ARTICLES:
The Making of an Expert
Managing Oneself
Are You a High Potential?
Making Yourself Indispensable
How to Play to Your Strengths
The Power of Small Wins
Don't Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise
Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity
Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance
The Right Way to Form New Habits
[site is buggy and not letting me add links to relevant articles... will try again soon]
The Making of an Expert
Experts are always made, not born.
Achieving expertise requires engaging in deliberate practice — practice that focuses on tasks beyond one's current level of competence and comfort.
Improving skills you already have
Extending reach and range of skills
Key to improving expertise is consistency and carefully controlled efforts.
True expertise can be replicated and measured
"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it"
Self-coaching: each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the level of an expert performer.
Managing Oneself
What are my strengths?
Knowing our strengths in order to know where we belong
Feedback analysis
Write down what you expect will happen whenever you make a key decision/ take a key action
Compare the actual results with your expectations 8-12 months later
Revelations
1) Where your strengths lie
2) What you are doing or failing to do that deprives you the full benefits of your strengths
3) Where you have no strengths and cannot perform
Implications
1) Concentrate on your strengths; put yourself where your strengths can produce results
2) Improving your strengths; where you need to improve skills or acquire new ones
3) Discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it
Responsibility for Relationships
Taking responsibility for relationships
Fact: Other people are as much individual as you yourself are. They too have their strengths, their way of getting things done; their values.
To be effective, you have to know the strengths, the performance mode, and the values of your co-workers.
Taking responsibility for communication
Fact: Most people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect.
Organisations are no longer built on force but on trust.
The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means they understand one another.
My Reflections: Link [restricted view]
Are You a High Potential?
High potentials consistently and significantly outperform their peer groups in a variety of settings and circumstances;
Exhibit behaviours that reflect their companies' culture and values;
Show a strong capacity to grow and succeed throughout their careers within an organisation — more quickly and effectively than their peer groups do.
[All these seem highly subjective though...]
The Anatomy of a High Potential
Delivering strong results—credibly.
Competence is the baseline quality.
But one also needs to prove credibility — building trust and confidence among your colleagues and, thereby, influencing a wide array of stakeholders; getting the team on your side.
e.g. Asking "What time-consuming tasks would you like to see addressed within 90 days?', and getting right to work.
Master new types of expertise.
Broadening set of expertise; technical excellence > broader expertise (e.g. project management)
Recognise that behaviour counts.
Demonstrate a behavioural shift from "fit and affiliation" to "role model and teacher".
Be humble; help peers succeed rather than threatening them.
Making Yourself Indispensable
What makes leaders indispensable is not being good at many things but being uniquely outstanding at a few things.
Focus on a competency that matters to the organisation and about which you feel some passion
Because a strength you feel passionate about that is not important to the organisation is essentially a hobby, and a strength that the oganisation needs that you don't feel passionate about is just a chore.
[e.g. when working on communication skills] Pay attention not just to what you are communicating but also to what you are saying.
e.g. Keeping track of how often you issue instructions vs how often you asked questions;
e.g. Keeping track of how much of what you said was criticism (constructive or otherwise) and how much was encouragement
How to Play to Your Strengths
Paradox of human psychology that while people remember criticism, they respond to praise.
Criticism makes people defensive and therefore unlikely to change;
Praise produces confidence and the desire to perform better.
Reflected Best Self (RBS) Exercise - to develop a sense of one's "personal best" in order to increase future potential [an example of new approaches springing from an area of research called positive organisational scholarship (POS)]
The Power of Small Wins
People are most creative and productive when their inner work lives are positive — when they feel happy, are intrinsically motivated by the work itself, and have positive perceptions of their colleagues and organisation.
Progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation and perception, the single most important is making (consistent and meaningful) progress in meaningful work.
Work does not need to involve curing cancer in order to be meaningful. It simply must matter to the person doing it.
By focusing on managing progress, the management of people becomes much more feasible.
Supporting Progress: Catalysts and Nourishers
Catalysts and nourishers can lend greater meaning to the work and amplify the operation of the progress principle.
Catalysts = actions that support work
e.g. setting clear goals, allowing autonomy, providing sufficient resources and time; helping with the work, openly learning from problems and successess, allowing free exchange of ideas
e.g. establish oneself as a resource for team members, rather than a micomanager
Allow autonomy
Offer guidance; checking in with them , not checking up on them
Being transparent, not hoard information
Nourishers = acts of interpersonal support
e.g. respect and recognition, encouragement, emotional comfort, opportunities for affiliation
Don't Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise
Look to teammates as teachers.
Set aside time every month to reflect on the most important lessons or insights you gleaned from your team members.
Ask them open-ended questions to trigger their thoughts and encourage them to challenge your thinking and give you feedback. (Make certain to take their comments seriously.)
Cultivate learning buddies.
Seek colleagues who challenge your thinking and whom you bounce around new ideas.
Learn from mistakes.
Mistakes are to be acknowledged, not swept under the rug,
Set aside time each month to think about the errors you made.
Did you notice any patterns?
Were you misaligned with your team?
Did you rush to judgment when making a decision?
Did any mistakes result from experiments you were trying? If so, what lessons can you capture? And what new experiences might you try to improve your performance?
Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity
Mindful management: imagine that your thoughts are totally transparent. If they were, you wouldn't think awful things about other people. You'd find a way to understand their perspective.
Creating a more mindful organisation: making not knowing ok—rather than acting like you know, so everyone else pretends they know, which leads to all sorts of discomfort and anxiety.
Get people to ask, "Why? What are the benefits of doing it this way vs another way?"
Achieving soft openness — to be attentive to the things you are doing but not single-minded, because then you are missing other opportunities.
Interesting thought: "the best way to decrease prejudice is to increase discrimination."
Take a group of 20 kids and keep dividing them into subsets—male/female, younger/older, dark hair/light hair, wearing black/not wearing black—until they realise everyone is unique.
Play games and midway through mix up the teams/give each child a chance to rewrite the rules of the game, so it becomes clear that performance is only a reflection of one's ability under certain circumstances.
Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance
The leader's mood and behaviours drive the moods and behaviours of everyone else.
Moods that start at the top tends to move the fastest because everyone watches the boss and takes emotional cues from him.
Emotional leadership: a leader needs to make sure that not only is he regularly in an optimistic, authentic, realistic, (high-energy) mood, but also that, through his chosen actions, his follows feel and act the same way.
Dynamic resonance: displaying moods and behaviours that match the sitiuation at hand, with a healthy dose of optimism mixed in. Respect how others are feeling—even if it is glum or defeated—but also model what it looks like to move forward with hope and humour.
Self-awareness: ability to read your own emotions and know how they are affecting others
Self-management: ability to control your own emotions and act with integrity in reliable and adaptable ways
Social awareness: empathy and organisation intuition; show you care; keenly understand how your words and actions make others feel; be sensitive enough to change them when that impact is negative
Relationship management: ability to communicate clearly and convincingly, disarm conflicts, and build strong personal bonds
High levels of emotional intelligence create climates in which information sharing, trust, healthy risk-taking and learning flourish.
An upbeat environment fosters mental efficiency, making people better at taking in and understanding information, at using decision rules in complex judgments, and at being flexible in their thinking.
The Right Way to Form New Habits
"two-minute rule": take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less
e.g. "read 30 books next year" > "read one page a day"
e.g. "do yoga 4 days a week" > "take out my yoga mat"
The habit must be established before it can be improved.
It has to become the standard in your life before you can worrying about optimising or scaling it up from there.
Focus more on your identity than on the outcome.
Useful question to ask yourself: "Who is the type of person that can achieve those outcomes?"
This way, your focus becomes building habits that reinforce that identity rather than achieving a particular outcome. And you can trust that the outcome will come naturally if you show up as a specific type of person daily. (act in alignment with the type of person you see youself being; true behaviour change is really identity change.)
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become. The more you show up and perform habits, the more you cast votes for being a certain type of person, the more you build up this body of evdience.
❌ "Fake it till you make it" = asking yourself to believe something positive about yourself without having evidence for it, i.e. delusion.
Habits of energy and habits of attention.
Habits of energy = meta-habits; habits that if dialed in, puts you in a better position to perform other habits (e.g. good sleep habits)
Habits of attention
Improve consumption habits (curating, editing, refining and filtering information feed) to improve work output.
Habit graduation.
At some point, you want to graduate; to step up to the next level. General rule of thumb: to try to get 1% better each day.
Keep showing up.
"Whenever I feel like giving up, I think about the stonecutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock 100 times without showing a crack. An then at the 101st blow it splits into two. And I know that it wasn't the 101st that did it, but all the 100 that came before."
Keep showing up, keep hammering on the rock, keep building that potential energy, to know that it is not wasted, it's just being stored. Maybe then you can start to fight that emotional battle of building better habits and ultimately get to the reward you're waiting to accumulate.
Making good habits stick.
Make it a big part of your environment.
Make it as easy and convenient as possible.
e.g. Redesign your environment to make the actions of least resistance the good and productive ones, and increase the friction of the things that take your attention away.
The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. A lot of the reason why bad habits form so readilty and good habits are so unlikely, or resistant to form, has to do with that gap in time and reward.
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