The most powerful weapon

“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”?—Malcolm S. Forbes?

I was at my son’s college graduation this weekend and one of the many great speakers of the day reminded us of this great quote from Malcolm Forbes.??The value of education, the value of continuous learning, the value and power of our minds.

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”.?- Malcolm X

Education opens our minds and introduces us to the world so we can learn and explore. The more we explore, the more we respect and understand our world. The more we explore, the closer we get to the truth.??This is true in our personal lives, as well as in our business careers.??Education?connects us with the stories, theories and accomplishments of people, businesses, cultures, and generations. It offers us a body of knowledge greater than we can ever experience in our lifetime.

From Forbes magazine (Ashu Goel), “Speed, agility, flexibility – companies value these traits today. Such characteristics come only when a business has employees who are inquisitive, engaged, think dynamically, and can make decisions quickly to impact the business. To build such an organization, companies and leaders must nurture a culture of continuous learning – something that seems intuitive, but is quite challenging”

What stops us as company leaders from building this type of culture? Today, everyone is busy – busy with projects, deadlines, meetings, emails, texts, and the new pressures the post-pandemic, hybrid work world has created. Thus, our focus is on fixing immediate, pressing problems versus truly solving our long-term goals, such as developing our teams.?

Even before the pandemic, an article in Harvard Business Review shared the results of a survey showing HR executives surveyed expected managers to spend about 36% of their time supporting the development of subordinates. The same survey showed managers dedicating only 9% of their time to this cause. A gap.??A miss.??A disconnect.

Several factors contribute to the disconnect. Our typical organizational structure and management style is often hierarchical, so learning flows from the top downward. In this case, departments can become siloed and opportunities to interact and learn from one another fade away – especially in our new video/remote worker driven world.?

Complacency is another factor impacting our learning. Our teams become comfortable with the modus operandi and avoid – and even resist – opportunities to discover new ways to work together – learn together. We have seen this play out in our declining feelings of connectivity with our coworkers through the pandemic.??We just moved to video, not taking the time to adjust and change to meet the differing demands of a video driven workplace.??

How do we change our ways???We need to begin with empowering a continuous learning culture for our teams.?

Creating this culture will empower team members who want to learn and grow and not stay satisfied with past achievements. Because they own and control the learning process themselves, our teams continually increase their knowledge, become more competent, innovate more regularly and better develop future leaders. In effect, our team drives itself to new heights – ones often beyond even our most visionary manager.

Everyone’s experience at work differs of course, but there are some broad commonalities among our teams: There are?almost 800 million knowledge workers, and they sit in front of a computer for almost 7 hours a day.???On most days, they spend?almost 30% of their time on email, 20% of their time gathering information (searching for data), and 15% of their time communicating internally (in formal and informal meetings). Those three activities combined constitute almost two-thirds of the total time at work for this vast population (HBR, Bersin & Sanders).

“Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.”?Albert Einstein

Continuous learning is the process of intentionally expanding our skills and knowledge for our own personal, professional, and organizational improvement. The most classic example of continuous learning is when our team member learns new hard skills, enabling them to gradually move up to more complex and challenging roles.?

While personal growth and professional growth may seem like two separate concepts, they’re more intertwined than we may think. As a leader, it’s crucial to learn how to develop a growth mindset not only in ourselves, but also throughout our entire team. By intentionally allocating time for growth, team members simultaneously become more invested in themselves and the success of the company. Team members engaged in personal growth are often more productive, less stressed, and more likely to produce better results.??A growth mindset involves embracing the idea that challenges are meant to be overcome and every opportunity (positive or negative) presents a chance to grow.

People with a growth mindset believe to improve, we must be intentional (Forbes, Andrew Rains). This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, which psychologist and Stanford professor Carol Dweck describes as those who see their abilities as fixed traits that cannot change.

How do we own our development in this new world???

We start by creating a written plan to hold ourselves accountable and put time on our calendar to chip away at growth goals. Take the same discipline we apply to other areas in our life — like never missing a daily walk, or bike ride, or pickleball match — and apply that dedication to our personal growth.

We need to also find a time commitment that works for us.?Don’t set ourselves up for failure by setting unrealistic goals. Maybe reading one book per month isn’t realistic for me. What about 15 minutes a day? Or a few audio books per month? Set ourselves up for success by committing to an obtainable goal.

We should also collaborate to create accountability.?Hopefully, we won’t go through this journey alone, and we can find others in our company to forge a bond with and help hold each other accountable. Book clubs, article sharing, lunch discussions…

Curiosity goes hand in hand with our growth mindset.?When we stay curious, we don’t fall into a fixed mindset. Make “why” and “how” frequent parts of our vocabulary and commit to an “always be learning” mindset — even if we’ve reached the pinnacle of our career.

“Motivation gets you going, but discipline keeps you growing.”?– John C Maxwell

Here are things we can do to take control of our career development (HBR Carter Cast):

Understand what we’re evaluated on.?What does success look like in our position? What are our job goals and success metrics? It’s best to identify these with our manager, but if that is not happening, then write down what we understand the goals and key performance indicators to be. Take them to our boss to get their agreement and engage in an ongoing dialogue to ensure we stay on the right track.

Solve for our own blind spots.?Top performers are always learning and adjusting, and routinely seek feedback from our boss, peers, and subordinates. If our boss doesn’t proactively give us feedback, start the conversation yourself. After a presentation or big meeting, state one thing that you think went well, and then ask for advice on one thing you could improve. It’s best to keep it simple; most people can only absorb one area to improve at a time. Listen to and thank your boss for the feedback.

Increase our visibility with the C-suite.?It’s not always possible to get noticed by our senior leaders through our direct work, so we might try volunteering for new initiatives, such as key projects, task forces, charity work, company events, or even on-campus recruiting. This is an easy but often overlooked way to meet with senior people who will see us in action and ideally take notice of our contributions.

Become an expert in an area of increasing importance?to our company.?Our company may be grappling with a disruption from a new technology such as VR in the operating room, artificial intelligence, or cloud-based computing.??Or we may be facing a pandemic, a worker shortage or increasing inflation. Become the expert person in our department on an emerging issue. Conduct research and literature reviews, attend conferences, or write on the topic. Developing expertise in a nascent area of growing importance can lead to promotions and other career opportunities.

Always seek out good counsel and mentoring.?The perspective of a senior person is invaluable but pouncing on someone — “Will you be my mentor?” —?is likely to scare them off. Try to meet in an informal way: in the coffee shop in our company’s cafe, or at the company sales event or golf outing. Know the person’s background and be prepared to ask a few good questions related to their area of expertise. If things go well, you’ll hear, “If I can help you, let me know.” A week or so later, we can extend an invitation to “continue the conversation” over coffee. In time, a mentor relationship may develop organically – and those are the most successful.

Our skill set is ultimately our career capital, so we need to take the time to develop our functional skills. Jumping from job to job too quickly (say, in 18-month or two-year increments) won’t allow us to develop the functional expertise we need to advance our career. With time and patience, and by taking the initiative, we’re far more likely to thrive in this DIY world.

From Indeed.com, the most effective life lessons are learned through experience rather than reading or being told about them. Whether we’re working our first job or we’re years into a career, each life lesson learned along the way is an immensely important one.

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another”?– G.K. Chesterton.?

Always strive to avoid stagnation

Stagnation is often an unavoidable part of a job, and it can affect even the hardest-working individuals. Times of stagnation can happen for several reasons, such as becoming too comfortable with a situation or giving up on a challenging problem. A valuable life lesson we can learn from work is that those who always strive to learn more and continue to progress through times of stagnation are those who succeed.?

We should always be learning and bettering ourselves as a person. Just because we’ve succeeded doesn’t mean we should stop trying to improve as a person and an employee. Furthermore, being in a challenging situation doesn’t mean we should be resigned to our fate.

As we try new things to fight off stagnation, we may make mistakes or come up against challenges. It’s important to remember to view each misstep as a learning opportunity and to remember that even experts make mistakes.

How we should combat stagnation depends on us. For example, we could learn a new skill that’s always interested us. The key is to constantly be working to improve our job performance as well as our personal development. Work hard to get that promotion just as hard as we would on our passion project at home. With hard work both at work and in life, our days will be happier, and each will have more significance.

Make connecting with others a priority

Another important lesson we may learn at work is how valuable connections with other people are. Whether it’s with a professional colleague, friend or family member, each relationship we build with another person adds another beam of support to what we’re building for ourselves.?

Though there’s much we can create by working alone, the greatest success often comes when we create and work with a network of friends and colleagues. Think about our personal life—would it be where it is today without the connections and relationships, we’ve built with the people we love the most? Each person in our network is a valuable member of our team and adds invaluable quality to our life.

Ask questions, listen to people’s opinions and stories, use our own strengths to help them with their projects and problems and don’t be afraid to open up to our work network. Plus, we may be surprised to realize that what makes a great professional team can also be implemented to foster our relationships with friends and family. Making connections with others a priority is an important lesson that can improve every aspect of our life both in and out of work.

Remember to look on the bright side

Every day isn’t going to be the best day and some days can be downright challenging. However, if we can remember to look on the bright side, the difficult days can be just another way to grow in both our career and life in general.

This life lesson is an important one when we’re in a job we don't like. This situation can be especially challenging and, when left unchecked, can negatively impact not only our work life but our life outside of work as well. Focusing on the positive rather than the negative can help turn the situation around. For example, enjoying a project we do well or taking advantage of a free office lunch may seem small in the grand scheme of things but are ways in which we can look on the bright side and remain positive.

Being able to remain positive and look at things with optimism is an invaluable life lesson. The more we can improve our outlook and the less the small things affect us, the better we’ll be able to handle challenges in both our professional and personal life. As a result, we’ll find ourselves happier and more content no matter the situation.

Focus on developing and using our strengths

Finding out what we enjoy doing and what we’re truly good at as well as how to develop those areas is an important lesson we can learn at work. While it may take time, determining where we excel in our career can be one of the most rewarding gifts of having a job and something we can’t learn outside the workforce.??Keep in mind that no one is an overnight expert and that we’ll have to work hard to get to where we want to be. While anyone can be good at something with enough hard work, those who find pride and enjoyment in their work will succeed more than those who don’t.

Realizing where our strengths and passions lie enables us to set concrete goals in our professional life and gives us an actionable plan to achieve them. Focus on whatever it is that makes us feel like we’re doing the best work we can and develop those skills to create the best world for ourselves. With enough endurance, motivation, and commitment, we’ll find that we truly enjoy honing our workplace strengths.

Work until the work is done

One of the first lessons we may learn when starting to work is what happens when we procrastinate. Procrastination has clear repercussions in the workplace and can result in challenges such as falling behind with our tasks. Committing ourselves to work until our work is done is a valuable life lesson that can prevent hardships and increase our overall productivity and success.

This lesson doesn’t have to be limited to our professional work. When translated to our personal life, it’s just as applicable. For instance, think about a project we decided to start but didn’t finish. Think about a goal we thought we might want to work toward, but didn’t for some reason, whether it be lack of time, will or energy. Just like we don’t stop working until we’ve done our job at work, we shouldn’t stop working for ourselves at home. Dedicate time to learn that new skill we’ve been wanting to learn, complete those projects or reach out to someone we’ve been meaning to. The more time we invest in doing the things we set out to do, the more accomplished and satisfied we will feel.

Trust in the power of failure

As we work toward our professional goals, we will inevitably experience challenges and make mistakes. Not everything we do will be successful. But don’t stress about these failures. With no mistakes, there would be no opportunity to learn.

Every failure gives us the chance to grow both personally and professionally. There is no better way to know what works than knowing what doesn’t.

The life lesson here is that without taking risks and making mistakes, we run into a problem discussed earlier: stagnation. Playing it safe may allow us to slide by, but often we’ll plateau in our journey while the risk-takers keep climbing up. In work, taking a risk may be asking for a raise, suggesting a change to the status quo, or starting a new career.

Remember that everything is a learning experience, failures, and successes alike. What we take away from failure is up to us. In a situation where we experience failure, we can either see it as a challenge or use it as a learning experience to know how to better navigate your next endeavor. The choice is up to us.

“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.”?Nelson Mandela?

Together.??We.??Win.