03.01 – Your Most Developmental Experience

Welcome. In this session we’re gonna talk about your role as a teacher, your role as a coach. One of your most important responsibilities as a leader in your team is to develop and coach your team. In today’s fast-paced, dynamic market, where teamwork is essential for success, this leader as teacher, leader as coach, and developing your team is one of your most important responsibilities. There will come a time when you are not around, where your team has to perform without you being present. And it’s your responsibility to ready them, to coach them, to develop them, to make sure that they are able to be successful on their own without you having to be there every step of the way.

In this session, I’ll share with you some best practices, some frameworks, some tools that we’ve discovered through our research about what makes teams successful. And in particular what enables leaders to coach and develop their teams to success. I wanna start by having you reflect on your own development, your most developmental experience. What I’d like you to do, as we begin this session, is to start by thinking about your most developmental experience in life. It could be from childhood, it could be from adulthood. It could be personal, it could be at work. I want you to think about and imagine that experience, this experience that pushed you, that challenged you in different ways and enabled you to grow and develop.

I want you to ask yourself, what was the experience? What was it about the experience that made it so developmental that enabled you to grow? Why was it so developmental? What was it about the experience, how it challenged you, who was involved, what skills it focused on? How did the experience challenge or stretch you? Where were you in your own skill set when you began the experience and then what was the stretch? How did it challenge you as you engaged in this experience? Who was involved? How did they contribute to your growth and development? Were these mentors that enabled you to learn from the experience? Were these people who presented a challenge that you had to overcome?

Who was involved and how did they contribute? Before we jump in, I want you to think about this experience. I want you to imagine it. I want you to put yourself back into that experience. Understand why it was so developmental, how it challenged and stretched you, and who was involved, that enabled this experience to be so developmental for you in your life.