example, when working with organizations that want to enhance personal and team accountability we start the learning by immersing the participant in what accountability is and is not. We introduce our accountability continuum and provide real case study examples of team and individual accountability that sets the right foundation for personal action planning and long-term reinforcement.
Next week we will build on that foundation of immersion by getting engaged!
To get immersed in our five core leadership skills, check out our Lead Where You Are Passport! It contains courses and other resources focused on accountability, change, performance, relationships, and leading with purpose.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Engage in Your Learning
Just like organizational performance and leadership, learning continues to evolve. 10-15 years ago individuals would sign up for or were told to attend either an internal or external training class. Past training models would consist of 1-5 day training classes depending on content and complexity of the training. The most effective trainings contained some form of experiential learning component like role plays, group work, case studies, etc.
However, retention was limited with little to no active continual reinforcement component. As we work with clients to champion and dramatically impact their overall employee engagement we are challenging past learning models and want to assist you in developing a targeted, engaged learning framework.
If you stay with us over the next 3 weeks you will rise above the age of information to the pinnacle of ongoing, engaged learning. Next week we will explore the immersion phase of engaged learning.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | A Man on the Moon
An engaged team put a man on the moon!
There is a predictable model for team success leading to amazing results. Let's explore the formula for success one team used to literally put a man on the moon.
When President John F. Kennedy first announced that America was going to send a man to the moon, most thought that it was impossible and insane and predictably asked, "Why?". But alas, we know (or most of us know) that he did it!
The formula for success President Kennedy used?
Purpose + Behavior + Commitment + Support = Amazing Things
First have a purpose. It must be compelling, relevant, and go beyond just performing or completing a task. The purpose established by JFK – “Put a man on the moon and return safely by the end of the decade”. Now that was a clear and compelling purpose.
The second element of the formula for team success – behavior. To enable success, a team must identify and consistently display enabling team behaviors. For the Apollo team, they didn’t focus on obstacles, they focused on opportunity. It was about the mission and not personal gain. They worked as one to achieve the purpose and never lost sight of what was truly important. That team had the right behaviors.
The mission required the third element of the success formula; commitment. Not just commitment from the three astronauts who risked their lives, and as a result, became national hero’s either. No, it was the thousands of NASA employees dedicating their lives to the purpose. Even when tragedy struck the program in 1967 and three astronauts lost their lives on the launch pad, commitment to the purpose never wavered. In fact, that incident rallied NASA to ensure that the sacrifice of human lives would not be in vain. It takes real commitment to ensure team success.
And finally, it takes support to succeed. President Kennedy made an appeal to both Congress and the American people on May 25, 1961. “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out; of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth”. The men and women of NASA had the support of the President and now an entire nation.
Because the team had a compelling purpose, showed the right behaviors, were committed to success, and had the support it needed, on July 20, 1969 at 10:56 PM Astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module ladder and planted his foot on the powdery surface. Then on July 24, 1969 the space capsule safely splashed down, completing Apollo 11’s mission and realizing the dreams of a nation.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Don't Wait, Get Engaged!
Employee engagement is on you and me. True engagement is a personal choice. Maybe you don’t how or where to engage but even engaging to find those answers is a critical personal choice. In the last two blog posts we have explored engagement from the organizational level on how to enable engagement and from the leadership level on how to support engagement. Now, we will highlight how to personally engage which, bottom line, is what truly matters.
Let us start with these questions:
Are you personally engaged?
I mean truly engaged?
Do you come in each day to complete your tasks to the highest level and go home satisfied you have earned your pay check?
If so, great! But I challenge you and say there is so much more for you to engage in and contribute to. Organizational performance is evolving and rapidly changing and it requires each of us to actively engage in making success happen versus passively existing and expecting success will just happen to us.
There has not been one employee engagement survey conducted that produced greater employee engagement just by delivering the results of the survey. Not one PowerPoint presentation that explains the power of engaged employees and the initiative’s suggested to improve engagement that has actually engaged any individual employee. It is all just engagement talk, not personal, active engagement.
The only path to improved employee engagement is for each of us as employees to actually engage and stay engaged. We don’t need to wait for an annual survey to tell us we need better engagement. In over 20 years of conducting and looking at employee engagement surveys and scores, only one 500 plus employee organization out of hundreds we have worked with had 98 percent actively employee engagement, no other even comes close….just one! And it took 2 years of enabling and supporting by the organization and leadership, with a focus on engagement, to achieve such success.
So where can we personally engage?
Areas like engaging more actively in your personal performance. Try proactively setting expectations with your manager not your manager setting the expectations with you. And then you setting time on their calendar to actively lead every 6-week performance discussion on your progress to those expectations. That is active engagement!
- Engage in change – see possibilities in everything, think disruptively and create options and recommendations for change. Don’t just embrace change, engage in change.
- Engage in developing authentic relationships, move from transactional interactions to investing in building authentic relationships.
- Engage through accepting personal accountability no matter what. Make things happen, don’t let things drift and just happen.
- Engage with a purpose, find your purpose beyond delivering a task. Come in each day with your task to contribute to a more meaningful purpose in your work.
- Engage by either volunteering for or jump-starting an employee-led engagement team within your organization. Get involved!
There is a lot of talk right now about engagement, but the bottom line is that to get more engagement we have to be the ones to more actively engage.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | The Future of Performance is all about Teams
Performance is evolving from top down, command and control directives to engaged teams that are supported and enabled by leadership and the organization.
The future of organizational performance – A significant portion of work will be conducted by a network of employee engagement teams. These teams provide incredible decision making/problem solving agility and performance. Teams form as needed and disband once success is achieved. Individuals will potentially contribute to a number of teams over the course of any given year.
As this team performance evolves, titles and organization hierarchy become less important. Success is achieved through the teams’ collective knowledge, insight, and experience all guided by a shared vision to achieve a defined purpose. Organization support and formal leadership roles shift from top down decision making and management to enabling performance success by breaking down any barriers that might exist.
The end result of this evolution?
These engagement teams, with the right training, support, and reinforcement, produce amazing results while enhancing productivity, increasing the speed of change, breaking down silos, and engaging every employee in the organization.
Want better employee engagement? The future of performance is all about the team!
For more information on how to develop a fluid, high performance network of teams in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.