How Steep is Your Growth Curve?

“Knowl­edge alone is not enough. You need to put what you learn into prac­tice, or you’re no fur­ther ahead.” — Kevin Lawrence, Your Oxy­gen Mask First

When I was in New Del­hi, India, recent­ly, doing 360 feed­back and coach­ing for key exec­u­tives, a ques­tion came up about how to increase the growth curve when devel­op­ing future lead­ers. How could we take the nat­ur­al growth curve and make it steeper?

Like using new equip­ment for the first time, you’ll even­tu­al­ly fig­ure it out, through tri­al and error.

If a man­ag­er teach­es you, you’ll learn faster. The learn­ing curve starts to rise.

In a full train­ing pro­gram, you learn even more, and the curve gets steep­er. And, ulti­mate­ly, with a coach to guide you, as you take and test what you’ve learned in the real world, the curve can go off the charts.

With­out the com­bi­na­tion of these invest­ments, they could still be fid­dling with the knobs.

“Invest the ener­gy it takes to stay ahead of the game.”

Now, the return can still be zero even if you do nat­ur­al and for­mal learn­ing, and work with a man­ag­er and a coach unless you have the dis­ci­pline to apply it on a dai­ly basis.

We all know this. We’ve seen it as we help our chil­dren to learn new skills, like rid­ing a bike or learn­ing a sport. But, once they get going and we see them doing decent­ly well, we often for­get to keep help­ing them to grow fur­ther because we all get so busy doing our work.

There’s no lim­it to how much moti­vat­ed peo­ple can grow, with the right sup­port and in an envi­ron­ment where they have the abil­i­ty to be great.

The Chal­lenge

• Are you tru­ly mak­ing invest­ments con­sis­tent with the growth you want to see in your team?

If you want to learn more about our Lead­er­ship Edu­ca­tion pro­gram, train­ing, work­shops and coach­ing, please get in touch.