Experience Explorer™ equips a facilitator with a simple, energizing tool to help managers explore their most memorable workplace experiences and what they learned about leadership from those experiences. This tool is based on proven research and offers the opportunity to accelerate leadership development – enhancing leaders’ ability to learn from experience at all levels. Experience Explorer™ is much more than a personal inventory of experiences and lessons. It emphasizes the specific types of experiences and dimensions of lessons identified by CCL research as common to leading in organizations. A coach or consultant facilitating Experience Explorer with multiple leaders or a classroom instructor facilitating an educational session will need to provide each leader or student with a personal card deck.
Participant’s comments after using Experience Explorer:
“You get to know others in a deeper way. This is a nice way to have a conversation.
“As I kept meeting people I found out that I wanted to talk less about my own experiences and listen more to their experiences.
“You can learn some important things by talking with people about their experiences.”
Those who wish to succeed as leaders need knowledge about which experiences are the most developmental, and what leadership lessons are the most essential to learn.
By sharing their stories and reflections about learning from experience, individuals and their circles of colleagues can become more competent and confident at leading. Experience Explorer also helps people to identify additional experiences they want to add to their portfolio of experiences, and what they hope to learn as a result.
The newest addition to this research is the book Developing Tomorrow’s Leader’s Today: Insights from Corporate India by Meena Surie Wilson, Ph.D. The classic work in this series is the book The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. A recent update appears as the chapter “Learning from Experience” in The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd Edition.
For more information contact Meena Surie Wilson, Ph.D.