Transform Experience into Growth: A Mindful Model for Leadership Development

Here’s a simple, scalable framework that you can begin using today to boost employee learning, engagement, and job performance. It’s made up of three steps: Approach, Action, and Reflection.

1. Approach: Before your employee steps into a new challenge, help them:

• Prime with a Growth Mindset
  A growth mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, effective strategies, and learning from feedback. You can foster this by reinforcing that skills grow with practice and persistence. For example, “I noticed how hard you worked on this and even adapted your approach when challenges came up.” Frame setbacks as a normal and valuable part of the learning process; you could do this by sharing a personal story about how navigating obstacles led to improvement or success. Ensure the environment rewards progress and learning behaviors, not just outcomes. This creates conditions where people are more likely to develop both a growth mindset, which primes them for a learning orientation.
• Activate a Learning Orientation
  Encourage your people to take risks, ask questions, and admit what they don’t know. Model it yourself. Employees with a learning orientation report less stress, greater engagement, and better performance than their performance-focused peers.
• Set SMART Learning Goals
  Instead of asking “What will you accomplish?” ask “What will you learn?” Target personal growth edges, like leading cross-functionally or managing ambiguity, and support them with feedback loops.
• A SMART goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, “Over the next 3 months, I will apply the Mindful Engagement Model to my stretch assignment by documenting 12 weekly reflection entries and key lessons learned. These reflections will be supported in weekly 1:1’s with my manager. By the end of the 3 months, I will submit a brief summary highlighting lessons learned, how they could be applied moving forward, and next steps for my continued growth.”

2. Action: When the work begins, employees should strive to learn.

• Experiment Actively
  Encourage trying new behaviors, approaches, and perspectives. Two simple planned experiments during a stretch assignment can multiply learning outcomes.
• Seek Feedback Relentlessly
  Feedback shouldn’t come once a quarter. Promote a norm of regular check-ins with peers, subordinates, customers, not just managers. Employees who seek feedback are seen as more open, coachable, and promotable.
• Regulate Emotions to Stay in the Game
  Leadership is emotional, and emotions can hijack learning. Encourage your people to name what they’re feeling, talk it through, and reconnect with their learning goals. Emotional regulation is not soft, it’s strategic.

3. Reflection: Experience alone doesn’t teach. Reflection does! In fact, reflection is what transforms an experience into learning. Here are some approaches to reflection, all backed by science…

• Run After-Event Reviews (AERs)
  Adapted from the military, AERs are structured debriefs that focus on: What happened? What could have gone differently? What are the takeaways for next time? These sessions turn daily experiences into enduring leadership lessons.
• Feedback Integration
  Have the employee actively seek feedback from peers and/or supervisors after a new behavior is tried, then reflect on the alignment (or misalignment) between self-perceptions and others’ observations.
• Guided Journaling
  After a challenging task, the employee answers questions like the following in a structured journal entry
• What went well, what didn’t, and why?
• What assumptions or biases influenced me?
• What emotions did I feel?
• How did my actions influence others’ responses?
• What leadership lessons can I carry forward?

As a leader, your role is not just to assign challenging work, but to create the conditions where challenge becomes transformation. If you want to learn more about making learning from experience part of your team’s culture, you can contact us here.

Want more? We suggest reading our post on developing leaders through on-the-job learning here. 

Reference:

McCauley, C. D., DeRue, D. S., Yost, P. R., & Taylor, S. (2013). Experience-driven leader development: Models, tools, best practices, and advice for on-the-job development. John Wiley & Sons.