Tag: Truth Challenge

by Applying Daily Learning Audit Questions
Your Personal Daily Incremental Learning Audit

One benefit of growing older is that every month brings a handful of messages from former clients, students, colleagues, friends, relatives, even strangers. They want to share some episode from their lives where something I said, wrote, discussed, or taught powerfully affected their life’s trajectory.

These notes are always inspiring. I respond in two ways, grateful appreciation and asking these correspondents to please answer several of the following questions, or as many as they care to:

1.     What’s the most important thing you learned from me?
2.    What is the most surprising thing you learned from me?
3.   What’s the most interesting thing you learned from me?
4.   What’s the most unusual thing you learned from me?
5.   What’s the most useful thing or idea that you learned from me?
6. What do you know now that you didn’t know before you heard, saw, talked, or something read from me?
7. What new questions were raised for which you need answers or deeper questions?
8. What will/did you do differently based on what you learned from me?
9. Why did you come to me? 

How I learned to organize my daily learnings, every day

From the earliest days of my career, there was so much to learn every day. I was having trouble retaining and recalling it all. Then I met this amazing young, new CEO I was to be coaching. He asked me to visit him every Tuesday at 5:30pm for an hour. Well, ok. He’s the client and the requests were unusual but reasonable.

After a month of Tuesday meetings, I asked him why he set our weekly meeting the way he did. I will always remember his response and so will you.

He said,” I spend every Tuesday afternoon evaluating what those who work for me have learned from me.” And then he said,” “and, I from them.” “Jim, you come at the end of my learning day to help me truly and powerfully understand and integrate my thinking and their thinking into what we do every day.”

His technique was to ask a handful of important questions, then lean forward and listen carefully. His questions were business related, some technical, some emotional, some calling for judgmental responses.

At that moment I knew I should have been paying him.

Getting Started

I immediately established a set of my own Learning Audit Questions. Everyone took the questions very seriously.

Here’s a set of answers from an assistant who worked for me for one year:

Learning Audit Example #1
Former Assistant (with me 18 months)

Jim, here are my answers to those questions. I hope this is helpful to you.

1. The most important thing I learned is a quote from your book where you speak about how helping someone else achieve their goal will in turn help you achieve your own goals. 
2. The most interesting thing I’ve learned is to focus on what can be
   accomplished to look for solutions, always be mindful of the way I’m speaking or writing in correspondence, and to not default to what “cannot be done”. 
3. The most surprising thing I learned is about myself and how, even though I love writing, I wouldn’t want to write for a living, which is why I’ve enjoyed my work and time as an admin.
4. The most useful thing I’ve learned is just the importance of tracking, maintaining, and creating a process and system for organization not just of material and content, but also of life things.

Learning Audit Example #2 Former client in mid-career, years ago with me 2.5 years

Jim, In terms of your questions:

1. What is/was the most important thing you learned from me?
   a. The importance of being a verbal visionary and how to achieve that
   b. Use of power words, especially for women
   c. Know your client’s/leader’s business and their concerns and perspectives
   d. Don’t be afraid to raise tough questions
2. What is/was the most surprising thing you learned from me?
   a.    The critical need to identify and care for victims – and they aren’t always who you think they are.
   b.   The importance of face-to-face comms – with internal and external audiences. The power of this became crystal clear when I helped implement your strategy for the Venice Hospital sale.
3. What is/was the most interesting thing you learned from me?
   What leaders need and want – options, candor, straight talk.
4. What is/was the most memorable thing you learned or observed about me?
   How you communicated with leaders and held their attention!
5. What are/were some important questions that you needed answers following our work together?
   
   How can I continue to improve?
   
6. What do you do differently now because of our working together?
   Many things!
   a. Stopped preparing long documents of strategies and options.
   b. Learned to think more on my feet and respond verbally, immediately.
   c. You made me a much better strategist and counselor.
   

Question 9

Quite often, Question # 9 triggers a conversation. “Why did you come to me?” Here is an answer from a senior practitioner and tends to reflect similar answers to this question.

She said, “I reached out to you because when I think of who has made an impression on my career, you are among a handful. I’ve appreciated your direct and invaluable approach to counseling executives. It’s straight as in forward, considerate, decisive, and anchored in doing the right thing…while being prepared if that doesn’t happen.

My Recommendations for you

Whatever the stage of your career, you can begin using this technique to teach yourself about yourself, a handful of real questions in every evaluation situation. Keep it simple.

If I’m seeking evaluation of a presentation, meeting, coaching session, or similar setting, I’m interested in learning what other people learned from spending time with me, from their perspective. If I am going to take some participant’s time with a survey it should be:

1. Brief, 5 questions is the ideal length. You can always follow up with more.
2. Help them learn about what they learned during their program or experience with you, while also helping you learn about yourself. 
3. What to avoid.

Avoid #1. Surveys that just collect data mindlessly and without purpose. It’s irritating. Stop participating. Focus on fact and truth-gathering approaches as advocated here.

Avoid #2. Forced answer polls/surveys. Forced answers corrode and contaminate survey results. Forced answering is forced lying that produces mis or disinformation. STOP It. Avoid any data gathering using forced answers. Survey Monkey always uses forced answers. All Monkey Surveys and surveys requiring forced answers are garbage.

Avoid #3 Lying. Expose lying. The more lies you or others you know fabricate and compound, the deeper the truth gets hidden and harder to find.

• Allegories
• Analogies
• Euphemism
• Lies
• Metaphors
• “Nuanced Descriptions”
• Obfuscation
• Stories – are never the truth.
• Translations, “in other words…”
  
  Look familiar?  Yes, we use some of these tools and techniques when trying to avoid the truth. In the end it’s a lot easier to be simple, sensible, positive, declarative and plainly truthful.
   
  Truth avoidance is the greatest contributor to confusion, doubt, suspicion and needless usually permanent trust damage.
   
  To be continued.