Identifying Your Lessons Learned with Kathy Repa
Phil is joined by HR and change management expert Kathy Repa to discuss how to identify your lessons learned during change. Understanding how our experiences impact outcomes helps build change capacity and skill, and dramatically improves organizational knowledge on how projects work within our cultures. So, how do identify, record and learn from your experiences during a large change initiative? Kathy can be reached at: Email: [email protected] EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PHIL: Hello everyone, welcome to the change on the run podcast, where we discuss common change challenges and ways to address them. When you're short of time, and I'm your host, Phil Buckley. Today's topic is identifying your lessons learned. Understanding how our experience impacts outcomes helps build change capacity and skill and dramatically improves organizational knowledge of how projects work within our cultures. Experience is the best teacher, which enables us to repeat success patterns and eliminate future roadblocks to achieve our goals in the quickest and most effective way. Learning occurs in the moment. Something worked or didn't work because of specific factors, and we often lose learnings we don't record quickly. This applies equally to organizations and individuals and is especially true in the middle of projects because we tend to remember only beginnings and endings, leaving the key middle ground foggy. So, how do you identify, record and learn from your experiences during a large change initiative? And my guest today is Kathy Repa. Kathy, welcome to the show. KATHY: Thank you so much for having me, I am so excited to be a guest. PHIL: Thank you, Kathy, and thanks so much for taking the time to be here. Kathy has over thirty years of global human resources and change management experience. She is currently the Vice President HR, Global Supply Chain at Mondelez International. Kathy holds a BA, Human Resources Development at DeSales University. So, Kathy, looking back at your thirty-plus year’s career and we've known each other for over ten years, what's been your experience with personal lessons learned. I look at you as the queen of lessons learned and I've learned so much about how you do so just generally. What's been your experience? KATHY: You know, one of my biggest lessons, and I think your book Change on the run really triggers a lot for me, is that we run a lot when we're doing these changes. We run from one change to another. We're change junkies. It's sort of our drug of choice and we look forward to those things. What we don't take time often enough as change professionals, to take a pause and to think about what we have actually learned, what lessons we can pass on to others or what lessons we can take forward ourselves, and I think that by doing that you don't often get as much value as we possibly could from that pause for purpose, that time to refresh, that time to reflect, and I'm a huge journalizer, so I do often sit back at the end of the week and maybe as I've gotten into my twenty and thirty years of running change, I do it much more frequently to say, you know, what things went well about this and what am I most proud of and what do I want to learn from that to take forward and make sure that I incorporate in the next ones? You know what things didn't go so well, and sometimes we punish ourselves for what didn't go so well, and I like to sit back and say, well, was that in my control? Because if it's not in my control, then why would I punish myself for it not going well? Then? That's not to say I don't take that as a lesson to do something differently, but I don't sit there and beat myself up over and over again about something that wasn't in my control, but rather reflect on how I can manifest it into something that next time might be much more controllable. And then I d