The focus of this chapter is on techniques you can use to go beyond being just good at your job and become truly outstanding; to be all you can be. To achieve this, you will need to become much more deliberate in choosing and working on things you want to improve, and you will also need to tune your senses to acquire feedback from every possible source and then use this feedback as a learning mechanism. Through learning, you get better at what you do and you also develop the personal courage to strive to be great at things that you currently believe are beyond your ability.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
When we talk of personal mastery we are describing the process of developing true expertise in a field.
It is natural to aspire to be an expert, but in looking for role models people often look outside their profession for inspiration about how people achieve mastery. For example, when you look at top artists or sportsmen or sportswomen it is easy to think that such expertise is a step too far for you. In many cases that may be true to an extent, but it is not the whole story. Almost all top performers share the following common traits:
• They practise intensively and in a very focused and deliberate way. On average, the evidence appears to suggest that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice over a period of around 10 years to reach elite performance.1
• They study with devoted and talented teachers and coaches who are dedicated to developing people.
• They are encouraged and supported in their development by their family and friends.
Rather than be disillusioned or daunted by the sheer scale of effort put in by these role models, you should draw comfort from these statistics. These experts achieved brilliance through hard work and focused deliberate practice. If they can do it, so can you. But what is the difference between deliberate practice and the routine consolidation of your skills that you engage in every day of the week?
There is an old adage that says:
Practice makes perfect.
The reality is that practice just makes you better at doing what you are already doing and more certain that what you are doing is right. Without appropriate feedback and reflective thought, you can never hope to get truly better at doing anything.
Within the context of learning by doing in the workplace, you can think of the process in the following way; you take action, observe the results, reflect on why things turned out the way they did, and then you think about how you can modify your actions or approach next time to get different or better results.
This is termed the learning loop and was articulated neatly by David Kolb in 1983.2 In order for you to learn, experience has to be backed up by reflection which, in turn, allows you to make generalisations and formulate concepts that can then be applied to new situations.
The thing that makes Kolb’s learning loop work is feedback – information that you receive from the real world that helps you understand how things are playing out. Feedback is a critical element for learning and growth.
If you want to achieve personal mastery at anything, you need to look for feedback on your current performance and then reflect on what that feedback is telling you.
Everything you do is an opportunity to learn and grow, but unless you get feedback you will never be able to take full advantage of these precious learning opportunities.
THE IMPACT OF THE ISSUE
There is a world of difference between being busy and being productive. Our organisations are full of busy people, people running on autopilot as they repeat with little thought the same tasks in the same way. Often enjoyment and fulfilment drain away and all that is left is getting through another day without actually screwing up. It need not be like this: you do have a choice. You can spend your days reacting to things as they hit you; if you do this you will inevitably have a sense that the world is happening to you and is outside of your control. Or you can adopt a more creative mindset and seek to create the future you want by the choices and actions you take today and every day.
If you choose to take a hand in creating your own future you will need to, first of all, imagine what that future could be, in terms of:
• what it would look and feel like;
• what you would be able to achieve if you could make it real;
• what you would need to put in place in order to get there.
This is, in effect, building a personal vision. Your vision needs to be challenging; ideally it should appear to lie just outside your possible grasp and it should be something that is going to take significant and sustained effort to achieve. If you are not heading somewhere significant and exciting you will just drift – most of the people in the workplace today are drifting. Drifters seldom get promoted and are highly unlikely to get to do the exciting and interesting jobs. You need to be driven and you need to be driving relentlessly towards a goal.
Comparing your personal vision to the current reality will highlight the gaps – the things that you need to change or improve in order to make progress. Some of the skills and abilities you need will be new to you or will feel awkward or uncomfortable, whilst others may need a little polishing. The key is to be selective and focus on one thing at a time.
Expertise is realised as a result of lots of small but significant improvements to lots of seemingly insignificant things rather than one big improvement to one thing.
The reason that many people find it so difficult to improve in the workplace is because they do not have a vision that drives them to a new level. They don’t know how to apply themselves in a way that can yield results. They often don’t have someone to inspire, guide and sustain them in their quest for excellence and mastery and, critically, they expect results too soon. The problem with shooting for the stars is that at the first setback it is tempting to give up or lower the goal, to say: ‘Well, that was unrealistic. Perhaps I ought to attempt something a little less challenging.’ Never give up or lower your goals. You may not achieve them all but the people who you admire and who succeed are the sorts of people who will strive relentlessly to achieve their goal. For them, failure is not an option.
If you fail to achieve your goal, don’t lower it – change your approach to achieving it.
Once you start to work on improving your skills you will need a means to assess the progress that you are making. This normally comes in the form of feedback. You know from the last section that feedback is important, but, sadly, feedback is not always easy to come by.
Feedback comes in many forms: it can be tangible metrics of performance gathered as part of your business systems, or it can be more subjective assessments about how people are making sense of, and reacting to, the changes you have instituted. Feedback can be generic in terms of the contribution that your efforts have made or it can be more personal, about how you are perceived and reacted to as an individual. All types and styles of feedback are important and you need to reflect upon what the feedback tells you about both what you do and how you engage with people in order to do it.
Often the consequences of your decisions or actions do not show up until weeks, or even months, later. The outcomes, when they finally arise, do so all too often somewhere else along the value chain and, therefore, are not visible to you.
This causes a big problem in your feedback loop and it shows itself as follows:
• You meet an issue. Your brain recognises a pattern in the events and says, ‘Oh, this is one of them’. If you have met the situation before, you are likely to remember what you did last time.
• You probably think that you did the right thing last time or in a similar situation and the obvious conclusion is that you didn’t do it well enough, or that you should have done it faster or more vigorously.
• So, you do the same thing again, but with more vigour and certainty. The consequence is that you repeat solutions that fail and in many cases you keep repeating them ad infinitum because you never get feedback on the outcome, or consequences, of your actions.
This scenario is just as likely to show up in the way you handle your relationships as it is in the way you play out your organisational responsibilities. Day after day, you do what you always did; you always get the same results; you don’t question those results, or witness the outcomes; and you don’t take personal responsibility for those outcomes.
The result is that your leaders shake their heads in dismay and wonder why the same problems keep cropping up time after time, and why the competition appears to be more nimble and more innovative.
You don’t need to get better at what you are doing; you need to get better at understanding why you are doing what you are doing and recognising when you need to start doing something different.
MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
In his book The Fifth Discipline,3 Peter Senge identified personal mastery as an underpinning principle of organisational learning. According to Senge, to achieve personal mastery you must first set a personal vision: what you want to achieve and why this is important to you. This will then lead to what he terms ‘creative tension’: the feelings and impulses that arise in the space between where you want to be and the current reality. Without this creative tension, you are unlikely to summon the desire and achieve the sustained levels of effort needed to bring about a change in your personal circumstances.
Senge goes on to stress the importance of being loyal to the truth; this is a more difficult and contentious notion, not least because often our version of the truth is tied up with our assumptions about how the world works. We would suggest that at this stage of your development as a team leader it is possibly better to think in terms of integrity and by that we mean having a strong moral compass and being true to your beliefs and principles.
The starting point is personal vision: a desire to achieve something tangible, something that will stretch you, involving the acquisition of new skills, knowledge and habits. Your vision should be something that is capable of shifting the tectonic plates of your life and shaping you as a new and better person with new capabilities and horizons. The actual vision itself is far less important than what the vision does for you, how it triggers and sustains progress towards a new you.
The following mini case study helps to put this issue into context. Interestingly this story of personal transformation started more by accident than purposeful visioning, but the vision emerged as the story unfolded and the results were life changing.
Anne was a middle manager in the operations department of a large FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) organisation. Anne was bright, hard-working, highly professional and well respected by her peers. She ran her department well and could be relied upon to do what was right and deliver a great quality service.
Anne came to the attention of the HR department and was offered the opportunity of a one-year sabbatical to go back to university and do a master’s degree, paid for by the organisation. She was excited by the prospect and prepared herself for the challenge. Just a couple of weeks into the course, Anne realised that the key was not to learn new stuff, but rather to learn new ways of looking at stuff. She had to examine everything she knew and question why she thought about things the way that she did.
With this new sense of ‘self’ came the crushing realisation that she did not have 15 years’ experience of management – what she had was one year’s experience repeated 15 times. Eventually, she came out of the programme knowing new things, seeing all things differently, and having a new sense of her own value and a commitment always to try to see everything as if for the first time.
Anne’s story illustrates nicely that, paradoxically, personal mastery does not necessarily come from striving to perfect what you currently know and do. Anne’s breakthrough came when she realised that the big pay-off came when she challenged herself to see and do new things; learning how to learn better and, crucially, realising that what was already in her head limited what she focused her attention on. To really learn differently you need to acquire the ability to see (perceive) differently.
Sometimes the real clarity of a situation can only be seen when you view it from another perspective.
Personal mastery and development comes through discovering new ways of learning and embedding the desire to learn in everything that you do; learning is kick-started by new experiences.
So, the way to really get better is by grappling with things you don’t know. You need to challenge what you think you know and how you came to be so certain about it. You need to spend more than half of your available time striving, however imperfectly, to seize the unknown.
At the end of each week ask yourself the question – ‘What have I got better at this week that moves me towards the achievement of my goal?’
People who make significant improvements in their personal performance do so as a result of deliberate practice.
Most of the time when we choose to make the effort of practising something, we quickly fall into the habit of practising the things we can already do; after all, this feels good and gives us an instant psychological reward. But the research4 shows that the route to expertise lies in practising the things that you can’t do or that you find difficult.
To improve your performance you need to identify something specific that you either don’t know how to do or that you are poor at and then work on that one thing in a sustained way. Once you have perfected that one thing you can then add it into your wider practice and look for the next small thing to work on.
In addition to physical activity, try to be deliberate in the thinking that is associated with the physical acts. Try talking through your strategy out loud before you take action; this all helps bring additional focus to your physical acts.
You may also benefit from consciously scheduling what time of day you tackle certain sorts of problems. Listen to your body clock and set time for your most difficult and mentally challenging deliberate practice when you are at your freshest and your best; for most people this will be at the start of the day.
The following story illustrates how, with a little thought, imagination and forward planning you can build deliberate practice into any situation.
Tim was a web development team leader. A key element of his job was to accompany senior sales execs as they pitched for business to important clients. Tim was generally acknowledged as the most promising web developer in the company, but he was uncomfortable in the presence of the extrovert sales guys and was often marginalised or talked over in these important meetings. To make matters worse, Tim’s boss was a charismatic personality who delivered knock-out sales presentations, answered client questions with authority and panache and was loved by all the sales team. Unless Tim could get better and win the trust of the sales team in the same way, he would never have a hope of stepping into his boss’s shoes when his boss moved on.
Tim got on well with his boss and so asked him if he would mentor him. They adopted the following strategy.
A couple of days before an important sales pitch was to be delivered by his boss they would sit down and brainstorm all the key client needs and expectations and the unique ways in which their solution would fulfil these needs. They compiled a list of all the possible questions the client might have and the objections they might offer about the proposed solution. Tim would then go away independently and work up a slide pack and a persuasive response to all the questions. He would not share this with his boss.
On the day of the sales pitch, Tim would accompany his boss and sit at the back of the room – he would compare his boss’s slide pack to his own and notice how his boss responded to questions from the floor. He made extensive notes on his own slide pack and briefing notes to show where their two approaches diverged and which elements of his boss’s pitch had the most impact on the audience in terms of nodding and supportive comments. A couple of days after the event the two would sit down again and review what Tim had learned from the process and his boss would explain, where necessary, why he had made the choices he did. Together they would agree on one core aspect that should be the focus of their next mentoring session. This continued at least twice a month for 18 months.
Two years later the sales team no longer looked at Tim as technically capable but dull – he was now charismatic Tim who could be relied upon to wow clients. Three years later he moved up into his boss’s job.
Tim’s story highlights some key points. Getting better at something takes a lot of hard work and time. But effort on its own is not sufficient: Tim could not have achieved his transformation without the dedicated and selfless support of his boss. We all need support, encouragement and targeted feedback if we are to progress and achieve mastery at anything.
We have seen that to get the most benefit from your practice periods you need expert feedback, so you need to find a good coach, someone you trust and respect, someone who has real proven ability in the field you wish to excel in and someone who will both inspire and challenge you. One coach does not fit all purposes. As you grow and develop you will need different things from different people; your need may become for a mentor rather than a coach, for example.5 Your coach or mentor will need to be skilled at giving feedback.
Feedback needs to be considered, targeted and balanced: too much feedback in general can be confusing and too much negative feedback in particular will be demoralising. The best coaches and mentors don’t just focus on the here and now – they look forward and identify the skills and attitudes that you don’t possess now but will need to develop in order to achieve your next goal.
Great coaches and mentors will help you to develop your inner coach, so that you can become sensitive to your own performance in any situation and hence learn to self-coach.
The key to learning to self-coach is acquiring the ability to observe yourself, as a third party would, whilst you are engaged in your practice. This is not an easy skill. Most people, much of the time, will fall into one of two states: they will either be in the flow, so immersed in what they are doing that they are oblivious to the outside world, or they will be purposefully standing back from the action and consciously thinking about what they are experiencing and what they plan to do next. The second of these states is often termed ‘reflecting on action’, a term coined by Donald Schön in his landmark book The Reflective Practitioner,6 and is an important skill to master. This sort of reflection is more than just noticing what is going on; it is also about asking yourself why you see and experience things in the way that you do. If you adopted a different perspective would you notice things differently in the same situation?
You will know that you are starting to become really effective as a self-coach when you are able to slip seamlessly and unconsciously between the two states – of flow and reflecting in the moment on the action you are taking. Schön termed this ‘reflecting in action’. The bedrock of all coaching is asking powerful questions. As a self-coach, you will need to ask yourself reflective questions such as the following:
• What specific technique or skill have I been deliberately practising this week?
• How much have I closed the gap between where this element of my practice is and where I want it to be?
• What has been the most rewarding outcome of this particular phase of practice and why?
• What has been the most frustrating thing about this phase of practice and why?
• What does the frustration I have felt tell me about how I should structure the next phase of my practice and what key learning target I should build into my performance vision?
The only way you will grow as a leader is by stretching the limits of who you are, and doing things that may make you uncomfortable but that teach you, through direct experience and feedback, who you want to become. Indeed, the moments that challenge your sense of self are the ones that teach you the most.
PRACTICAL ADVICE
We will split our advice into two parts:
1. getting better and achieving mastery in what you are currently doing;
2. getting better at learning, so that you can achieve mastery in something new.
First some tips on how to become a superstar at what you are currently doing.
• Set yourself performance goals for all the important things that you have to do. These goals should not be process goals; they need to be outcome focused. It is not good enough to do something faster if the end customer sees no benefit that is meaningful to them as a result of your efforts.
• Monitor your own success rate against your personal performance goals. What is your personal best?
• Get into the habit of visualising what it would feel like to set a new personal best:
How would you need to prepare differently?
What new skills or knowledge would you need?
How would you deploy your new-found skills and knowledge to do something that someone cares about differently in a way that produces a significantly different outcome or customer experience?
How will you know when you have achieved something new?
• Ask yourself how others would assess your performance. Ask people for feedback on the following indicators:
What is it like to work with you?
How do you make people feel?
What is the most significant contribution that people associate with you?
What do others see as your core strength?
What one or two things would others really like to change about how you do what you do?
Now turn your attention to doing things differently and also to doing different things.
In terms of doing things differently, our message is a simple one: every hour spent on up-front thinking and reflecting with an enquiring mind will pay big dividends and could save you 100 hours down the road, mopping up the consequential issues of a bodged job, or dealing with the quick fix when it fails. This up-front hour should be spent in the following way:
• Considering alternative approaches.
• Putting yourself in the shoes of the person, or people, who will receive the output of your efforts. Ask yourself what is important to them and how they would want you to improve what you are doing.
• Asking yourself if this will fix things in such a way that they are likely to stay fixed.
• Thinking how what you are doing is going to make things easier for your customer (by easier, we mean reducing the effort the customer has to expend in order to engage with you or your services).
• Ensuring that you are addressing the root cause of an issue rather than merely the symptoms.
• Considering what leadership style or tactics you could borrow from others, for example shaping opinion without being overbearing, or using humour to break tension.
You also need to find every opportunity you can to do something different. Our basic rule of thumb is that when looking for a new challenge you should try to aim for something that is 50 per cent familiar and 50 per cent completely unknown. You need the 50 per cent familiarity, or you are likely to freeze and become unable to act. The 50 per cent unknown forces you to think new things and imagine new solutions.
When you approach a new challenge, start by asking yourself these questions:
• What is different or new about this situation, problem or request? Then look for new angles.
• What are the big assumptions that underpin your thinking about this situation? Are those assumptions still valid?
• If you were coming at this for the first time with no prior knowledge, how would you react?
• What would be the first thing that made an impression on you?
• What would world-class performance on this issue look and feel like?
• How far are you away from providing world-class service?
• What is the single biggest barrier to success?
What don’t you know about this situation? Is the lack of that knowledge a roadblock that will stop progress or merely a speed bump that will slow you down?
If you are facing a roadblock, can you find someone else who has the knowledge you need?
You also need to adopt a rigorous approach to creating opportunities to be different. We suggest that, at the start of each week, you choose one event that you may be called upon to repeat a number of times; for example, chairing a meeting, meeting a customer, or, maybe, briefing a team member on a task.
Then pick one aspect of the task; for example, planning for the task itself, how you use questions to steer the meeting, how you build rapport or how you check on understanding.
Whatever you decide to focus on, make sure that you do the following things:
• Be conscious of the thing you are trying to practise.
• Monitor your own feelings and internal struggles as you carry out your task.
• Monitor the reaction and behaviour of the people you are dealing with:
Were they at ease and receptive?
Were they following your train of thought?
Could they feed back to you an understanding of what you wanted?
Had you engaged both their hearts and minds, or just one aspect?
Did you get the level of contribution from them that you had hoped for?
Did anyone leave the room not understanding what you were aiming for or feeling that they did not have the opportunity to express their concerns, hopes and desires?
Now think about the outcomes you were hoping to achieve, and use those outcomes as feedback to guide your learning about the effectiveness of your new strategy:
• How confident and natural did you feel as you used the technique?
• What went really well?
• What could have gone better?
• What one or two things that you did appeared to resonate with the people you were working with? What got them excited?
• Did the energy you created produce a positive result?
• If you could immediately repeat the same exercise with the same people, what would you do differently and why?
Keep a reflective journal of what you tried, and what you observed happening as a result of what you tried. Capture how you felt, as well as what you did. In your reflective section focus on:
• what you learned from the events of the day or week;
• what you might have done differently if you had been able to view the same events from a different perspective.
At the end of each week review your learning and try to identify:
• two things that you will try to do more of;
• two things that you will try to do less of.
Achieving personal mastery is all about:
1. setting a goal and putting in time and effort to achieve it;
2. finding ways of getting feedback on your progress;
3. reflecting on what the feedback tells you about yourself and your impact, in the context of your goal;
4. using your new understanding to modify what you do and how you think going forward.
The process that we have described above looks pretty straightforward but, in our experience, the facet that people have most difficulty with is reflection. Our advice would be to get yourself a coach or trusted adviser. It is important to understand that, when choosing a coach, you are not looking for someone who can tell you what to do. You are looking for someone who can listen to your experiences and then ask you really good questions, questions that make you think and that kick-start your learning process.
The key to achieving personal mastery in anything is reflection and learning, and having the courage to try something new.
If you want to achieve mastery in everything you do, you have to find learning opportunities in everything that you do.
By all means take pride in doing something well, but always remain alert to the possibility that maybe you could have done it even better. It is the quest for continuous improvement that marks out the star performers.
THINGS FOR YOU TO WORK ON NOW
Below are some questions that will help you build a picture of how you currently seek and value feedback about your own performance and contribution to significant outcomes.
KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
• How do I judge and measure my own performance?
• How much of my time does fire-fighting and rework consume?
• When did I last actively seek feedback about how my efforts contribute to achieving outcomes that are meaningful to our customers?
• When did I last seek feedback about how my style of engagement impacts or inhibits the achievement of key goals?
• Have my stories, my defining moments or my self-image become outdated?
• How often do I challenge myself to think and see things in a different way and then reflect upon how I could do things differently?
• How concerned am I about how I appear, and how afraid am I to take risks in the service of learning?
• When I look at people in the organisation who are considered to be star performers, what are the key things about how they operate that are different to my way of behaving that I feel I could emulate?
Reflect on your answers to these questions. Decide on whether you wish to work on perfecting a current personal practice or embark on achieving mastery at something new, then choose one of the techniques we identified on pages 13 to 17 and use those ideas to help you tackle the mini exercises below.
MINI EXERCISES YOU CAN TRY IMMEDIATELY
• Start to keep a personal diary of learning – jot down things that you do that work well and things that don’t work quite so well. How did you recognise that they were working, or not working?
• Set aside some quiet time to review your learning diary and reflect on how you can change one or two of the things you do. Make a plan of how you will change those things and be rigorous about following through on your planned actions.
• Ask for feedback from your staff, your boss, your peers and your customers. Ask them what they value most about your style and approach and what they value least.
• Get yourself a mentor or coach and be prepared to have at least two sessions in the first month and then at least one session per month for a minimum of a year.
• Set yourself three personal performance goals. How will you measure your progress and how will you know when you have achieved these goals?
• Understand that you can also improve performance by eliminating some behaviours – identify two things that you are currently doing that are getting in the way of improved performance and vow to stop doing them. Once you have succeeded with these two, set yourself another two.
If you are inspired to find out more about any of the themes covered in this chapter we suggest that you start by reviewing the resources listed below.
FURTHER FOOD FOR THE CURIOUS
• Ericsson, K.A., Prietula, M.J. and Cokely, E.T. (2007) ‘The making of an expert’. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert [20 November 2017].
A short 15-page paper with lots of inspiring and fascinating examples.
• Goleman. D. (1995) Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
A comprehensive text on the subject of emotional intelligence. One of the five emotional intelligences that Goleman describes is ‘motivating yourself to achieve peak performance’.
• Schön, D.A. (1991) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Arena.
A must-read for the more thoughtful professional who is committed to learning and self-coaching.
• Senge, P.M. (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: strategies and tools for building a learning organization. New York; London: Currency, Doubleday.
The classic text on the elements of building a learning organisation. This is an easier read than the original book, The fifth discipline (1990), and is set out in a very accessible way with lots of clear examples. Dip in to sample a specific idea.
• Taylor, D. (2002) The Naked Leader. Oxford: Capstone.
An easy read with many poignant truths and practical tips.
1 Ericsson, K.A., Prietula, M.J. and Cokely, E.T. (2007) ‘The making of an expert’. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert [20 November 2017].
2 Kolb, D.A. (1983) Experimental Learning: experience as the source of learning and development. London: Prentice Hall.
3 Senge, P.M. (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: strategies and tools for building a learning organization. New York; London: Currency, Doubleday.
4 Ericsson, K.A., Prietula, M.J. and Cokely, E.T. (2007) ‘The making of an expert’. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert [20 November 2017].
5 Coaching is about personal effectiveness, growth and career development. It focuses on the achievement of specific goals or the resolution of certain performance or motivational issues. The role of a coach is to ask really good questions that make you think and motivate you to learn and do things differently. Coaching helps individuals access what they already know. They may never have asked themselves the questions but they have the answers. A coach assists, supports and encourages individuals to find these answers. Coaching is about helping people to learn rather than teaching them.
Mentoring is concerned with the passing on of knowledge or experience to someone less experienced or less qualified. Mentors may also open doors, act as sounding boards, or provide guidance, affirmation or reassurance to their ‘mentee’.
6 Schön, D.A. (1991) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Arena.