How Leaders Develop Expertise

In previous blogs, we discussed that in order to achieve difficult goal, you might need to help your team develop the expertise required. The seven steps of mastery described below show you how to develop and practice any new skill you need to learn in order to build the belief that you can achieve your goal.

1. Select a critical skill or competency you want to improve that will help you reach your long-term goal. Then write a goal for this skill. Focus on a small, relatively simple, stretch goal. For example, if you want to improve your listening skills, your S.M.A.R.T. goal could be: During all meetings this month, I will improve my listening skills by asking at least one question before giving my opinion.

2. Learn as much as possible about this skill from the many models available to you. Whom could you call who does it well? What books or audio programs can you digest? Are there seminars or workshops you can take? What if you simply search “improve listening skills” on the internet? You might also choose to observe or interview a few of the best listeners in your unit/company.

3. Decide how to measure your progress. British scientist Lord Kelvin asserted, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it." Therefore, you must choose a method (or person) to provide feedback as you test the new skill. For example, you might simply place a check mark on a notepad every time you ask a question during all one-on-one and team meetings for a month. One leader I coached shared his “listening practice goal” with his virtual team. He then invited them to count his questions during their one-on-one phone conversations and virtual meetings. That which gets recorded gets repeated. He was promoted during our coaching agreement.

4. Practice deliberately. Begin practicing the skill in a safe environment. Safe environments are the training wheels of new skills. Olympic gymnasts practice new skills in safety harnesses. When you try the new skill, do so where you feel safe and where the consequences of poor performance are minimal. Practice the skill in your car, at home, with a friend. For example, leaders who have improved their listening skills, often begin at home were they are more comfortable taking their training wheels off in front of loved ones.

As your comfort level increases, increase the difficulty of the skill. The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching just beyond your current abilities. On the basketball court, at the driving range, or in a business setting, most of us do what we've always done before without progressively increasing the difficulty. As your improve your listening competency, for example, you could try your growing skills in a variety of different or complex environments (e.g., with key customers, in executive meetings, during difficult negotiations…). If you want to achieve difficult goals, you must practice what you don't do well.

5. Record feedback after using the skill. We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on our experience. It’s important to analyze performance immediately after trying the new skill. (In the military, these are called after action reviews.) Begin your evaluation process by describing what went well. Make a quick list of things that you felt good about when you attempted this new skill. Next, write a few thoughts about what did not go as planned. Why didn’t it? What can you learn from the trial that will help next time? Be gentle with yourself and others. Complete this step by refocusing on the positive and what went well.

6. Reward yourself for taking action. Using positive feedback can keep you motivated and on track throughout the day. When a baby learns to walk, the smiling faces of cheering adults spur the child on as it gains mastery over its environment. Employ the power of immediate rewards to reinforce the baby steps toward long-term success. These pat-on-the-back rewards increase the probability that you will try, try, try again, especially if at first day don’t succeed. Of course, do not reward every practice a session. The classic studies on conditioning teach us that intermittent reinforcement is best.

7. Make this new skill a habit. Incorporate this skill into your everyday routine.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

How Leaders Build Belief In Their Goal - Part 2

What do Tiger Woods, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates have in common? If you guessed money or fame, you’re right. But if you guessed they have “achieved extraordinary results,” you’re spot on as my friends in the UK might say.

How did they and other peak performers achieve these extraordinary results? For many years, outstanding achievement in any endeavor was thought to be the result of outstanding genes. However, recent research has shed considerable light on the nature versus nurture controversy. Nurture has come out on top. Innate talent or natural gifts, once thought to be the key driver of amazing accomplishments, have been relegated to a secondary role. Something as simple as practice (yes, we're talking about practice) seems to be the major contributor to outstanding goal achievement. While modeling (discussed in a previous blog) is about learning from the best, mastery – the second step in building self-efficacy - is the process of practicing what your models teach you.

In a review of more than 300 scientific studies entitled, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and his colleagues concluded, "Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years." (1)

As Fortune magazine senior editor Geoffrey Calvin points out, Tiger Woods’ father introduced him to golf at the age of 18 months, and encouraged him to practice. (2) Tiger went on to become the youngest Winner of the US Amateur Championship, at age 18… after 15 years of intense practice. Warren Buffett is well known for investing long hours studying financial statements of investment targets. Bill Gates had more than 10 years of concentrated programming practice before he ever cofounded Microsoft.

The importance of practice small steps in reaching goals is also illustrated in the movie What About Bob. In this comedy, Richard Dreyfuss portrays a psychiatrist/author who has a dysfunctional patient named Bob, played by Bill Murray. Throughout the movie, Dreyfus is trying to help Bob take small steps to improve his psychological health. In fact, the title of Dreyfuss’s book is called Baby Steps. Practicing increasingly difficult "baby" steps to achieve a goal, based on what is learned from models, is what this movie and mastery all about.

If you or your team members need to learn new skills or practice old ones in order to achieve your long-term goal, then you need to practice the art of mastery, the second key to building self-efficacy. Mastery states that your belief in your ability to reach your goal will increase as you deliberately and progressively practice the actions that you learn from your models.

As in modeling, you have already practiced mastery in other parts of your life. Have you ever trained for an athletic event or any sport? If your answer is yes, how did you prepare? What did they call the sessions that prepared you for the race or the competition? (If you answered practice, you get a gold star.) Remember learning how to drive? Did you start out driving on the highway? Of course not. You probably started in some deserted parking lot with a driving instructor telling you what to do. You then gradually increased the complexity of environments that you drove in. Eventually, you worked your way to the highway. You built your belief that you could achieve your goal step-by-step until you became a highway star.

The importance of progressive or deliberate practice was also emphasized by the extraordinary work by Professor Bloom at the University of Chicago. (3) He investigated the lives of 120 of the America’s very high achievers in six diverse professions (concert pianists, research mathematicians, neurologists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, and tennis champions). He interviewed these peak performers, along with their coaches, parents, and other family members in an effort to uncover the common elements of their exceptional accomplishments. His key findings tell us how to practice mastery in order to reach our long-term goals:

• View early practice and performance activities as play
• Maintain a strong commitment to excellence
• Receive strong, on-going encouragement from coaches
• Develop high commitment to increasingly complex learning and growing

Practice does not make perfect, progressive practice makes perfect.

All four of these keys are related to taking small steps over time. Dr. Bloom’s 557-page encyclopedia of achievement is reminding us that if we need to learn or practice new skills to achieve our goal, we must develop the discipline of mastery.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues; The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406.

2. Geoffrey Colvin; What it takes to be great, Fortune Magazine, October 19, 2006.

3. Bloom B: Developing Talent in Young People. Random House: New York, 1985.

Seven Tools Leaders Use to Build Belief In Their Goal

In previous blogs, I’ve written about the first two keys to goal achieving; namely write a SMART goal and strengthen commitment that you can reach your goal. The third step to achieving any goal is to strengthen the belief that you and your team can reach the goal.

The belief we are talking is the most powerful, new belief dominating cognitive psychology called self-efficacy – "your belief in your ability to take the action needed to reach your goal.” (1) Research shows you can dramatically increase the probability of achieving your goal when your self-efficacy is high. The three major tools to increase your belief that you can reach your goals are:

• Modeling
• Mastery
• Mood

In this blog, we’ll discuss the power of modeling. Modeling is the study of those who are achieving the results you want, and adapting their approach to construct your plan. Aristotle said that children learn by imitation; so do adults. The process of modeling is so powerful that the beliefs you absorb during your formative years play out throughout your lifetime, like formatted CDs that were burned into your brain. These ingrained beliefs cover all facets of your life (e.g., your intelligence, performance skills, general biases, leadership ability…) and become the filters or mental models through which you see situations and process information. Beliefs are the periscopes of life.

Professor Haslam and his colleagues have found that ingrained beliefs can also become stereotypes that affect our performance. (2) Let’s say, for example, I “remind” you that men generally have greater mathematical ability than women do do and you then take a difficult math test. Research shows that you would probably perform better if you were a man and worse if you were a woman (compared to not being aware of this “math ability stereotype”). Similarly, if you have an ambitious sales goal, but your team has a stereotypical belief that they can't sell to this market or a particular product, your sales team will perform poorly. As Professor Haslam concluded, "what we think we are determines both how we perform and what we are capable of becoming." Show me what a leader believes and I'll tell you what she can achieve.

To build your team’s belief that they can reach your difficult goal, you must eliminate any remnants of negative, subconscious, stereotypical beliefs. You need to reformat their CDs. Philosophers, creative geniuses, and business leaders have been doing it for centuries.

• Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson met once a month for over 20 years with an elite crowd known as the Saturday Club. Members included Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Whitman...
• Professor Howard Gardner reviewed the lives of creative geniuses such as Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Gandhi. He concluded that models of success were instrumental in shaping their lives. (3)
• In his study of 500 industrial giants, Napoleon Hill reminds us that Henry Ford had his most outstanding achievements when he began associating with Edison, Burroughs, and Firestone. (4)
• When Jeff Immelt became CEO of GE, he identified the sharing of best practices across GE's businesses as one of the keys to increasing productivity. (5) Modeling what works is really another name for best practices.

At my first national sales meeting as a rookie salesperson, I remember asking Jack, the top salesperson, who had helped him the most. He said he listened to Zig Ziglar's audio-programs. That day, Zig and Jack became my first models of sales success. Based on what I learned from them, I built a step-by-step plan that strengthened my belief that I could become the top salesperson, which I did.

If you want to strengthen your and your team's self-efficacy, apply the power of modeling by learning from those who have been (and are presently) where you want go. Call them models, mentors, or coaches. But please call them! Listed below are several ways to make modeling work for you. Adapt these ideas to help you construct your systematic plan to reach your goal.

1. Become active in associations to discover your industry’s best practices.

2. Dedicate a small portion of your regular meetings to learning from each other.

3. Start an evidenced-based book of the month club at work. Select books that have solid research to back up their recommendations. Research is really modeling based on the scientific method.

4. Call the authors who have written books to customize their ideas to your situation.

5. Involve your team members in the creation of a plan based on successful models.

6. Invite team member to create a task list to fulfill their individual responsibilities.

7. Find a coach or mentor, who has been there and done that, to review your plan.

Use these keys to build your (and your team’s) belief that you can take the actions to reach your goal. How surprised will you be when you overcome these tough times and reach your destination? Let me know how you’re doing.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. Berry J and West R: Cognitive Self-Efficacy in Relation to Personal Mastery and Goal Setting Across the Life Span. International Journal of Behavioral Development 16(2): 351-379, 1993.

2. Haslam A, Salvatore J., Kessler T, and Reicher S. The Social Psychology of Success, Scientific American Mind, April/May 2008, pages 24 -- 31.

3. Gardner H: Creating Minds. HarperCollins: New York, 385, 1993..

4. Hill N: Think and Grow Rich. Fawcett Crest Book: New York, 1937.

5. Thomas Stewart; Growth as a Process, Harvard Business Review, June 2006, 62 - 70.