Tag Learning

Do you Know Enough to Succeed?

Steve Keating 7 Comments

So, when do you know enough to know that you can stop learning? 

I have no idea when I’ll know enough to believe that I essentially know it all, or at least know all I need to know. I do know for sure that I still have much to learn, in fact, I doubt I’ll actually live long enough to know as much as I need to.

But I’ve have come across people who do know enough…at least they think they do.

I’ve written before about a marketing consultant who I was thinking about hiring to evaluate the effectiveness of some training we were doing. He noticed the credentials after my name and asked what they stood for. I explained what they were and then said perhaps he might be interested in the marketing certification. He politely told me that he already knew “all there was to know about marketing” so he wouldn’t be interested. 

I knew in that moment we wouldn’t be using his services. Successful people learn something new almost every day and believing that you already know it all can make it very difficult to learn something new. If you can’t learn you can’t grow and if you can’t grow it is unlikely your success will continue for very long.

Recently I had a conversation with a similarly minded person. They have done very well for themselves, advancing up their organization’s ladder very quickly. By anyone’s measure they certainly appear to be a true success….at least for now.

There were a few of us talking and the subject of this blog come up. Someone asked this highly successful person if they subscribed to my blog. The successful person looked a bit puzzled and then said “why would I read his blog, I’m far more successful than he is, and “besides I know pretty much everything I need to know to succeed already.” In defense of this person they did not say it with apparent malice or contempt, they clearly meant me no harm. They simply said it in such a way as to indicate that they truly believed it.

Probably because of what I do for a living I instantly wondered how this person had achieved their level of success with that kind of attitude. I also knew immediately that this person had in fact much to learn. They needed to learn a bit of humility but beyond that they needed to learn that everyone knows something that they don’t. That means that there isn’t a person a earth that we can’t all learn something from. The most successful people know that, they also know that learning never stops. 

In my book the day you stop learning is the day you start declining. I wish nothing but continued success for that highly successful person but it appears they believe they have already reached the pinnacle of their success. Maybe someone should tell them that once you reach the top there is no where to go but down.

If success is your goal feel free to stop learning the moment you think you’ve achieved success. If long-term success is your goal then you need to know that you don’t know enough. You don’t know enough today and you won’t know enough tomorrow.

Keep learning and keep learning from anyone and everything you can. Learning is a life-long endeavor and here’s hoping you have a very long life!

 

Do You Have Gaps?

Steve Keating 9 Comments

The only honest answer to that question is yes. If you’re a leader who believes they don’t have any gaps in their skills or abilities then you are likely a leader who has been blinded by their success.

Even the most successful, authentic, and committed leaders have skill gaps. They have gaps not because they are poor leaders but because they are human. All humans have gaps of one type or another, I’m guessing it’s just part of being alive.

Authentic Servant Leaders deal with their gaps in one of two ways, they either grow themselves to fill their own gaps or they hire people who can fill the gaps for them. Most likely, they do some of both. They realize that they can’t excel at everything and they also realize that not everything that needs to be done needs to be done by them.

Step one for filling your gaps is acknowledging that you have some. 

This is going to require honesty and the courage to admit to some shortcomings. You will never fill a gap that you can’t admit to having so admit where you’re weak and deal with it. If you’ve decided to fill your own gap then take a class, read a book, talk with your mentor or someone who doesn’t have that particular gap. Whatever you do, do it now! Procrastination is the worst possible way to deal with any gap.

If you’re going to hire someone to fill your gap then once they are hired you need to allow them to actually fill it. Let them do their job. Micro-managing something that you couldn’t manage to begin with is totally unproductive and will quickly destroy the morale of the “gap-filler” you just hired. If you’ve summoned up the courage to acknowledge your gap and you’ve hired a qualified individual to fill it then dig a bit deeper for even more courage to let them do their job. 

Mentor if you must, (and yes, you must) but don’t mettle in details that you don’t truly understand. Remember why you hired the person in the first place!

The acknowledgement of gaps and the process of filling them is a constant of leadership. As a leader you can never stop growing, you can never stop learning and you absolutely can’t afford to think for even a moment that you’ve learned all you need to know. 

Great leaders never get where they are going because once they get someplace they know that they aren’t there anymore. Great leaders know that few things of consequence stay the same for even a second, almost everything is always changing. That’s why true leadership isn’t a destination, its a journey. (Just an aside here, principles and core values DO NOT change, regardless of the circumstances a leader may find themselves in) 

The very second you start to think you’re “good enough” you’re not good enough anymore. So don’t think in terms of good, focus on better, always better, and as your abilities and knowledge grow your gaps will shrink. 

Now, do you have gaps?

When You Know It All

Steve Keating 3 Comments

A while back I was meeting with a representative of a company that helped learning organizations measure the effectiveness of their training. We got off track a bit and were discussing various certifications and I mentioned a certification for marketing executives that I had initially earned several years before. I told him that there was a lot of education and testing involved in earning and maintaining that very challenging certification. 

He stated that he wouldn’t need anything like that because he already knew all he needed to know to succeed in his career. I was polite and finished out the meeting but I knew in that moment I would not be using this person or their organization. 

If he already knew everything then it meant that he had nothing left to learn. It may have even become impossible for him to learn. I couldn’t help but wonder how this know it all would ever learn enough about my organization to actually help us. I figured if we used him we would be getting some cookie cutter measuring system that was a “one size fits all” deal. That was not what I was looking for… at all.

Talking with him reminded me of the story about the United Sates Patient Office closing in 1899 because “everything that could be invented, already was.” The office never actually closed but there were “know it alls” at the time who recommended that it should.

Truly successful people will never be a know it all. They know they can’t know it all and they know that they don’t have to. They also know what they don’t know. 

Truly successful people learn something new every day. They are always looking for the newest idea. The best idea doesn’t have to be their idea, they will use and benefit from good ideas no matter where they come from.   

The most successful people are in constant learning mode, they are as far from a know it all as you can get. 

The biggest problem with being a know it all, other than annoying everyone around you, is that once you believe you know it all you see no use in trying to learn anything new. Much like the patient office, you have learned all there is to learn. You’re done!

When you’re done learning you’re done period. Whatever success you’ve had will begin to wane. If you’re not pushing your limits to learn, if you’re not trying new things, if you’re not taking risks then you may be playing life to safe… or you may think you already know everything you need to know. 

Either way, you’re likely seriously limiting your potential. 

You can’t possibly know it all, the good news is, you don’t have to. The great news is you can learn something new this very day. Keep your knowledge base fresh and your success will always be fresh too! 

Leaders are Learners

Steve Keating 13 Comments

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. – John F. Kennedy

A leadership position is not a destination. No one should “arrive” at a leadership position and just sit tight. A leadership position does not make you a leader, it merely gives you the opportunity to grow into one.

To grow as a leader you must learn. Continually.

The most successful people learn something new everyday and so do the most effective leaders. It doesn’t have to be an epiphany every day but you should add to your knowledge base each day.

If you want to be a better manager then learn something about stuff, if you’re intent is to become a better leader then learn something about people. Learning something about people in general is good, learning something about your people specifically is great.

Invest time each day to learn what motivates your people. Learn what their goals are, discover their challenges and even more important, how you as a leader might help them overcome those challenges.

The best leaders are not afraid to show the gaps in their knowledge and the very best leaders do not believe it is a weakness to learn from the people they lead. It’s pretty tough to learn when you’re struggling to keep your “I already knew that face” on.

So open your eyes, open your mind and perhaps even open your heart to new discoveries every single day. Never forget this basic leadership fact: when you stop learning you likely stop leading too.

Never stop leading!

Encouraging Mistakes

Steve Keating 4 Comments

I’m not a big fan of mistakes. That might surprise the people who know me best since they also know I make a lot of them.

I make a lot of mistakes because I make a lot of decisions. Mine are mistakes of action and they can be fixed, usually with just a small adjustment. Often, people don’t even realize I made the mistake at all.

Some people believe they can avoid mistakes by not making decisions. They fact is, not making a decision is a decision, it’s a decision to do nothing and it’s almost always the wrong decision. Deciding to do nothing is a huge mistake, it’s a mistake of inaction and it’s often much harder to fix than a mistake of action.

The most successful leaders make a decision the moment that they have the facts required to make it. They make good decisions because they have made a lot of them and they learned as much from the bad ones as they did the good ones.

I get asked from time to time about the best way to help young leaders learn to make decisions. My answer is nearly always the same – let them make decisions!

No one can learn how to make good decisions just by watching someone else do it. If you’re a leader hoping to build future leaders then you need to let your people make decisions. Even some bad ones!

Get out of the way and let them decide. Let them be wrong and let them fix their mistakes. Let them learn from THEIR experience and allow them to build self-confidence by doing… and redoing if that’s what it takes. 

I’m not suggesting any leader stand by and let their people make decisions with potentially devastating consequences, but let them make small decisions and grow their way to bigger ones.

Lead by ensuring they find the lesson in every mistake they make and lead further by helping them develop a plan to make a better decision next time. 

The ability to recover from a mistake or a poor decision can be a great encouragement to your younger leaders. Authentic Servant Leaders don’t use mistakes to criticize their people, they use them to coach and encourage their people. 

It all comes down to this: as a leader, do you have a spirit of criticism or a spirt of encouragement? One forces compliance and one builds commitment. 

One works and one doesn’t. Which one are you? 

Learning for Life

Steve Keating 15 Comments

The most successful people learn something new almost every single day. They never stop, their level of success, their age, their already substantial wealth of knowledge does not stop them from learning more. 

In all of history there has never been an easier time to learn something new than right now. The internet alone is a vast and ever growing source of knowledge. Google estimates there are currently 637 million websites and 250 million blogs. The depth of human knowledge has never been so easy to find and transfer from one person to another. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that not everything you see and hear on the internet is true. I know that might be hard for some people to believe but the fact that not everything on the internet is true is one fact that is most certainly true. 

There are certainly other sources that are available too. 

Read newspapers, books, magazines, and periodicals. Everyday! Here’s a pretty well documented fact: the most successful people read more than less successful people. Technology allows us to carry a ton of books with us right on a laptop, tablet, or even a smart phone. Everyone “waits,” either at a doctor’s office, for a sales call, for the plumber, and the most successful people don’t waste that wait time. One of the more effective ways they use it is to read. 

The “boob tube” more commonly called the television is another great source of knowledge. If you make it so. There are programs available that inform and educate, truth be told they aren’t the most watched programs but perhaps they should be. When was the last time you sat down and watched something that did more than just entertain you? 

Talk to your mentor. Here’s a problem for most people… they don’t have a mentor. Most people don’t but the most successful people do. If you don’t have a person whose brain you can pick and who you can bounce ideas off of, you should find one today. 

Meet someone new and different. If you’re only associating with people like you, who think like you, then you’re limiting your potential to learn something new. Interact with people different than you, people who you do not always agree with. You can, and should, learn from people with different backgrounds, from different cultures, and with different perspectives. 

However you choose to go about it understand the “success imperative” of consistent, constant learning. If you haven’t learned anything from this post the keep looking, you only have 249,000,999 blogs to go. 

How to Make the Right Mistakes

Steve Keating 3 Comments

Mistakes happen. The only people who never seem to make a mistake are the ones who refuse to try. They will eventually figure out that not trying is the biggest mistake of all.

Of course, their excuse for not trying is often that they are afraid of making a mistake. It’s kind of a vicious cycle. 

Successful people make mistakes and lots of them. They fix a lot of mistakes too and they seldom make the same mistake twice. Now I’m not so optimistic as to say there is such a thing as a “good mistake.” Given the choice I would never recommend anyone purposely make a mistake. 

If a mistake can be avoided it should be. All mistakes have one thing is common: they eat resources. Mistakes cost either time or money and oftentimes both. Throw in the fact that they can disrupt momentum and it’s clear that mistakes should be avoided if possible.

If possible! There’s the rub, if you’re going to try new things, if you’re going to push your limits then you are almost certainly going to make mistakes. Just make sure you’re making the right ones.

A right mistake is one made from honest effort. It’s a mistake made in the pursuit of a known objective. If you have no objective, goal, or desired outcome for whatever it is you’re doing then pretty much every mistake is the wrong one.

Most of all, a right mistake is one you learn from. It’s a mistake you learn enough from that you won’t repeat the mistake. It’s a mistake that at minimum shows you how some thing won’t work. A right mistake is one that’s made only once.

When you make a mistake the first thing to do is pause for a bit. The bigger the mistake the longer the pause. Do a bit of self-assessment to be sure that the mistake is not skewing your sense of self worth. Remember, making a mistake does not make you a mistake.

Analyze where you got off track and how exactly the mistake was made. Back track a bit because the real cause of the mistake could have been several steps back in your process. One of the main reasons that mistakes are repeated is that people fail to identify the root cause of the mistake.

Make a plan to avoid the mistake in the future. I love the saying “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” The only problem with that saying is that it has caused more mistakes than any other single piece of advice. DON’T just try again, try again with a new and different plan. If you’ve really learned from your mistake the plan may not always be a better plan but it darn well better be a different plan. 

I really don’t believe it’s mistakes that cause ultimate failure. It is a person’s or team’s response to the mistake. I also don’t believe that a mistake can’t be fixed, some take more effort than others but nothing is impossible. 

So get busy, take some risks, try new things, make some mistakes and succeed!