I have recently embarked on a new Leadership Learning Journey by enrolling in the Executive Leadership Coaching Program at Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario. I’ve done this to expand my Executive Leadership Coaching development as a coach and as a CEO to support my 5-member coaching team. I’ve just returned home from the first of three intensive learning weekends. One of my key takeaways is the power of “Self-Reflection” (to evaluate) to generate learning insights and action quickly.

I have come to understand that my relationship to learning has expanded by being more intentional about debriefing after a learning event. A learning event could be a conversation with a colleague, a meeting with your team, a learning workshop, a client meeting or a key project. At the end of the event, you pause and debrief the learning that occurred from the event, on your own, or with your colleagues. My self-reflection practice includes this Learning Loop – Design (a conversation), Execute (the conversation) and then Evaluate (the impact of the conversation). Remember, every meeting, event, and project is a series of conversations that you design – execute – evaluate.

My Learning Journey at Ivey Business School:

As I reflect upon my recent weekend at Ivey Business School, one experience comes to mind.

We were put into groups of 5 and challenged to create a Coaching App to support our clients. We were given 1 hour for idea generation as a team, then 15 minutes to create an engaging presentation to give to the class and then 30 minutes to evaluate our prototype.

As I self-reflect (evaluate) on this experience here are my key learnings:

1. Collaboration creates rich insights! Idea generation begins with each person generating their own ideas and sharing their ideas with the group. At that moment collaboration took us from a few ideas to many ideas as we built on each others’ ideas.
2. Being curious about other people’s visionary ideas was very profound. It took me out of my fixed mindset of how I thought the Coaching App should be built.
3. Quantity of ideas can lead to a few quality ideas which can generate viable solutions. Together, our class created a prototype Coaching App in one hour, we called our app “HeadCoach!”.

I have gained a lot of insight from applying the Learning Loop to this experience. The power of collaboration to create Possibility Thinking was AWESOME to be part of!

Bringing this learning into my business taught me that when you have an issue (operational, service, process, communication, sales or a team), don’t solve it alone! Gather your team together for an hour and challenge them to generate a prototype that will improve the situation that you can test as a solution. I have also committed to practicing daily self-reflection (to evaluate) to accelerate my Learning Journey to becoming a champion leader in my business and as a coach to my clients.

Leadership Challenge:

Take 15 minutes at the end of your day and Self-Reflect by evaluating what you learned from your day and see what new insights you gain about yourself.