In a power vacuum, the “vacuum” is created when someone who had power suddenly departs, leaving the opportunity for someone else to quickly fill the void. Throughout history, power vacuums have been common when despotic leaders are deposed, and others then rush in to seize their power (see hydra effect in Chapter 2).
In a controlled setting, an organization can deliberately create a power vacuum, and actively try to get people to fill it. For example, leadership can carve out a set of responsibilities and offer people an opportunity to take them over. In other cases, leaders may wait to see if anyone steps up naturally. Setting up a controlled power vacuum like this can help determine who is intrinsically attracted to a role. By watching what people do as they step into the power vacuum, you can see how well suited they are for the role before officially giving it to them.
However you decide to do it, discovering the right roles and responsibilities for the members of your team is a step worth taking. The ideal situation for any group setting is one where you have clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, and people who are well suited for each and intrinsically motivated to excel at them. Those are the ingredients for a 10x team.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Crafting the right role for an individual—whether for yourself or for a colleague—doesn’t guarantee that they will reach their full potential. People, especially those in new roles, need guidance and mentorship to achieve at the highest level. If you’ve ever been on either side of a successful coaching or mentorship relationship, you probably know what we mean. In any case, you should be aware of several mental models to help you think about how to receive or provide such guidance and mentorship.
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has made a career studying the fastest way to get good at something, a model he calls deliberate practice. It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback. As Ericsson noted in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
Deliberate practice is more intensive than what you think of as regular practice. A kids’ soccer practice where the children spend the beginning of the session passing the ball back and forth is passing practice. However, it is not deliberate passing practice because the kids are not practicing at the edge of their abilities and also are not receiving real-time feedback on how to improve.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate passing practice could take multiple forms. One example would be repeatedly trying to hit a target and getting coached on mistakes after each few tries. The goal could be to hit the target an increasing number of times in a row: first once, then three times, then five times, and so on. Once the last goal has been reached, then the target could be moved further away and the process repeated. This more focused type of passing practice is a more efficient way to improve passing skills.
You may have heard of the so-called “10,000-Hour Rule,” which Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book Outliers. Gladwell draws on Ericsson’s work and notes that world-class experts usually required ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve world-class status. Please be aware that Ericsson and others have noted that this is not a hard-and-fast “rule,” in that actual hourly amounts vary depending on the subject you are practicing, how deliberate the practice, how good your coaches are, and the degree of mastery you are seeking.
Regardless, it is clear that in any field, deliberate practice is the fastest way to move from being a novice to being an expert. It is difficult to do alone, however, because it relies on continuous specific feedback about what you could be doing better. Unless there is a simulated environment where such feedback can be usefully received (e.g., some online chess programs), at least one other person needs to be involved.
Ideally, this person is a true expert who can provide direct feedback and identify the best goals, practice environments, and coaching methods. Think of someone like a personal trainer, sports coach, or music teacher. In a professional setting, this person could be a manager or mentor who is helping you take on more and more responsibility, coaching you consistently along the way.
Deliberate practice puts you outside your comfort zone. That is both mentally and physically taxing. Trying to impose deliberate practice on someone is therefore a losing battle. It is better to get buy-in from both the mentor and mentee before committing to this model.
A related model is the spacing effect, which explains that learning effects are greater when that learning is spaced out over time, rather than when you study the same amount in a compressed amount of time. That is, “cramming” is usually a suboptimal strategy, as we noted in Chapter 3. To really learn something, you must reinforce it over and over again.
The spacing effect further holds that spacing between reinforcements can be increased over time. Think about when you learn a new word. The first day you learn it, you really need to study it. Then you might want to remind yourself of its meaning the next day or a couple of days later to make sure you’ve got it, but you don’t need to do that every day for the rest of your life. If you never use the word again, though, you’ll likely eventually forget it, and so occasionally you need to be reminded of it. This is exactly how many modern online learning platforms, such as Duolingo for learning languages and Quizlet for learning facts.
The spacing effect should inform your deliberate practice. You don’t completely master a skill and move on. Rather, you must rotate among skills, reinforcing what you’ve learned over time. It’s like going to the gym and rotating among all the muscles in your body, gradually taking on more intense workouts that involve more weight and complicated movements.
The spacing effect has more wide-reaching implications, such as that spacing out advertisements is more effective than showing them back-to-back. Also, spacing out topics within a textbook is more effective than the standard mechanism of covering each topic in its own, single chapter. For example, in an elementary math textbook, if you teach fractions in different chapters, kids learn how fractions can be applied across different contexts and the concept is better reinforced than it would be if taught in a single chapter.
To make deliberate practice work in an organizational context, you need to find a way to provide people the continual feedback and reinforcement learning they need. One way to do this is through a weekly one-on-one standing meeting with a manager, mentor, or coach. This meeting can serve as a forcing function to deliver such feedback on a regular basis (as we noted in Chapter 4). These can be relatively unstructured meetings where you discuss current projects, as well as discussions about skill development and career growth.
In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott describes a model of the same name for how to approach giving feedback in one-on-ones, weekly or otherwise, using the trusty 2 × 2 matrix (see Chapter 4).
Radical Candor
The two axes for this matrix are “challenge directly” and “care personally.” When you give feedback to someone, you can give it in a vague, abstract way (“I think you could do a better job at communication”), or in a specific, actionable way where you challenge directly (“This sentence you said was confusing, here’s why, and here’s what I think you should have said”). Being vague and abstract is much easier to do because it avoids the hard work of identifying specific examples and the psychological stress of debating the nuances around those specifics. Many people thus take the easy way out. But for your feedback to be effective, you are going to need specifics.
Caring personally involves nurturing the relationship you’ve built prior to giving feedback. If you’ve consistently shown that you have this person’s best interests at heart, then you’ve laid the groundwork for that person to be receptive to your constructive criticism. On the other hand, if you don’t have much of a rela
tionship at all, or worse, have a negative one, your feedback is not likely to be accepted. It is too easy at that point for the receiver to disregard it.
Radical candor is giving feedback in a way that both challenges directly and cares personally (upper right quadrant of the matrix). Your feedback is completely candid and gets to the root of an issue, its radical form. It goes hand in hand with deliberate practice because this type of feedback is exactly the type that should be given in a deliberate practice session: a specific account of what the person could be doing better at a particular skill they are trying to improve.
The other quadrants create suboptimal feedback patterns:
Ruinous empathy (upper left quadrant)—when you care personally but don’t challenge directly. This occurs when you aren’t specific enough in your feedback.
Obnoxious aggression (lower right quadrant)—when you challenge directly but don’t care personally. This type of feedback is often brushed off because the lack of caring can make it seem insincere.
Manipulative insincerity (lower left quadrant)—when you neither challenge directly nor care personally. This takes the form of vague criticism that isn’t actionable enough to be useful and can be off-putting because of the lack of a strong foundational relationship.
When you engage in deliberate practice outside an organization, you and your coach can design practice sessions that are specially tuned to your goals and skill level. Think about the soccer practice where you can arrange the cones just so. Inside an organization, by contrast, constructing these ideal practice sessions is more challenging because you do not control the environment. For example, you might want to work on your presentation skills, but you may have only so many possibilities to do so given your position. Additionally, these real-world situations come with constraints and consequences. However, you can still try your best to find learning opportunities.
An excellent start would be declaring your intention to engage in deliberate practice for a particular skill set and recruiting a mentor who is willing to coach you regularly. Then you and your mentor can look out for situations where you can work on improving your skills without much consequence to the organization. For example, you can take a role where you practice your skills on a project that won’t have a big impact on the company. Of course, you can also find additional practice opportunities in your time outside the organization.
How can the organization help you determine which projects are suitable for practicing your skills, or, as a mentor yourself, how can you help determine the same for your team members? Venture capitalist Keith Rabois developed a related mental model, called the consequence-conviction matrix, to do just that. As he explained in his lecture “How to Operate”:
You basically sort your own level of conviction about a decision on a grate, extremely high or extremely low. There are times when you know something is a mistake and there’s times when you wouldn’t really do it that way, but you have no idea whether it’s the right or wrong answer. And then there is a consequence dimension. There are things that if you make the wrong decision are very catastrophic to your company and you will fail. There are things that are pretty low impact. At the end of the day they aren’t really going to make a big difference, at least initially.
Where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. And delegate completely, let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side, obviously where the consequences are dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you are right, you actually can’t let your junior colleague make a mistake.
Conviction-Consequence Matrix
High conviction
Low conviction
High consequence
Don’t delegate
Delegate sometimes
Low consequence
Delegate sometimes
Delegate completely
The consequence-conviction matrix can help you free up your time as a leader, and also categorize situations into learning opportunities for your team members. You can even apply this matrix to family situations. For example, we try to have our kids attempt things that won’t cause much harm if they fail, such as buying something at a store themselves or making their own lunch.
Tying it all together, activities in the high-conviction, low-consequence quadrant are perfect to help someone (or yourself) with deliberate practice. These are times when what should be done is known, so that coaching can happen effectively, and at the same time it won’t be so consequential to the organization if the associated tasks initially fail. These situations are perfect deliberate practice exercises where the particular tasks that are on (or just outside) the edge of someone’s ability are delegated, and then that person is given radically candid feedback about how to improve. That’s a compelling method to help people grow quickly, including in new roles.
UNLOCKING POTENTIAL
Certain psychological mental models repeatedly arise when you are helping people unlock their potential. First, even if someone agrees to the idea of pursuing deliberate practice and receiving radically candid feedback, the process simply doesn’t work very well if the person doesn’t have the right mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck developed the fixed mindset versus growth mindset model, which explains this wrong-versus-right frame of mind, popularized in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
A fixed mindset means you believe that your personal attributes and abilities are fixed, with no ability to grow or change. For example, you may believe that you are “just bad at math,” and this lack of ability is “just part of who you are.” Of course, if you believe that your abilities (or lack thereof) are fixed, then you are naturally going to resist feedback to improve them.
The opposite of the fixed mindset is the growth mindset, where you believe that you can grow and change over time. When you have a growth mindset, you are more open to critical feedback, since you believe that you can grow your abilities and recognize that receiving and acting on constructive criticism is a necessary part of the process.
You have to be careful about your mindset, especially with things you’re already pretty good at. The reason is that when you’re good at something (e.g., math), being good at that thing can become part of your identity (“I am a person who is good at math”). Yet effectively growing that skill, such as through deliberate practice, requires consistently getting out of your comfort zone and periodically failing. If you have a fixed mindset, this process is perceived as an attack on your identity (“How can I be a person who is good at math and keep failing at these math problems?”).
As you start looking at whether people have a fixed or growth mindset, you will find that these concepts can apply selectively to certain characteristics (e.g., public speaking, athletics, etc.), though for certain people a fixed or growth mindset can be pervasive across most of their endeavors. What do you personally have a fixed or growth mindset about?
Originally, Dweck theorized that delivering educational instructions in school might encourage one mindset over another. For example, telling children they are smart encourages a fixed mindset because then students may take fewer educational risks in an effort to protect their “smartness.” On the other hand, praising students for working hard encourages a growth mindset because then they want to put in more effort, including taking on new challenges.
Since Dweck’s original studies in the 1970s, many others have been conducted. A recent meta-analysis in March 2018 in Psychological Science found that these types of “growth-mindset interventions” have a positive effect, though a modest one. However, there is an opportunity to replace these subtle interventions, like praising hard work instead of intelligence, with a much more direct approach, which is simply talking through this model explicitly with the person being coached. You will reap significant benefits if you can get someone to commit to having a growth mindset for a particular skill.
It is similarly important for you to believe in the growth poten
tial of your team members, as your expectations may influence their performance. The Pygmalion effect is a model that states that higher expectations lead to increased performance, as people try to meet the expectations set for them. (It’s named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who crafted his ideal spouse, whom Aphrodite then gave life to as Galatea.) Conversely the golem effect is the phenomenon where lower expectations lead to lower performance. (That one’s named after a clay creature in Jewish mythology that came to life, grew increasingly corrupt and violent, and eventually had to be destroyed.) Both are types of self-fulfilling prophecies.
As with fixed and growth mindsets, there is an ongoing debate on the strength of these effects across different circumstances. The original studies in classroom settings have also been criticized, but stronger effects have been shown in other settings, such as organizational leadership. For example, a meta-analysis in the October 2009 issue of Leadership Quarterly found the Pygmalion leadership style to be the most effective of the methods studied. This meta-analysis of two hundred different studies on leadership methods was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and compared Pygmalion leadership interventions with traditional methods (popular ideas from the 1970s and earlier) as well as newer techniques described variously as charismatic, inspirational, transformational, or visionary methods. Setting high expectations came out on top.
If you set high expectations for your kids or colleagues, that alone will likely not be enough to propel them to reach their full potential. But setting low expectations or lacking expectations altogether will likely create a significant barrier for them and prevent them from reaching their full potential. Again, being explicit can help: if people understand what they are shooting for, they can rise to the occasion.
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