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Leadership Lessons Heard

Written by: Lee Meadows

Article Overview: Leadership lessons are abundant in both literature and life! The prevailing wisdom is to maximize the lessons that come from life experiences by turning them into a never-ending learning process. However, too often it is the lessons heard that serve as the practical learning model, thereby minimizing what gets practiced in successful organizations.

Leadership Lessons Heard

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
While this often cited quote is a reminder of how easy it is to repeat mistakes, it is rarely seen in the context of Lessons Learned, which is a more positive spin, and used as a building block in which to move individuals and organizations forward. The memory of the past is captured through documentation and personal accounts. The information is, then, categorized, stored and retrieved at convenient intervals and used as examples of how much progress has been made or how little we’ve accomplished. The success that comes with most organizations, and most people, can be attributed to the ability to reflectively learn from the past and objectively plan for the future. In every instance, the only guide we have are the events that have already taken place, our interpretation of those events and the application of the appropriate Lessons Learned to insure that certain events do not repeat themselves.
However, in looking at many of the events that have taken place in the last twenty years, it does not appear to be a Lessons Learned model that has seized the present, but a less powerful Lessons Heard model that has seized the past. At a time when individuals, groups, organizations and nations are experiencing unprecedented change at an accelerated speed, forward progress to what can be is slowed by the ankle bracelet chained to the anchor of the past. How many of us thought we learned the importance of furthering our education to insure a successful future? The truth is that, statistically, we heard the lesson, but only a few actually learned the lesson. So, motivated by an uncertain economy and a commitment of state resources to support retraining, the community college system is experiencing unprecedented enrollment. Twenty years ago, this message was being touted, shouted, affirmed and confirmed as one of the key areas that individuals and organizations need to focus on as a path to transforming the economy and their lives. The lesson was heard, but wasn’t learned, until now! Twenty years ago, the message of personal fiscal restraint was discussed and hammered as an important change needed to offset the uncertainty of globalization, outsourcing and job restructuring. The lesson heard was equated to the squirrel who, instinctively, stores their food for the winter and the squanderers who don’t. Now, as personal bankruptcies continue to escalate, the tendency is to look to the past for what was, to look to the skies for what’s needed and not look ahead to what has to be done. The action is determined by whether we have heard the lesson or whether we have learned the lesson. The rude awakening, irrespective as where you sit in any organization, is that the toughest lesson to learn is the one you’ve already heard. We heard the past! We’ve heard about how things once were. We’ve heard about the industrial dominance, we’ve heard about the regional prosperity, we’ve heard about the expanded middle class and the unlimited access to untapped resources. We’ve used those memories as beacons of light to guide us back to what once was our history. As such, we remember the past in the hope that we can repeat it. An uncertain future can only be managed by moving beyond lessons heard to an unconscious consent to lessons learned. The expectation is that business will always drive that model because it is the one arena where lessons heard can be both costly and devastating. The other arenas, education, government and non-profits, all take their cues from what business does. So, the leaders of business have to make an internal decision as to what model of thinking will resonate and ripple out to the other disciplines. Respectfully, if it is only a lessons heard model that is advanced, it is only a lessons heard model that is learned.

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Article Tags: leadership lessons, life experiences



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