How to Learn from Experience
By Dr. Denny CoatesPeople who eventually become managers typically don’t come to the workplace with leadership skills such as effective communication and character strength. They have to learn from experience. Their challenge is to replace old habits with more effective ones. Books like Connect with Your Team describe how to perform these skills, but acquiring them takes lots of on-the-job practice. As coaches always say, “You gotta get your reps.”
So, work itself can be a time of growth, a time for learning. It is said that experience is a great teacher. But learning doesn’t automatically follow experience. You can have a significant event—whether positive or negative—and move on to the next challenge without learning a thing.
How to Guarantee Learning from Experience
The key is to think about what happened—to analyze the experience.
When you get the feeling, “Well, that didn’t go well,” give yourself a time-out break and ask yourself these questions, in roughly this order:
- What happened? Who did what? What was the sequence of events?
- Why did it happen this way? Why did it happen? What caused the result? What went wrong—or right?
- What were the consequences? What was the impact? How did you feel about the outcome? Benefits? Costs?
- What could you do differently in the future? What lessons did you learn?
Learn from Both Successes and Failures
Life is an amazing succession of experiences. You can learn from all of them. These four questions will help you transform a poorly handled situation into a plan that will enable your success going forward. I recommend that you make a habit of analyzing whatever happened, whether it was a success or a failure. To make the lessons stick, I suggest recording your thoughts.
When coaching others, you can encourage them to learn from their experiences by asking them the above questions.
“Learning doesn’t automatically follow experience.
It’s possible to move from one event to the next without learning a thing.”
Good things happen, and you can build on your success. Things can go wrong, too, and you can try something different next time. But you won’t learn the lesson if you don’t think about what happened.
Connect with Your Team is your how-to guide for working on leader-team communication skills and is a key resource in the leader development system, Grow Strong Leaders.
