Building Team Mastery
Cognicent | 30, September, 2024 | Newsletter
Over the past 18 years, we’ve spent a lot of time with leaders and teams, working with them to enhance their organisational culture and to improve performance. A central part of the approach we take is to explore the importance of human needs in the optimisation of performance. In simple terms, when we have our social and emotional needs met, we feel better, and of course, when we feel better, we tend to perform better – at everything. We tend to be more creative, more productive, more resilient, and safer. So, it makes sense for leaders to be aware of the role they can play in getting these needs met for their people and teams.
One of our core needs is our need for mastery, that is, we want and need to develop our capabilities to do things. When we get a new skill right, the reward centres in our brain are activated, releasing feel-good chemicals like dopamine. If you’ve ever watched a child learning to walk, falling over and over again, until they finally manage to string a few steps together, you will have seen the joy of success plastered across their little face. That sense of achievement is something we continue to crave throughout our lives. I acknowledge that this need may be stronger for some than for others, and yet, all of us feel good when we’ve mastered a new skill, even if the feelings are short-lived.
When we talk about mastery, inevitably there is a question on the theory of 10,000 hours. For those of you who don’t know about this theory, it comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book, Outliers, and draws on the 1993 work of Psychologist Anders Ericsson and his co-authors, Krampe and Tesch-Romer. The theory is that if you do something for 10,000 hours, then you will be an expert in that thing. While it’s an attractive idea, it’s just not correct. There are plenty of people who have done things for 10,000 hours (and often for many more), who are far from masters or experts in what they do.
In fact, the original paper by Ericsson and colleagues doesn’t suggest 10,000 hours is what is needed, but rather it highlights the importance of time spent in deliberate practice for skill development. The original paper also highlighted that the type of practice, and the quality of instruction, are critical factors in developing expertise. While the paper focused on elite performance, there is a bit we can take out of it when we consider how we promote skills development and mastery within our organisations. If we want to invest in the capabilities of our people and teams, then ensuring that we invest in quality training and time to practice what we have learned are crucial ingredients.
While training in technical skills is an obvious need for businesses, we know we need more than just technical skills to ensure teams are cohesive, collaborative and can work together effectively. We see many organisations focus on soft skill development for the top tier of leadership, but, they often neglect to invest meaningfully in these skills for their front-line leaders and employees.
Consider how it looks within your organisation:
1. Do we allocate adequate time and resources to the development of our people?
2. Do we provide a balanced development approach that incorporates both technical and soft skills development for our people?
3. Are we providing our people with the skills they need to enhance their performance, engage in the culture, and manage interpersonal communications?
4. Are we as leaders finding opportunities to challenge and develop our people within their roles (e.g., secondments, challenging projects, step-up positions etc.)?
5. Do we rely too heavily on a trickledown effect for capability development, hoping leaders will pass on what they have learned to their teams?
We hear leaders highlight that people are their greatest asset. However, it is the organisations where leaders match their actions to these words through focused investment in their people, that truly create cultures of high performance.
We hope you have a safe, well and productive rest of your week.
– The Cognicent Team