Taking ownership; building capability

Hi there, in our last article we discussed about ‘capability building’ and that being ‘your’ responsibility. Thank you for your overwhelming response to that! Let’s explore this area more with today. Once I did a training session for Laugfs and at the start of the session, Laughs Chairman Wegapitiya addressed the group of senior manager participants. I still remember two important points he made and I still use both frequently. He was talking about the importance of continuous development and how people give up life after a point. He said ‘many die at the age of 25 but they are buried only at 75. Many live a life of death for a bigger part of their lives. No development as a person and no contribution to the world. It’s better to live one year well rather than 50 years of death’. I thought this message was very powerful.

Many of us don’t have the continuous development mentality. We tend to stop learning and development after school or possibly after your first degree. Second point he made was about wearing ‘rain coats’ for training and development sessions! Companies organise many training and development activities, but how much of that touch your inner self ? Most often they drip down like rain water on a rain coat without touching you.

One possible reason for this is we are not open for training or new ideas. We are fixated in our own paradigms and beliefs, and we don’t see anything new. As time passes we become ‘hard’ and lose the ‘agility’ and become set in our ways. When a rubber loses its flexibility and tone it breaks. Then we are surprised that we were offered a VRS! The environment and everything around us change constantly. You will agree with me that most things we learnt a few years ago are outdated now. This change will only become faster and we need to face that reality. We should be agile and adapt to these changes. The only recipe for success is constantly learning new tricks and hiring people who know new tricks. What is the true purpose of ‘development’ during your ‘life after school’? Yes you got the basic education in school. But do you know the most important lesson we missed in school? That’s the lesson of ‘how to learn’.

This may sound a bit crazy, but hang on. Think about how we ‘study’ in school. For most kids the teacher and the notes in class is the ‘world’. How do we become successful? Those who study what’s in the book and do a clean ‘memory dump’ get higher grades. Year after year we build a bad habit of not learning but studying. We lose our imagination, exploration, experimentation skills along the way. We bring this bad habit to our place of work too. We need to learn the ‘art of learning’, if you master this art, you can learn new things and adapt continuously, quickly.

Art of learning is about research, exploration, imagination, testing your ideas and continuous improvement. You know your ambition and vision in life. A vision or an ambition without action is a mere dream and it will stay a dream. If you know your dream, start working on a development plan. Only you know what is needed, how you can expect a company to fuel your vision and ambition. When you think of development plans, there are many obstacles we face. It could be financial, time, family commitments, logistics, lifestyle and the list is endless. We have so many distractions that keep us away from our development efforts. We have money to buy the latest smartphone, but we don’t have money to pay for capability building. We are keen to take a loan to buy a better car, but we don’t want to take a loan for personal development. Trust me ROI is far greater in capability investment than a smartphone or a car! If you don’t have time for personal development, then you need personal development for sure (really!). First you need to take a course on time management to get more things done with less time. Learn to balance family commitments with development time. The more you develop you will have quality time with your family.

Today’s article became a little too long, sorry. I like to talk a little on lifestyle. Many tell me they are ‘tired’ and have no energy left to attend an evening class or a weekend class. Have you seen people yawning in the afternoon? This low energy is a real life drainer. Get your diet, exercise and sleep organised, you will have energy for development! Write your thoughts, comments and questions to [email protected] or challenge me! Have a great week.