009: Lifelong Learning-Invest in Your Development

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in today's show. I'm talking about investing in yourself. I encourage you to learn and develop your leadership and continue to learn about your industry. Angel job. Make the commitment to improve every day because developing your leadership can set you apart from your peers. Others will notice it when your team outperforms other teams. And that's because you have created a culture of trust and learning that will lead to a culture of excellence. I hope you enjoy the show today. Welcome to the finance leader. Podcast or leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen McLean, and this is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. This is episode number nine of the podcast, and today we're gonna talk about investing in your leadership development, along with leaders. Need to be continually learning and growing, and leadership development can set you apart from your peers. And at the very end, I have a very special announcement that I'm gonna share with you. John F. Kennedy said. Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. I believe that you do have to invest in yourself. Don't assume others will invest in you and don't assume the company you're working for will invest in you. You have to believe in yourself, and you've got to invest in yourself. Believe that you have to make the commitment to become better every day. You have to set that example. You have to do that self assessment and know where you are, and you have to have that vision for yourself. You should have written goals. You should have plans for what you want to do, where you want to go in your career, what you want to become. Do you still want to stay in this industry? Do you have other plans and not only your career plans? You should also include plans for your personal life. I encourage you to have a complete individual development plan for yourself. You can use the company created one, but also encourage you to have your own version. Some companies do have a template version or an app that they use, but of course, that individual development plan is the property of that company. It's something that you may not be able to take with you. So again, I encourage you to have your own version on your laptop somewhere you keep safe that you can continually update. And I believe that an individual development plan needs to be updated at least quarterly. And I would continue to look at it monthly just to see what you have accomplished to keep recording down the training that you've done or the skills development that you've done and also record down what things you've scheduled. And if there's any changes to your goals, so continue to have that individual development plan considered it a working document continually update it. Make updating your individual developed plan, a task you do up front and not something that you just get to you when you have time. It's your development. You have to invest in yourself. You have to put that priority one so that you can help others. You could help others grow. You set that example. I encourage you to have written down goals that are also recorded in your individual development plan. Your goals and the plan around it should match. There should be some type of training or skills development matched to a goal. I should have some kind of timeline to it, some kind of way to show how you're gonna proceed on your big goals, some type of list of objectives for each goal and how you're gonna accomplish those. It could be a skills development. Could be attending a conference or seminar. Could be reading a book. It could be attendance at university for your advanced degree. It could be accomplishment of a certification, our license. But write down all these things in in your I d. P record them, record your goals and record how you're gonna accomplish them and then record out your purpose, what you want to do with your life. What do you want to do? You know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and especially what you want to do in the next 2 to 3 years because it could change rapidly. You know, if you have that 5 10 and 20 year goal written down, that might be something that you will hold on to for a while. And as you shape out your career and as your career develops, you may make adjustment or two every few years, but continually toe have that written down in your individual development plan. I want to tell you a quick story. I came from a working class family in Maine who had a strong work ethic. Where we practice humility, completed our duties because you're expected to lived with integrity and made a goal accomplishment key. And we served our family and the community. A lot of my family members served the community in various capacities with it was elected positions or volunteered positions that provided a very solid example to me for the serving and taking care of others in my own life. My two parents and two brothers, along with many other extended family members our strong examples of hard work and sacrifice, I said My family served the community, and it's actually no surprise that I joined the Army and made it a career. I learned by watching my parents with their strong work ethic and the things that they accomplished in their life, that you do have to invest in yourself. You have to set goals you must believe in yourself. You must understand yourself both your strengths and your weaknesses. You must continue to work hard because we don't settle and we don't get complacent. We continue the work will continue to improve. We continue to serve our team continue to serve our community. We serve others just as we would improve ourselves, because the end state would be to improve the people that are around us to make them better. And that goes into the next item that I wanted to talk about. We must set that example for our team by emphasizing personal development and growth. I believe that great leaders grow others. We're not just gonna grow ourselves and leave our team behind. We need to encourage and mentor our team to continually improve and to learn and to push themselves to be better. Our teams won't be complacent. We won't be complacent. We're gonna set that strong example. We're gonna work on our own mindset. We're gonna work on our own ability not to become complacent in the workplace, not to become complacent in any part of our lives. We're gonna set that example to push ourselves to be better, push ourselves to excellence, and we're gonna work on our team members to help them also achieve excellence. I want our teams that have a strong mindset where we can overcome obstacles and we don't let others tell us that we can't accomplish our goals. I mentioned earlier that you have to have an individual development plan. I think that is essential to setting the example that you're going to focus on your own personal growth and development and that will encourage others toe work on their personal growth and development. As a leader, you can provide the opportunities you can do the encouragement. You can do the mentoring. You can lead them to opportunities, but they have to accomplish it. And I think by setting that strong example that you're gonna go through and figure out things that you need to work on, you're gonna have a set of written goals. You're gonna identify areas that you're weak at, identify skills, you need to work on identified training that you need to do to get better, and you communicate that to your team. You then encourage them to go ahead and make the sacrifice to get better every day. If you want to rise in this profession, if you want to get better. If you want to get promotions, you have to improve yourself. You have to focus on your growth, get to focus on improving yourself along all lines. You have to become more technically confident and you have to improve your leadership. I believe by doing all that is by talking about your own goals and your own individual development plan, and you tell them that you have written goals and how to accomplish it. Continue to set that example. And I believe in these individual development plans. You definitely have to have a mix of leadership and topics about your industry. And also don't forget to focus on the technical development, which I think most people do anyway. And don't forget your soft skills like communication, time management, public speaking. Continue to work on all these skills. And don't be afraid again to tell your team the things that you're working on. Set that example. Tell them how you're gonna accomplish your goals. I need to continue to create an environment of learning and encouraging your team. To get better, you need to find the time for your team to have development during the working hours. You need to find the time, create the time you need to find efficiencies in the work day. There are ways that you can make the work bay better that go smoother, better processes better ways of communicating. You confined efficiencies in the work day that provide opportunities for your team members to focus on some development each week whenever I talk to managers or individuals, and I hear that they don't have time to work on self development, that I'm going to challenge that I'm gonna challenge that every time because I believe your processes can be improved. If you're struggling with finding just a least an hour or two each week, or maybe even a little bit more to focus on your development and there's something wrong in your process is you can do better, you can find a way to make it happen. The next thing I want to talk about and which I have mentioned before is that leader development can set you apart from your peers. I believe that studying the years of development, you have the potential to rise above your peers because I believe your boss and the senior leaders will notice it. They will notice how your team operates differently. They'll notice how you have more trust on your team than other teams. Efficiencies. Air created processes are better, people communicate a lot better. You get more done and your work output is a lot better. And people seem to be happier because you've empowered your team. You're not micromanaging. You're communicating. You're prioritizing your getting things done. You're encouraging others to grow and learn People gonna notice that. And as you continue to develop yourself, you're gonna learn all these things you're gonna learn, how to prioritize and how to communicate and how to share a purpose in a vision and how to encourage someone who's not doing so well or encourage someone who's feeling not feeling so happy. Encourage someone who's having a bad day or something's going on in the life, and you show that understanding and caring and you help them get through whatever they're doing. When you focus on developing your leadership, you're gonna change yourself, and you're gonna change how you see the world around you and how you see your team, and that's gonna directly affect the performance of your team. It's going to affect the mind set of everyone who you come in contact with. It's gonna affect people's view of complacency, is going to affect how they view goal accomplishment. It's going to effect how much they want to accomplish, it's gonna affect their overall happiness and growth in pursuit of excellence. So continue to work on your own leadership because it will have a positive effect down the road as you learn the skills and your team will just get better. And again, I believe that your boss and senior leaders will notice it, and it will just create opportunities for yourself down the road. I believe that leaders are readers. You need to continue to stay current on topics affecting leadership, your industry, the global economy and many more other topics. When we read books, we get to build our expertise. Books can offer the skills and knowledge that we lack. And the great thing is that we get to learn from some smart people who have done the research. So I encourage you to be reading. Find out what industry leaders air reading and grab those books. Find out the books that your boss is reading and the senior leaders and your organization are reading. Just asked him, Don't they'll share with you what they're reading, and maybe you can put together a good reading list of books that will help you with your development. And if there's someone you like to follow, funding what they're reading, especially a community leader, especially for someone who has served our nation or other capacity again, I want to encourage you that leaders or readers find out what's current. Find out what's going on in your industry and find out what the books are. They're coming out that can affect you in a positive way and share those books. Share what you're reading with your team so they can get better, too. So for an easy win today, I want to go back to that first thing I was talking about. I want you to start to plan out and develop your own individual development plan if you don't have one and list out very specific goals that have dates on them and list out how you're gonna accomplish those goals were there would be through classes, online training, some kind of other skills development that you need to do. Do you need to work on an advanced degree? You gonna work on a certification or a license and list all those out in your I D. P. I want you to start scheduling training and start gathering up lists of books that may help you in your development. Now, if you need a leadership book to read, I can recommend one, and I recommend a book called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Cynic. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Simon cynic, and some of you probably have already read this book, but it's about military leaders taking care of their team. It's about building trust and how great teams pull together. I served in the Army, as I have talked about many times, so his officers, we ensure our team is taken care of before our own needs are met. Our soldiers eat first, and as leaders, we put our team first. So we eat last. We insure their trained and prepared and ready for the fight ahead. And that's why the military can build trust worthy teams ready for the most ardent and challenging duties because we build trust. First, I mentioned at the beginning of the program that I have a special announcement this year I will be offering to online courses that will help you with your leadership development. The first is an introductory course on helping you advance in your career, we will focus on your professional foundation, your mindset and how you can set yourself apart from your peers along the leadership development. Plus, I will share career advancement strategies. So I'm really looking forward to that coming out that should be coming out in a few months. And I will give you Maur news on that As we get closer, the second course is going to be a deep dive and leadership development. I really want to help you prepare for senior leadership and executive leadership. And what does it mean to have an executive presence, including how you think strategically, How do you lead change in your organization and how can you develop positive relationships and win win solutions? We will work on these topics and many more again. I'm looking forward to getting these courses out to you this year and offering that as a way you can develop your leadership. I'm looking forward to working with you and seeing you grow your leadership and growing your potential for your career. In this episode, we talked about how leaders need to be learners and that you need to invest in yourself and you continue to set that example for your team. Share with them how you're developing yourself so that you can be an encouragement for everyone on your team to become better every day. Also, you can set yourself apart by growing your leadership because as you grow your leadership, your team won't prove the performance will improve. Your boss and senior leaders will notice that I have two interesting statistics to share with you that I discovered Info Pro learning back in 2017 found that 83% of organizations they surveyed stated that it's important to develop leaders at all levels, but only 5% have fully implemented programs at all levels. Again, 83% said it's important to develop leaders, but only 5% follow through with it to get it done. I believe that to be very true, even today, I'm going to remind you again that you need to invest in yourself. You need to grow your leadership and need to be prepared for that opportunity for advancing. Your career comes up, you're gonna thank yourself. So again, I want to encourage you invest in yourself, take it upon yourself to take your development personally. get it done. Don't wait on others to develop. You take the responsibility to get it done. Starting now again. You'll thank yourself. Next episode we're gonna talk about team empowerment and its opposite micromanagement. Micromanagement is that dreaded technique that manages who live with constant fear practice every day. I despise micromanagement, just like I despise complacency in a horrible mindset. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about fear when I talk about why managers want to control and micromanage every aspect of your life and that we don't want to do that. We want to build teams who are empowered to get things done and don't have to wait on us. And we're gonna work on our fears. We're gonna learn to take a risk, and we're gonna build strong teams who trust each other. I hope you enjoyed the show. You can find this episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify and many other podcast platforms. You can download the show notes by going to steven McClane dot com. Please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook Group. This will be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession until next time you can check out more. Resource is at steven mclean dot com and sign up for my updates. So you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and see you next time. Thank you.