I’m currently listening to the audio book “Influencer” by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and David Maxfield. I’m about half-way through, but thought I’d share a couple of tidbits because the book is truly thought-provoking if you are the kind of person who is interested in effecting positive change in your organization, personal life, community or the world at large.
The dominant meme throughout the book is that to effect change, you need to focus on changing behaviors, and avoid the traditional pitfall of focussing on outcomes. There are actually some very good tangible example stories presented to demonstrate the proposed techniques. These are the same people who produced “Crucial Conversations” and “Crucial Confrontations” – two very good books providing tools for how to have critically important conversations and interactions in high-stakes, emotionally-charged situations.
Another item that came up in the current chapter is that according to Psychologist Anders Erickson “improvement is not just related to practice, but to Deliberate Practice…. prowess is a matter of knowing how to enhance your skills through Deliberate Practice” therefore, “not all practice is good practice.” This is also something that was highlighted in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”.
Disturbingly, research results have shown that “most professionals progress until the reach an acceptable level and then they plateau” correspondingly, ” Software engineers for instance, usually reach their peak somewhere around 5 years after entering the workforce. Beyond this level of mediocrity, further improvements are not correlated to years of work in the field. ” Stunningly, Erickson has discovered that, “No matter the field of expertise, when it comes to elite status, there is no correlation whatsoever between time in a profession and performance levels.”
In essence, unless we deliberately work on a particular type of focused, deliberate ongoing education and learning, we don’t progress beyond basic proficiency.
Corporate committment to learning and development aside (most small companies lack much budget for that so you have to get creative in building learning opportunities), one question that springs to mind is, is how do you recognize the “elite” from the chaff when hiring senior developers? The dot-com era unfortunately drove a bunch of people into high-tech for the money. This gave us a lot of developers, but we still suffer from a lack of GOOD developers. I personally look for people who have personal initiative, and for whom the paycheque isn’t their primary driver for being in the profession. I want people who love developing, programming and seeing the fruits of their labors go live. Once I’ve established their technical know-how and experience, I personally look for soft qualities – a passion for the technology, a personal committment to ongoing education and self-learning, a willingness to experiment. I will ask interview questions like, “What blogs do you read? What is the coolest thing you have done (in the past/recently)? What kind of projects have you done outside of work? If you had to pick a website out there that has a really great design, what would it be and why? Tell me about your network at home…”
You would be surprised how many people never do anything beyond what is required of them in the workplace. Those people are unlikely to acheive an elite status in their profession.