• Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group

University Survival

  • Student Success Skills
    • Picking a College
    • Financing Your Education
    • Choosing a Major
    • Preparing for College
    • Managing the Personal Side of the Transition to College
    • Developing Discipline to Do Well
    • Managing the Social Side of College
    • Being an Efficient Learner
    • Taking Tests
    • Ensuring You Receive The Grade You Want
    • Managing Group Projects
    • Becoming a Campus Leader
    • Student Athletes
    • Navigating College Practices
    • Succeeding on Internships and Co-ops
    • Making Critical Decisions
    • Overcoming Challenges for Specific Types of Students
    • Setting Goals
    • Being an International Student In The United States
    • Using Resources
    • Communication Skills for College Graduates
    • Building a Professional Network
    • Using LinkedIn to Develop Your Network
    • Preparing for a Career
    • Understanding Job Protocols
    • Developing Essential Career Skills
    • Becoming a Leader
    • Overcoming Career Challenges
    • Planning for your Financial Future
  • Parent Connections
    • Parent Topics
      • Being a Supportive Parent
      • Making Critical Decisions
      • Financing Your Student’s Education
    • Parent Emails
  • Teacher Resources
  • Resources
  • Community
  • About
You are here: Student Success Skills » Becoming a Leader » Building on Lessons Learned

Student Success Skills

Building on Lessons Learned

by jennifer
July 8, 2016

Leadership often involves a lot of small situations that shape your experiences as a leader.  How you learn from these situations will go a long way to determining how effective you are as a leader.  Great leaders learn from every situation and adjust their approach based upon what they learned.  Here’s how to create a lessons learned structure:

  1. Create a lessons learned reminder list for yourself. These are reminders of situations you want to review.  It’s likely you will have 1 – 3 items on your list for each day.
  2. For each item on your list, create a simple analysis
    1. Background of the situation
    2. What you did
    3. What you feel you could have done better
    4. A statement of the lessons you learned (This analysis is best written down because the process of writing this down can amplify the learning process)
  1. Hold periodic reviews of your lessons learned with your staff. Showing your lessons learned process to others can be very helpful to both you and your staff.
  2. Create a culture for lessons learned. Here are some essential elements for this culture:
    1. It’s ok to make mistakes as long as you learn from these mistakes
    2. Tell your staff that making decisions based upon “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is not acceptable
    3. Tell your staff that excessive reliance on policy statements is just an excuse for not using judgement
    4. Share your lessons learned widely and ask others to do the same.
    5. Foster an environment where people are empowered to “deviate from the norm” as long as they document why they did so and share the results with others so that they did can become the new norm.

One way to reinforce the lessons learned structure is to build it into every presentation given in the organization. The last slide of the presentation should be “Here’s What We Learned from this Effort” This can really focus the organization on making every experience one that adds value.

 

← Thinking Through Decisions
Maintaining a Strategic Focus →

Suggest a Topic

Looking for a topic and can't find it? Why not submit one...

Suggest a Topic

Share This

Rate This Topic

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...

Testimonials

  • The biggest improvement I have made this semester has got to be my study habits.  This semester I made it my goal to study more and work harder in school.  I have kept pretty well to my word up till now and I hope I can continue to do so.  Another improvement that I have made this semester that I'm not too proud to say is not going out during the week.  Along with studying, I also made this my goal.  My dad always told me work comes before play, it's such a simple quote, but it's the truth.  If I plan on doing well this semester, I am going to have to limit my "play" to the weekends and work hard during the week.  With both of my improvements being said, it's likely that my grades are going to improve greatly.  I need to have self-discipline in order to complete my goals until the semester is over.  Discipline is something I lack and I also hope to improve as I make good habits in regards to my studies..

Sign Up For Student Emails

Enter your email below to get weekly student emails.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Suggest a Topic

Looking for a topic and can't find it? Why not submit one...

Suggest a Topic

Share This

Sign Up For Parent Emails

Enter your email below to get weekly parent emails.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Suggest a Topic

Looking for a topic and can't find it? Why not submit one...

Suggest a Topic
© Copyright - University Survival