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Learning Bites

Quick, bite-sized insights to build your skills and boost your career.

Missed a past edition? Visit the Learning Bites Archives 2025 and 2026 to explore previous topics, revisit professional development insights, and continue building your skills throughout the year.

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Shining a light on the skills that help you learn, develop and grow!

April: Feedback and Development

At UA, Performance Feedback and Development play an important role in strengthening performance, supporting growth, and helping employees reach their full potential. With performance review season underway, this is an ideal time for both supervisors and employees to reflect on accomplishments, discuss progress, and identify opportunities for continued development. Effective performance conversations are a shared responsibility. Supervisors provide guidance, recognition, and constructive feedback, while employees actively reflect on their contributions, seek feedback, and identify areas for growth. When these conversations are approached with openness and respect, they strengthen trust, communication, and professional development across our campus community

Core Behaviors to Practice:

  • Supervisors provide clear, constructive feedback that recognizes strengths and supports growth.
  • Employees remain open to feedback and use it as an opportunity to learn and improve.
  • Supervisors and employees engage in honest, respectful conversations about performance and development.
  • Both parties take time to reflect on accomplishments, challenges, and lessons learned.
  • Supervisors and employees work together to identify goals and opportunities for continued development.

Quick Tips to Elevate Ethics & Integrity

  • Supervisors: Prepare thoughtful examples of strengths and areas for development before the review conversation.
  • Employees: Reflect on accomplishments, challenges, and lessons learned over the past year.
  • Focus feedback on specific behaviors and outcomes rather than personal traits.
  • Use performance conversations as an opportunity to discuss future goals and development opportunities.
  • Approach the discussion with openness, curiosity, and a shared commitment to growth.

Call to Action:

Performance reviews are an opportunity for meaningful dialogue about growth and development. By approaching these conversations with openness, preparation, and mutual respect, supervisors and employees can work together to strengthen performance and support continued success at UA.

Check out these LinkedIn Learning courses for a deeper dive into performance feedback and development:

Your monthly playlist where professional development hits the right notes.

April Edition: Emotional Intelligence: Self-Reflection

Inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now

As we continue our Emotional Intelligence series, April focuses on Self-Reflection. After building self-awareness, self-reflection allows us to pause, examine our experiences, and learn from them so we can continue growing both personally and professionally.

Self-reflection involves taking time to evaluate our decisions, reactions, and interactions with others. By thoughtfully considering what went well, what could improve, and how our actions affect those around us, we gain insight that helps guide our future choices.

Joni Mitchell’s classic song Both Sides Now beautifully captures the essence of reflection and perspective. As we gain experience, we begin to see situations from different angles, helping us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

Think About These Lyrics:

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now…”
→ Reflection allows us to step back and consider different perspectives before forming conclusions.

“It’s life’s illusions I recall.”
→ Self-reflection helps us recognize assumptions or patterns that may influence our thinking.

“I really don’t know life at all.”
→ Growth often begins with humility and a willingness to keep learning.

Self-reflection helps us:

  • Gain deeper insight into our thoughts, actions, and behaviors
  • Learn from both successes and challenges
  • Recognize patterns in how we respond to situations
  • Improve decision-making and communication
  • Strengthen personal and professional growth

This month, ask yourself:

  1. What recent situation helped me learn something new about myself? How might someone else have experienced the same situation differently?
  2. What is one lesson I can carry forward into future decisions or interactions?

Call to Action:

This month, make time for reflection by:

  • Pausing after challenging situations to consider what you learned.
  • Seeking feedback from trusted colleagues to gain new perspectives.
  • Thinking about how your actions influence those around you.
  • Identifying one small adjustment you can make to improve future outcomes.

When we take time to reflect and view situations from multiple perspectives, we strengthen our emotional intelligence and our ability to grow, collaborate, and lead with intention.

Where fundamentals meet real‑world impact. Show up and skill up!

April Edition: Building Trust

Trust grows when we make the implicit, explicit: instead of assuming others “just know,” we show our thinking step‑by‑step so people can better understand how and why decisions are made.

In a higher education environment, expertise can unintentionally create distance; seasoned staff or faculty may speak in shorthand that leaves newer colleagues and students guessing. Taking time to “unpack” your reasoning helps everyone follow along and feel respected.

Try it this month:

  • As a supervisor approving flexible schedules, narrate your criteria (student service coverage, peak hours, fairness across teams) and walk through an example request so the process is transparent;
  • As a facilities lead, preview how you’ll prioritize work orders and model the steps you take to assess safety and impact before dispatching a crew;
  • As an HR partner, show stakeholders the decision tree you use to respond to a concern from an employee or supervisor;
  • In an academic advising appointment, a faculty member might walk students through why certain prerequisites matter and how course sequencing supports skill development;
  • During committee work, faculty can narrate how they evaluate proposals—explaining how criteria such as student impact, accreditation standards, or resource availability shape their decisions.

Actionable strategies:

(1) Explain your reasoning in real time—use phrases like “Here’s how I’m weighing this…” while working through a problem.

(2) Use visible artifacts—checklists, decision rubrics, and debrief notes that make your mental model shareable.

(3) Invite questions before finalizing—pause to ask, “What’s unclear in my approach?” to catch gaps or identify false assumptions.

(4) Demonstrate how you apply your knowledge—not just the final answer. Walking others through your process builds their skills and confidence, which in turn strengthens trust across teams and with leaders.

Making thinking visible reduces ambiguity, creates psychological safety, and helps colleagues and students feel respected and included. Let’s make trust the Tide that lifts us all—one clear conversation, shared checklist, and “here’s how I’m thinking” moment at a time.