Learn & Succeed ‒ Improve Your Improvement
- Feb 22, 2022
- 12 min read
Written by: Pierre Bauzee, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
A crucial topic in order to keep learning and progressing in your workplace is about the keys to success in order to improve your improvement. The first thing to highlight when it comes to improving your improvement is to understand its meaning and mainly its importance. Regarding the meaning it is pretty simple: what are you doing on a daily basis in your workplace in order to improve and progress? What is the real signification behind it? If I had to give a simple definition about improving your improvement, I would say that it is to improve your way of learning and improving in order to take all the opportunities to enhance even more your own development and therefore keep ameliorating your work performance both in the short and long term. Regarding what you need to do on a daily basis in order to do so, I will have the pleasure of explaining it to you below.
The importance of improving your own improvement
When it comes to the importance of actively looking to improve yourself professionally, it is first of all important to understand the two main goals in doing so. Indeed, the objective behind it does not only include the importance of actively taking part in your own improvement on a daily basis in order to keep being better professionally but also to question ourselves about why it is so important to be in a constant state of progression and improvement in your workplace and more generally, throughout your whole career? It is indeed crucial to understand that the main impact on your progression is your own. And this is the case before any managers’ feedback, induction plan or training courses or coaching is provided to you. It is also essential to understand that in order to improve effectively, you need to focus on your own way of improvements to make sure you are taking everything into account before focusing straight away on your performance only. Finally, I would say that only by understanding the fact that you always have opportunities to learn and improve yourself at any roles or positions and that it is only by thinking so that you will be able to keep maintaining the best quality of work. There is indeed nothing more dangerous to think you know it all, that you have now a role and position proving that you are perfect or even worse to be too arrogant to look at yourself or thinking that you can make mistakes.
Having the good mindset and attitude
In order to be ready for improvement, you need first to have the good mindset and attitude matching with these principles. As mentioned above, it is crucial to have a clear understanding that whoever you are and whatever you do, there is always room for improvement. You need to understand and share the values of a proactive improvement method so you can really achieve all the goals related to it. You need also to understand the importance of every action you will have to take in order to improve. For instance, the fact that there is nothing more positive than making a mistake as long as you improve from it. Or the fact that someone giving you negative feedback (what I like to call “opportunity of improvement”) is an opportunity and not a threat and should never be taken negatively as long as given objectively. Remember, do not only have the correct mindset about the importance of improving but also about the importance of every actions, decisions and ways of thinking you need to have in order to do so.
Regarding the attitude, I would say that one of the first thing you need to do, is to do your best to be positive in as many situations as you can. You need to see things happening around you positively. Yes, performance is important and you may work in a very demanding environment where mistakes and problems need to be sorted in order to move forward. But it doesn’t mean either that you should add more pressure on yourself and put your expectations on your performance too high. Do not only look down on you for the 5% of things you do bad but be proud of the 95% of things you do good. Take these 5% objectively and take action but make sure you do not bring yourself down for it. Take things positively and do not go too much into a way of improving where you become afraid of making mistakes, where you look too much down on yourself for your weaknesses or where you compare yourself too much with others. Finally, surround yourself with the good people and stand against blaming culture. Indeed, there is nothing more negative than a blaming culture within a working environment to harm team members’ improvement. It is like a snowball down a hill, the more you let it roll, the bigger it will get. By having a blaming culture within your company, you will be blamed for things you do wrong instead of taking it as a challenge and opportunity to improve, you will be afraid of making mistakes which may create stress and anxiety and therefore not be full-on and comfortable in doing your job. Finally, with such a culture, you will want not to have the blame on you and therefore blame others instead of looking at yourself and take actions.
Understand the importance of performance management
Many people tend to think that in order to learn and progress, it needs to be “provided” to you through specific Training sessions, briefings, feedback, on to ones, de-briefings or through specific management methods executed by your managers. Though all these methods of training are crucial to improve individual performances, it doesn’t mean that it is the only way in order to do so. Indeed, a very good way to “be trained” is to train yourself by managing your own performance. In fact, when I train people about management or about the keys to success to train your team effectively, one of the first thing I would say is that before even thinking of providing any form of training, you should first implement the proper mindset and provide a good environment so your team members are improving their work performance by themselves. This is the real heart of performance management: understand your own ability in training yourself.
Now, what does it mean practically? One of the first thing you should do in order to reach this goal is to ask yourself the good questions. Is there something I am being too long at? Is there something I am having too many difficulties in doing? Why am I not being consistent in doing certain tasks? Why can I not work with autonomy or multitask on specific duties? Only by taking the time to ask yourself these questions will you be able to evaluate your own performance, take actions on it accordingly and therefore manage it efficiently. However, we all know how limited is our time at work is and how much we have to constantly “run behind the watch”. In order to ask yourself these questions, you need to give yourself time to do so. Remember that it doesn’t have to be at work and can be outside of work, on your way back home for instance. Remember also that by taking time outside of work in order to do so you will be able to “take a step back from work” and be better in analysing the bigger picture. If you don’t do this, you may forget many of the things you do that can be corrected. Unfortunately, in a busy environment such as your work, you either do not have the time or the ability to take this step back and analyse the quality of your work.
Something else very important, is to be actively looking for feedback. Don’t be reactive by only taking actions when receiving it but be proactive by looking for feedback yourself and not wait for it to come. Ask your managers, colleagues, ask for one to one, discuss openly with people or dig up more feedback that has been given to you. Try to actively look yourself for this external eye that can be either good for you to see the things you do in another perspective or simply highlight the things you may not realise. However, you need to be extremely careful with that and make sure you are not believing everything said to you and that you have both the ability to 1 make your own critical analysis on what is said to you and 2 have the ability to progress by yourself following the methods explained above and below. Part of managing your own performance is indeed to be able to improve from your own mistakes and be self-aware of your own strengths and weaknesses and this is what we will now see together.
Improve from your mistakes
Improving from mistakes is definitely one of the main sources of improvement that everyone should do. First of all, you should never be afraid of making mistakes. Every mistake should be seen as a source of opportunity as long as you improve from it. In many companies, the pressure, expectations and requirements are so high that mistakes may be seen as a threat to the success of a team. However, having such a mindset will only cause more arms to the overall performance of a company as team members will become afraid of making mistakes which will lead to bad consequences such as blaming cultures, decreasing team members’ performance, bad internal atmosphere and even negative impact on the team member’s mental health (stress and anxiety for instance). It is especially when you are having such high requirements that you should focus on improving on mistakes rather than seeing it as obstructive. Think long-term and see the bigger picture. Yes, making a mistake may impact negatively the accomplishment of duties on the day but will also be an opportunity to improve the overall performance of the team member and more generally of the team and company in the long-term. Do never get annoyed, frustrated or angry in making mistakes or having members of your team doing so as long as you/they do their best to improve from it. Remember, you cannot avoid mistakes. And the sooner the mistake is made, the quicker you will improve.
Now coming to the keys to success to improve effectively from mistakes. Well first of all you need to be able to take a step back from every of your working days in order to remember the mistakes you have made. As mentioned above in “performance management”, you may be so busy in your working environment that the first thing you will do when making a mistake is to try to sort it out so the consequence of the mistake is not too bad. You may then get carried on with so many other things that you may never have the time to analyse the mistake itself so you are not doing it again. So my first advice to you would be to find the time. Either during on to ones, breaks, when you have a bit of free time because you are ahead in time or even when you are on the way back home. There is always an opportunity where you will have both the environment and time to take a step back in order to ask yourself “what mistake(s) have I made today and why have I made them?”. So make sure you take it.
Second advice I can give you would be to try to find the source of the mistake(s) source by asking yourself “why?”. Sometimes you may be taking actions too quickly from a mistake made by trying to improve on something you do not have all the information in order to do so. Indeed, you did not take time to realise that the source(s) is more complex than you think. For instance, the mistake may not be coming only from yourself but from the lack of tools or support to do your job correctly. Or the environment may be too stressful or busy to do the tasks well. Or you may even realize that the mistake you do on a specific task is not only because of the fact that you have difficulties in it but maybe from a wider problem (for instance having difficulties in focusing on your job in a noisy environment which lead to mistakes). Try your best to find the source, get help and ask for advice if needed.
Self-awareness on your strengths and weaknesses
As explained above, one of the best ways to be self-aware is to ask yourself the right questions in order to improve from your weaknesses. It is now important to understand what weaknesses include. Does it include everything related to your work performance that can be improved? Yes. Are weaknesses only related to mistakes? No. Can you improve on all your weaknesses? No. Does it still worth being aware of it in order to adapt your working methods to these weaknesses. Definitely yes. This is where we see that your self-awareness is not only about improving on the weaknesses you can improve on but also be strongly aware of those you cannot improve on so you can adapt your organisation, planning, way of doing your tasks and working methods accordingly around it. For instance, if you know you are not good at multitasking, it is definitely better to 1 know about it and 2 know that it is part of the things in your abilities that you cannot change. In fact, by doing so you will be able to organise and plan your day accordingly instead of trying to force it and improve on something you cannot improve on. Doing so will only decrease your work performance and ability. This is why it is crucial to understand that if you want your self-awareness to make a real impact, you should know what you can improve on and what you cannot. As I always like to say it is much better to be self-aware of something you cannot do rather than be too confident on something you can or you think you can handle.
Now the question can be how to know the things you can improve on and the things you cannot? This is a much more difficult question to answer as it will be related to your own ability in improving, to your job, your skills and your own specific strengths and weaknesses. However, the advice I can give you would be to simply look for things that keep reoccurring in different forms or to look for things that even if you have managed to improve on it haven’t fully disappeared. Now coming back on the example about having difficulties in multitasking, it is maybe the fact that you may have seen already in your private life or in other jobs/tasks that will make you fully aware about it. Or the fact that even by having tried hard to improve on it, you may have got better at it after a long period but still never be fully comfortable and efficient in doing so.
When we talk about self-awareness, we obviously cannot omit self-awareness regarding our strengths. It is indeed crucial to be aware on your strengths and do not underestimate this part. Only by being aware on your strengths can you bring your work performance to the highest level have enough abilities to both keep doing your job well while having enough power to improve. Being aware of your strengths is also something very important as you will be able to use them accordingly at work. Using them accordingly will also help you to show self-confidence and remove the useless doubts you may have on your capacity of doing your job effectively. Self-confidence is indeed crucial to be able to handle your job well while facing all the difficulties and challenges that it may include. Only by being self-confident will you be able to take risks when you have to, only by taking risks will you be able to leave your comfort zone when you have to.
Leaving your comfort zone
To conclude this article, I would say that one of the very important ways of improving your performance would be to leave your comfort zone. Now the question is how to do so? Well, there is billions of ways making you leave your comfort. For instance, taking new responsibilities, working with more autonomy or getting involved in things you are not very experienced but you know that it will be beneficial for you. Whatever the way, as long as you do your best to take risks and face challenges and understand their uses you will be fine. If there is indeed one way that has been so beneficial for me to grow and learn throughout my career is through difficulties and challenges. By facing difficulties and challenges you will be able to discover yourself new skills, develop new abilities such as finding solutions by yourself or taking more ownership in everything you do. You will also be better in solving problems and really apply all the things you have learnt. So do not be afraid to leave your comfort zone and “throw yourself in the water” by facing challenges and solve issues instead of avoiding them. Do not be afraid to take initiative when you have to or to make important decisions in crucial moments. Do not be afraid of more autonomy or responsibilities given to you but take all these opportunities as an opportunity to grow and progress. Sometimes it is only by stepping out of your comfort zone that you will be able to really know what are your real abilities but also to sharpen them even more. Remember, comfort zone is a very important thing that everyone needs at work in order to be in a good environment to do their job well but it is also a very dangerous thing if you never step out of it.
Pierre Bauzee, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
"Pierre Bauzee is a professional trainer, coach and consultant for the industry of Hospitality. After working for more than 10 years in this wonderful industry, Pierre decided to realise a dream: dedicate his life to train and support people by starting his Training and Consultancy company called Learn&Succeed Hospitality Training.
Learn&Succeed provides powerful Training courses covering crucial topics for people's development and success such as Leadership, Management, Training and development, customer service, personal improvement or Teamwork and interpersonal skills.
With certified and authentic courses entirely made by himself, he strongly believes that by training the right people with the right training, he can provide all the keys to success in order for them to grow, learn and succeed. He is also very proud and committed to taking part in people's development or in the success of their company by providing coaching and consulting services.
His goal: to make a positive impact on people and businesses in an industry full of opportunities."
