6 Ways you lead

There are at least six ways your lifelong learning program is leading your institution. Create a win-win situation by letting your institutional leaders know what cutting edge strategies your lifelong learning program is doing that can and will positively impact the greater institution.

Even if your lifelong learning program is small. Even if your program seems to get ignored by your institution. You still are leading your institution in many ways, small and sometimes big ways. And you do both your program and your institution a good service by informing your institutional leaders.

Here are six areas in which lifelong learning programs are leading their institutions right now:

1. Data analysis
   You look at data. You make decisions based on data. You probably can see certain things in the data that others cannot. Others in your institution can and should look at data from the same perspective as you do, so they can gain insight from their data.
2. Productivity
   You are regularly looking at staffing and making staff more productive without making them work harder. You are revising job descriptions, emphasizing outcomes more. And you are more apt to embrace flex time, telework, and other 21^st century work habits. With Gen Y the future of the workforce, your institution will have to move in the same direction. You are showing them the way.
3. Benchmarks and Ratios
   Your benchmarks and ratios in lifelong learning are not the benchmarks and ratios other units in your institution may need. But the concept and development of benchmarks and ratios in your institution is a concept and practice that can benefit all units in your institution.
4. Online technology
   From business systems to online learning, from work software to phone apps, your program is constantly keeping up with technology and constantly trying to integrate more technology into your operation to improve effectiveness. Your receptivity to online technology is an approach everyone in your institution can embrace.
5. Test Tube
   Lifelong learning programs have always been test tubes for new programs, services, activities, and processes in nonprofit institutions. Your program continues to be on the cutting edge testing new ideas, the most successful of which then get integrated (and often stolen) into the institution as a whole.
6. Customer service
   Keep hammering away at your ability to serve the customer, because it has been a hallmark of lifelong learning programs for decades now. Institutional leaders repeatedly need to hear about your success with customer service, and how other units in your institution can model their customer service on yours.

And there are more ways you lead. Create a win-win situation by letting your institutional leaders know what cutting edge strategies your lifelong learning program is doing that can and will positively impact the greater institution. You do both your program and your institution a good service by informing your institutional leaders about the ways you are leading your institution.