Accelerating Executive Mastery >>
The Executives that I coach all aspire to be the very best at what they do. It’s my job to help them, but when I turned to the literature on how to best to do that I was struck by how much of it fell short.
Written for transitional founders, CEOs, investors, corporate executives and other leaders across professional disciplines, Accelerating Executive Mastery >> series deep-dives into the metagame of mastery in a complex world.
The Big Idea 💡
- In a complex world, the types of systemic challenges we face as leaders can’t be solved by intellectual horsepower and expertise alone. How do we master this world?
- The popular literature on expertise, leadership and mastery addresses the development of technical skills in well-structured, ‘kind’ learning environments. The focus is on individuals attaining high proficiency within specific disciplines, where feedback is fast and results are directly measurable. With the right mindset and deliberate practice, success and mastery will follow.
- But it’s not like this in the C-suite and Boardroom. With your technical skills already well-honed, Executive-level leaders operate in more ‘wicked’ learning environments. Information and feedback is messy, random, incomplete, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand. The relationship between cause and effect isn’t known until afterwards. What worked once may not work again. Leaders can’t just ‘know better’. Leaders must look inwards, to understand themselves, and also outwards, to understand the perspectives of their people, organisation, competitors and the market.
- Accelerating Executive Mastery goes beyond technical proficiency to help you master the kind of adaptive leadership skills required to navigate this complex landscape, take your team on a journey with you, and speed up the rate at which you can do it.
Accelerating Executive Mastery: Common Factors
My reading, research and experience coaching executives for more than a decade has led me to believe that the following common factors are intrinsic to developing executive mastery. Put simply, if you’re not working tenaciously in some combination across all these factors, then you’re constraining the pace of your development:
- Motivation – do you really want to get better?
- Time on the Job – are you putting the time in?
- Continuous Learning – are you a ‘learning machine’, from a range of sources and diverse perspectives?
- Deliberate Practice – constant repetition, outside your comfort zone
- Feedback – are you seeking and soaking up feedback from all around you?
- Coaching – do you have a great coach?
- Mentoring – so you have a great mentor?
- Reflective Practice – do you analyse your actions, experiences, and decisions to improve future understanding?
- Inner Work – ‘know thyself’
- Complexity Fitness – work on “how you think” rather than just “what you know”
- Get up on the Balcony – elevate your sensemaking, seeing the system to gain a broader perspective.
- Heat Experiences – disrupt and disorient your habitual way of thinking, pushing you to the edge of your comfort zone.
- Shift Perspectives – expose yourself to people with different worldviews, opinions, backgrounds.
- Opposable Thinking – cultivate a both/and mindset, as opposed an either/or approach.
Go deeper on Executive Mastery ↴
Leadership beyond deliberate practice >>
Can deliberate practice help you master the craft of business and leadership?
Whilst it can be very helpful in the earlier stages of your leadership journey, it becomes less helpful as you advance in your executive career. That’s because deliberate practice is contingent upon rapid feedback in ‘kind’ environments. But senior leaders must navigate challenges that are devoid of rapid, plentiful feedback, or any feedback at all.
The Myth of Deliberate Practice & Mastery >>
Perhaps the self-improvement literature’s biggest act of mis-selling is telling us that if we want to improve at anything then we need to undertake deliberate practice. According to one guru “regardless of where we choose to apply ourselves, deliberate practice can help us maximize our potential”. It sounds enticing, but it’s incorrect. Deliberate practice won’t necessarily help you achieve mastery regardless of where you choose to apply yourself.
Discover the difference between kind and wicked learning environments, and why deliberate practice works well in the former but poorly in the latter.
Mental Models & Mastery: Forging a Theory >>
Explores the foundations of learning and our construction of knowledge:
- How mental models form the basis of cognition, and how we construct increasingly sophisticated mental models over time.
- How we move from acquiring the explicit knowledge that characterises our earlier work careers – teachable, learnable, conceptual facts which form the basis of our mental models – to tacit knowledge, that which is hard to express, extract, formalise or codify (including personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition).
- Learn about Cognitive Flexibility Theory and Cognitive Transformation Theory, which underpin your journey to mastery.
The Mental Models Paradox >>
People have become obsessed with what mental models they can use to make them smarter. If we take these mental models and conceptual frameworks and run our reality through them, then we’ll become better thinkers and make better decisions. Or will we?
Here’s the paradox: good mental models, and other conceptual frameworks, make us smarter but only up to a point, after which they can actually constrain our thinking.
Make sure your mental models are building blocks to higher wisdom, not brick walls constraining your thinking.
Thank you to Cedric Chin, who inspired this exploration by introducing me to the book Accelerating Expertise: Traing for High Proficiency in a Complex World and sending me further down the rabbit hole of mastery. Cedric has done much more work on this subject and I encourage you to read it.