Accelerating Executive Mastery >>
Are you an entrepreneur, executive, investor or other professional striving to be the very best at what you do? Accelerating Executive Mastery deep-dives into the metagame of mastery. How can you speed up the rate at which you develop in business, leadership and life? How can you get better, faster?
The Big Idea 💡
- In a complex world, the types of systemic challenges we face as leaders, at work and on a global scale, can’t be solved by intellectual horsepower and expertise alone. How do we master this world?
- The popular literature on expertise, mastery and leadership 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. 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 themsleves, 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.
How can you accelerate your journey towards Executive Mastery?
My research so far suggests you should pay tenacious attention to these ‘common factors’:
| 1. | Motivation | You have to really want to improve, otherwise you won’t have the grit, determination and resilience to keep going on a long and tough journey |
| 2. | Continuous learning | Acquiring new knowledge, skills, and competencies by engaging in all sorts of educational activities, like formal training, self-directed learning, and experiential learning, to stay current and adaptable. But it’s not just what you know, it’s how you now it. Make your cup bigger, rather than just fill up your existing cup |
| 3. | Deliberate practice | Repetitive practice of challenging tasks, continuous feedback, and a structured effort to go beyond current abilities, pushing the boundaries of one’s capabilities and addressing weaknesses. Only works well in ‘kind’ learning environments, but remains important for building base, technical business and leadership skills |
| 4. | Feedback | Integrating feedback from any situation into our current experience allows us to create new ways of understanding and making sense of things |
| 5. | Coaching | Unlock your potential to maximise your own development across all these common factors with the support of a trusted, external, objective, empathetic outsider |
| 6. | Mentoring | Learn from those who are more experienced and wiser you |
| 7. | Habits of Mind | i. Ask different questions ii. Take multiple perspectives iii. See the system iiii. Opposable thinking |
| 8. | Heat Moments | Continually pushing yourself into heat experiences – bigger, more complex situation and roles – that your current mental maps can’t explain, requiring you to construct new, more accurate maps |
| 9. | Reflective practice | Why did you think, do and act in the way that you did? What did you miss? What could we have done better? What might you do differently next time? |
| 10. | Inner Work | We can’t master anything without doing the work to know ourselves, including our embodied cognition |
Go deep on Executive Mastery here ↴
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.
Accelerating Executive Mastery: 10 ways to get better, faster >>
Work hard at something over time and you’ll get better, right? Yes, but time on the job alone gives you no guarantee of mastery. And what if time isn’t on your side. What if you want to get better, faster? This is the challenge that the CEOs and executives that I work with face. As their business and role grows, their development can struggle to keep up with the rate of change.
I identify the 10 ‘common factors’ that you need to be working on tenaciously if you want to become a better executive, or better at anything in fact: Motivation, Time on the job, Continuous Learning, Deliberate Practice, Feedback, Coaching, Mentoring, Inner Work, Reflective Practice and Deliberately Developmental Practice.
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 and this Series format 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.