Despite it importance, few have learned a sound, robust process of skill development—one that takes knowledge, to behavior, and to skill mastery.
Development of skills is crtically important, yet few know the process one can use. It's actually simple—you need to talke knowledge, to behavior, to skill mastery.
This page contains:
The Importance of Skills Development
A Leadership Video
The Skills Development Model
Resources
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The Importance of Skill Building
By Murray Johannsen, Feel free to connect with the author on Linkedin or by email
College gives one a knowledge base and a limited set of skills. Normally these skills are technical. Norhting wrong with that but is is important to understand that some of the most important skills necessary for success in business or government are not taught in the university.
Secondly, skill development should be viewed as a lifetime endeavor. But you are only toing to be good at it if you develop a process for learning a skill.
One of the strategic blunders made by many is a they stop building skills. It's like in the game of baseball. They somehow manage to get on first base, but they stop running they never go on.
One famous writer of human history who saw the same tendency was Aesop. And this is one meaning of his parable, "The Tortoise and the Hare."
The Hare was once boasting of his speed before the other animals. "I have never yet been beaten," said he, "when I put forth my full speed. I challenge any one here to race with me."
The Tortoise said quietly, "I accept your challenge."
"That is a good joke," said the Hare; "I could dance round you all the way."
"Keep your boasting till you've beaten," answered the
Tortoise. "Shall we race?"
So a course was fixed and a start was made. The Hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and, to show his contempt for the Tortoise, lay down to have a nap. The Tortoise plodded on and plodded on, and when the Hare awoke from his nap, he saw the Tortoise just near the winning-post and could not run up in time to save the race. Then said the Tortoise:
"Plodding wins the race."
You might say, "How does that apply to me? Well, most people act like the Hare, they race to build knowledge and skills up to the point of graduation . . . .and then they stop.
The same rule about always building skills applies to your personal life and your business life. In fact, if you have a business, you have a six other skills principles to keep in mind.
Description of The Video:How to Develop Leadership Skills
When it comes to growing leadership skills, it is just expected that we know how to do so. But the reality is, few individuals have discovered how to perfect new skills. This video contains the foundation principles one must understand to put theory into practice and turn knowledge into skills.
The Skills Development Model
Unless you have been blessed with having your own leadership coach or sports psychologist, the first step in individual leadership development is to understand how to build a skill. The model presented here for individual skills development is not the same as that used in organizational leadership development. This model stresses developing both mental and behavioral leadership skills in an easy to remember three-phase approach.
Overview
I
remember the words my mother ground deeply into my mind
starting when I was a little boy. Perhaps your mother
had similar words. She told me on many occasions, “Work
hard and you’ll succeed.” It was as if endless
hours of 20/7 days automatically correlated to vast wealth.
After
putting these words into practice for many years, it
seems she was only half right. Really she should have
said is, “Work hard and you’ll succeed; work
smart and you don’t have to work so hard.” And
to work smarter, you must continually upgrade
your knowledge and skills.
The Skill Development Model
The model stresses
that effective skill development requires learning how to master a process of developing skills. To do that, one needs the right mixture of feedback,
motivation, practice and theory.
Skill Development Phase 1: Find Sound
Theory
“Our greatest adversary is our own ignorance.”
Careful study is an important element of skill mastery
Your skill development
program is only as good as the theory behind it. In other words, before you
practice,
you
must know and understand intellectually
what has to be done.
Good theory is relevant, practical, detailed and convertible into a behavior. It's important to understand that many commonly accepted leadership principles are very difficult to turn into actionable behavior. Take for example, "Treat people with respect." Nothing wrong with the principle, but respect is an abstract concept not easily turned into actions.
Skill Development Phase 2: Practice
“If you don't practice, you can fall down, but you can't ski.” — Murray Johannsen
Some
skills development efforts require a few minutes; others
take hundreds of hours. In the hundreds of hours category, we have
becoming
a persuasive
speaker. Even those with great aptitude blessed with a large dose
of
talent must practice endlessly to get really good.
On the other hand,
skill development on how to make a positive first impression takes takes less
than
30 minutes since the theory is not that complicated. However, one must
still practice a many times to get good at it.
Skills vary tremendously in terms of the amount of time and effort one must dedicate to practice. For example, learning a new language as an adult is extremely difficult; while for a three-year old its effortless. Mastering complex skills require a great deal of practice, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of hours. For example, great leaders are commonly persuasive speakers. But even those with great aptitude, blessed with a large dose of talent, need to practice many, many times to get really good. It's also good to keep in mind two more points.
A Father's Admonition to His Son
Practice Requires Motivation
"Skill is nil without will.” — Judah ibn Tibbon, c. 1120-c.1190 Spanish physician and translator, A Father's Admonition to His Son
Standard assessments
are very good at measuring some things, but they can't measure motivation.
In our model, a person serious about skill development must
be internally motivated to perfect the skill. It is unrealistic to expect any teacher
or coach to motivate the apathetic or the lazy to perfect developing a skill. Still, smart organizations are wise to have defined consequences for desired and undesired behaviors.
It is unrealistic to expect any teacher or coach to motivate you if you are apathetic or just plain lazy.The primary motivation for skill mastery has to come from the inside. Still, smart individuals define positive and negative consequences for behaviors that hinder or accelerate leadership development. And will power is another key component to the motivational puzzle. Finally, great athletes talk about "psyching themselves up" by using self-talk and guided imagery to attain peak performance.
"Feedback is the true breakfast of champions." —Unknown
Practice Requires Feedback
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” — Wayne Gretzky
Skill development
requires feedback. Unfortunately, behavioral
feedback is commonly not done in most programs. There
are two ways to get feedback: do it yourself or get others to do
it for you. In our
programs, we typically provide skilled coaches who can provide positive and
negative feedback.
While there are many different types of feedback, there are only two real means of receiving it: self-monitoring or getting feedback from others. Self-monitoring has some real advantages since it allows one to adjust in real time. However, few know how to monitor thoughts and behavior real time to make these type of adjustments.
Getting feedback from others can work. However, there are two major problems with this type of feedback. The first is that people self-censor—they often don't say anything if we do something wrong. Even if someone says something, individual Ego defense mechanisms often activate when experiencing negative feedback and that feedback is ignored or distorted.
Skill Development Phase 3: Skill Mastery
This is our term for perfection—to "be all
that you can be."
This is a special state of mind when skills development in largely over and the skill runs largely in the unconscious.
Mastery is a special state of mind in which the skill largely runs in the unconscious. This frees up the conscious mind and the Ego to focus on other things. Sometimes called over learning, one experiences tremendous accuracy, precision and speed. In fact, if is the very speed of the action that prevents conscious thought. This can be seen in a number of sports such as basketball and soccer.
What's true for sports professionals is also true for more common skills such as typing or driving. It's rather disturbing to imagine that the next time you are on the eight-lane freeway, that the person on the right and the left, the one in the front and the one in the back, are all devoting very little thought or attention to driving. Yet, we almost always manage to get to our destination safely.
Examples of Mastery (Some world records and some unusual behaivors)
Michale Phelps, 7th Race , 2008 Beijing Olympics. What's fascinating about this race is how it was won at the very end.
Typing The Alphabet (in 1.72 seconds). Ok. This is a nice one to test for whether you are a novice or an expert typist. How quickly can you type 26 letters?
The Trampoline Jump. You need to watch it to the end to get a feel for the record that was broken.
Eat Drink, Man and Woman — Opening Scene. Watch a master chef preparing food. You will see many of the characteristics of mastery: speed, precision and a sense of the aesthetic.
Contact
us for a free consultation. We also can send you a link to a FREE ten minute streamed video done by one of our best presenters designed to both be entertaining and make the abstract real.
This is an extremely comprehensive site that focuses a wide variety of employment skills such as workforce literacy, various types of assessments, thinking skills, human relation skills and so on.
