Learning About Me – Learning Agility

The other day I realised how much personal development stuff I had done this year. So I’ve decided that it’s time to assimilate some of it, rather than just learn it.

Starting with the one that I did most recently, and have assimilated the least – learning agility. This is based on the Lominger book – FYI for Talent Management.

As a quick introduction here’s an extract from the start of the book:

Talent is usually considered the people who are in the upper 10 percent of what they do. What separates the best from the rest who perform well? To be good at anything requires some knowledge, skills, and technical know how. Both the best and the rest have that. One thing that separates the best from the rest is the ability to adjust, adapt, respond to, and be resourceful in the face of change.

….

Regardless of how intelligent or technically skilled you are, the best way to increase your talent score or effectiveness is to improve you learning agility. Relatively unrelated to intelligence (also good to have), learning agility is basically how well you adapt to the new and different.

The book then goes on to split learning agility into four areas, each with a set of learning themes.

On a quick assessment there weren’t really any surprises to me.

The four areas are:

• Mental agility
• People agility
• Change agility
• Results agility

Anyone who knows me would guess the top – mental agility where I came out above the 99th percentile. The only surprise was how high this was, it’s nice to have it affirmed though.

After that the other three are quite close between the 75th and 90th percentile.

Getting into the themes.

My strengths are:

• Critical thinker
• Inquisitive
• Solution finder
• Agile communicator
• Personal learner

Again, no surprises there and reinforcement for previous assessments.

Onto the “to be worked on” section. The areas where I came out weaker were as follows:

• Cool transactor
• Light touch
• People smart
• Presence

Each of these areas then has a set of remedies and recommendations. I’ve picked out a few things that I am going to try and do. I’m not going to detail them here just yet, we’ll see how I get on with them first.

I do feel a bit like I’ve come back to the beginning of a journey, because learning agility is almost where I started from in August 2006.