Building Expertise

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A newsletter subscriber bonus report, helping you better motivate yourself and your team

Building Expertise

A Mind Tools Quick Guide This e-book is published by Mind Tools Limited, of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John St, London, EC1V 4PY. Version 1.1 Copyright © Mind Tools 2007-2011. All rights reserved. This e-book is protected by international copyright law. You may only use it if you have downloaded it directly from the mindtools.com site, or if you have received it under license from Mind Tools Ltd. Cover image © iStockphoto/schnuddle

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Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................... 4

Building Expertise ..................................................................................................................................................... 5

Expertise – the Foundations .................................................................................................................................... 6

Shaping Your Career to Build Expertise ................................................................................................................. 7

Making the Most of Your Expertise.......................................................................................................................... 9

Drawing This Together… ........................................................................................................................................ 12

Next Steps................................................................................................................................................................ 13

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Building Expertise Introduced by Mind Tools CEO, James Manktelow

Expertise is all around us. Everywhere we look, respected experts are performing exceptionally well in their areas of specialization, are shaping this world for the better, and are receiving the rewards they deserve for doing so. So who are these people, and how do they become so eminent? Why do people seek these people out in particular, when so many others claim to have what it takes? And why do just a few people receive so many of the rewards of expertise, while others scratch around for what‟s left?

This Quick Guide brings together some of the answers. It helps you understand where expertise comes from. (At one level, the answer‟s obvious. At another, it‟s not.) It helps you think about how you can build expertise yourself, just as long as you‟ve got stamina and persistence. If you can stay the course, it shows you how to nurture your growing reputation for expertise. And then it helps you think about how you‟ll garner the rewards you‟ve earned, when you deserve them. We hope you enjoy this Guide, and find it useful!

James Manktelow, CEO, MindTools.com

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Building Expertise Laying the foundations of success

One of the best ways of achieving lasting success in your life and in your career is to build deep expertise in an area that really matters to people. At the start of your career, expertise in your job marks you out as the natural candidate for promotion – after all, the thinking goes, if you understand what‟s going on and can deliver exceptional results, you should be able to pass this on to the other members of your team. And as you progress your career, it‟s expertise that marks you out as a natural leader. People who are perceived as experts by the people around them get natural respect. After all, one of the strongest and most honest types of power you can exert is expert power. You have this when the people around you look to you for guidance in a particular area and, because of this, respect your leadership in it. As an expert, people will rely on you to show them how to work more effectively; guide them to make the most of their hard work; and direct their efforts towards goals that are coherent and genuinely worthwhile. Taken together, if your team sees you as an expert, you‟ll find it much easier to motivate team members to perform at their best. Think about your own experience – isn‟t it normally a so much better to work for someone who really knows what they‟re doing, rather than someone who‟s just “parachuted in”? Experts have the most penetrating insights, propose and develop the best solutions, think most quickly on their feet, argue most coherently and robustly, and keep their heads best when under pressure.

Still further on the career path, it‟s the people who are seen as experts who give the keynote speeches, who are interviewed in the press, who exercise influence within an industry or sector, who make the most significant breakthroughs, who are the natural candidates for the best leadership positions, and who achieve real eminence in their professions. At each level, expertise (albeit different types of expertise) gives your career that extra magic boost that makes the difference. So how do you build this expertise, and how do you achieve this success? And is it something that only a few people – the brightest, or the best-connected – can do? This Quick Guide answers these questions. In the first part, we look at what expertise is, we debunk the myths that surround it, and we show you how any reasonably intelligent person can become a respected expert in his or her field, just provided that he or she is prepared to work at it. In the second part, we look at how you can shape your work and career to continue building expertise, and avoid the traps that lock you into mere repetition of work you‟ve done many times before. And in the third part, we look at how you can nurture your reputation for expertise, and build a strong and deserved reputation for success in your industry. So let‟s get started!

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Expertise – the Foundations

Expertise is the ability to deliver truly exceptional results within a specific, narrow subject area. Experts have deeper knowledge than non-experts, solve problems more quickly, develop better solutions, and make better connections between items of relevant information. All of this contributes to delivering these exceptional results, which is why people are happy to pay so much more for people with real expertise. So who are these experts? And what is it that marks them out?

Experts – Naturally Gifted People? An early researcher, Sir Francis Galton, believed that genetics had a major part to play in expertise – he saw that in 19th Century Britain, eminent people (the foremost experts) in one field tended to be related to eminent people in another field. His view was that eminence came from a combination of energy, effective learning and working practices, and natural intellectual ability. Not surprisingly, this view became popular, and is still probably the widespread view of why people “get ahead”: Some people are seen to be “naturally talented”, and they are thought to get ahead in their careers because of this. The problem with this theory is that more recent research doesn‟t support this view particularly well. A great deal of work has been carried out trying to linking people‟s ability with their scores on IQ and other psychometric tests. Even in careers like engineering and medicine, differences in IQ scores accounted for only a very small (as low as 4%) proportion of the difference between eminent people and average performers, once people had completed their academic training. (Note that last point – these are people who‟ve already been selected academically!)

Yes, intellectual ability does affect people‟s ability to absorb information, particularly in the early stages of learning a new skill. However, as time goes on, differences in intellectual ability become progressively less significant. In areas like athletics or music, expertise is occasionally related to physical characteristics – you need to be tall to be a basketball star, and shorter to be a successful gymnast – but outside these specific situations, genetic factors seem to have relatively little impact.

Practice Really Does Make Perfect So, if IQ or genetic differences don‟t differentiate eminent people from merely normal people in a profession, what does account for the difference? The answer is deliberate effort, and practice. One study (by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralfe Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer in 1993) looked at violinists and piano players. It found that, after looking at all other factors, the difference between the best violinists at a music academy, and merely good violinists, was the amount of practice put in. The best players (as well as professional violinists) had put in an average of 10,000 hours of practice by the age of 20, compared with a “mere” 5000 hours put in by good violinists. The study then looked at the difference between amateur pianists and expert pianists. At the age of 20, expert pianists were practicing, on average, 27 hours a week, while amateur pianists practiced 2 hours a week.

This holds true in sport, too. In tennis, elite performers are putting in an average of 20 hours a week practice by the age of 13, while

Tip: Note that we‟re talking about practice here, not work: They‟re different. More on this later!

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top level swimmers and ice-skaters practice about 16 hours a week by the age of 16. And in science, studies suggest that scientists need to study for around 80 hours a week for an extended period if they‟re to reach an international level in their fields. Not only does it take a major amount of effort to reach these levels, it also takes quite a time. Over very many disciplines, a “10 year rule” seems to operate: It takes 10 years of intense preparation for people to reach a level of real expertise in an area. Even child prodigies tend to have had many years of intensive preparation before they show their genius. You may be looking at these figures aghast – firstly, they give the lie to the romantic notion of “the gifted amateur.” And secondly they show the complete commitment that people who want to reach the top of their professions need – commitment that includes spending time in not-very-emotionally-satisfying practice, while others devote that same time to leisure and fun. This is why, in many cases, it‟s the unfashionable hard-workers who end up on top!

“Natural Talent” Yes, you may be saying, but what of “natural talent” – we‟ve all seen it, and we‟ve all seen that people with natural talent for something get ahead in it. In fact, it seems to be the other way round. Just through play, young children may show an interest in something, and spend time doing it. Parents and other adults notice this, call it a “talent” (even if performance actually is no

different from that of other children of the same age), and reinforce the child‟s interest with praise. Quickly, a virtuous cycle builds the child is praised, practices more, and builds skills (unless the child becomes complacent, and slackens off.) He or she then attracts more praise and recognition, practices more, and so on. So “natural talent” comes initially from parental encouragement, and from this virtuous circle of praise and practice. It‟s something that has usually already been developed quite extensively by the time it‟s recognized as natural talent by someone outside the family.

Expertise and You So does it take this frightening numbers of hours work to achieve the level of expertise you want in your profession? That depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to be a world leader in what you do? If yes, then you need to be making something like this scale of effort. And yes, this means a great deal of sacrifice, largely of leisure time. If you‟re happy to achieve less, or you want to achieve excellence in a more obscure field, then you may need to put less time in. Whatever happens in this highly competitive world, there are no free lunches, and gifted amateurs usually win only in stories – or games of chance. If you want to get ahead in your field, take the time to build expertise!

Shaping Your Career to Build Expertise

“So,” someone‟s going to say, “I‟ve been working hard in this job for ten years. That makes me an expert, then.” Probably not. As we mentioned earlier, there‟s a difference between work and practice that‟s significant here, and it‟s practice that builds expertise,

much more than work. Practice involves taking the time to explore different approaches to doing things, experiment with different techniques, make mistakes and learn from mistakes, and develop skills in a disciplined, focused way. Someone engaging in practice builds the breadth and

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depth of perspective and experience that constitutes so much of expertise. Work is usually different. Most types of work need to be completed successfully, to quite tight deadlines. Fail to meet these deadlines often, and employment will, most likely, be short-lived. The incentive with work is to complete the task in a known and predictable way – after all, quite a lot of experiments fail, and why would people risk experimenting with new approaches if this could ultimately cost them their job? More than this, once someone shows aptitude in an important area, organizations are often best off if that person continues doing that same thing. That way, the organization doesn‟t have to pay for retraining, nor does it have to put up with sometimes quite lengthy periods of low performance as people learn new jobs. What this can mean is that periods of expertise-building at work can be quite short, interspersed with long periods of quite sterile activity during which little is learned.

So How Do You Build Expertise? So the paradox you face is this: If you just quietly “knuckle down” and get on with the work in hand, you‟re not likely to become an expert (unless building expertise is a recognized part of your job): You‟ll just be a steady performer. This can be good, but it won‟t help you excel, and while your career will progress, it won‟t progress fast. To build the expertise that will help you power ahead, you need to be a bit strategic, a bit restless, and a bit pushy. The strategic part comes in identifying the skills and experience most needed to excel, and making sure that you acquire those skills. If your organization is the industry leader, look for the skills that are most valued in it, and target these. If your organization is a small player, identify the skills most valued in your industry, and target these.

The restless part comes from making sure that you get the opportunities you need to build expertise in the field you‟ve identified. Seek out relevant and challenging projects to work on, and volunteer for these. Look for good ideas, and promote them. Read around relevant subjects, and build the knowledge you need so that when opportunities come up, you‟re the natural person to push them forward. And do all you can to learn – from people, from books and training material, from conferences and industry events, and by experimenting and trying new stuff out. However, as you do this, make sure you don‟t “flit around” – when you get a good project, make sure you take it through to successful conclusion. Partly you need a track record of success, but partly much of the learning comes from the sometimes brutal process of taking a project through to a successful conclusion. (And if you just flit from project to project, you‟ll build the reputation of being an unreliable “lightweight”.) The pushy part of this comes from making sure that these things happen, bearing in mind that it may be natural for your organization to want to keep you “pigeon-holed” in your current job. Make sure that you work hard, that you‟re a team player, and that you deliver plenty of value for your organization. But also make sure that people know that you‟re ambitious, keen to get ahead, and keen to build the experience and knowledge you need to build expertise. If you‟re getting a lot of identical work, make sure your boss knows that you want work that‟s more challenging. Push to go on training courses that will develop your skills. Push to go to conferences where you can learn cutting edge techniques and network with the leading people in your field. And push to get the varied projects that will test and develop your skills. This whole approach is sometimes known as “Job Crafting”, although you can choose to craft your job for reasons other than to build expertise. Find out more about job crafting

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here: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_36.htm.

Tip: Avoid “The Expertise Trap”

So this is great: As you develop expertise in your selected area, you begin to shine as the outstanding expert on your team. When the next opportunity comes up, you‟ll be a serious contender for that exciting promotion. But when this comes, beware. The skills, expertise and approaches needed to make a success of this new role may well be different from the skills you needed in your previous role. To quote the title of the well-known book by Marshall Goldsmith, “what got you here won‟t get you there”. A common example of this is when moving into your first management role. The trap here is to rely on your subject knowledge and try to bludgeon your way through the problems you encounter with this.

Instead, you need to develop a whole range of people and team management skills to complement your subject skills. Think of this as developing a whole new level of complementary expertise! But this is also true when you switch organizations, roles, areas, projects or situations. The things that were essential facts and techniques in one situation may not be as significant in the next. Have the humility to think about the new situation, talk to those around you, and learn as much as you can about the new situation, and the skills and expertise it needs.

Making the Most of Your Expertise

So you‟re putting in the hours, and intelligently building expertise. But how do you get the greatest benefit from it? After all, you‟ll be expending a great deal of unpaid effort to become an expert, so it only makes sense to put in that little bit of extra effort that gives you the rewards you deserve! There are two parts to making the most of your expertise: Protecting your reputation, and using the leverage of publicity to become the well-known, in-demand expert in your field.

Protecting Your Reputation Protecting your reputation for expertise is important if you‟re going to achieve significant results with it. There are many simple mistakes that you can make that can fatally undermine your reputation. You need to look out for them, and learn to avoid them:

Stay Up-to-Date: If you‟re promoting yourself as an expert, but you‟re not bang-up-to-date with developments in your field, the chances are you‟ll fall flat on your face at some stage and lose credibility. Be humble, and keep on learning. Keep well-informed of developments within your field, your team, your organization, and in the outside world.

Maintain credibility: Once you‟ve

established your reputation for expertise, don‟t “blow it”. Avoid commenting on subjects you don‟t know about, and avoid being associated with projects with a low likelihood of success. Both will lead people to question your judgment.

Keep listening: Even if they don‟t know

as much about the subject as you do, other people may still have important

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information that you don‟t have. Keep listening to everyone involved, so that you can build up a complete picture of the situations you encounter.

Avoid threatening people’s self-

esteem: Expertise implies a knowledge differential between yourself and other people. Unfortunately, this can cause problems if you‟re not careful about the way you use your expertise.

People don‟t like to look like fools, and will be upset by someone who arrogantly flaunts his greater expertise (you can often appear arrogant if you get frustrated by people‟s inability to see the situation as clearly as you can.) Don‟t lecture people, or convey the impression that they are ignorant. Stay humble, and treat people with patience and courtesy.

Getting the Message Out The second part of getting the most from your expertise is making sure that people know about you. Your expertise will have taken a lot of hard work to acquire, work which other people won‟t have put in. It‟s only fair if you reap the benefits of this!

After all, people will only value your expertise if they know about it. And the only way they‟ll get to know about it is if you promote it (you can bet that your “competitors” in expertise are doing the same!) Just think how great it will be when people are pounding on your door asking for your help! So how do you build your reputation for expertise? Start by networking. Identify the “information hubs” in your field – the places where people go to learn more. These could be organizations, conferences, influential people, online resources or websites, trade publications, journalists, newsletters, trades associations, chambers of commerce, special interest groups, or others. For those that are important, start engaging with them, quietly at first, but then more actively as you get your confidence up. Find out what people consider to be important or interesting, and research and understand these topics. Get to know the leading players in the field, and understand their perspectives. For more, read our article on Professional Networking: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/ProfessionalNetworking.htm. Next, work out your angle. Based on where you are, what you know, your resources, your interests, your strengths and your imagination, think about how you can develop an angle on your subject. Make sure it‟s an area where you‟re able to build strong knowledge, and that is, if at all possible, unique and interesting to the press. With this in place, communicate your expertise. Write articles or books, set up online resources, deliver speeches or presentations, and participate in discussions on the subject. Partly this gets your name out, but partly it helps you “crystallize” your knowledge and sharpen your arguments.

Tip: Don’t be Shy! It‟s natural just to want to do an excellent job, and “be discovered.” However self-promotion is important! Busy people often don‟t have time to look for obscure experts. What‟s more, just think how cross you‟ll feel when that lesser expert (who‟s put time into self-promotion) keeps on getting the glory, the fees, and the learning opportunities! For more on this, read our article “Get the Recognition You Deserve”: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_66.htm.

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And think about how you can develop stories of interest to the media (i.e. use PR). Take the time to think about what you‟re doing, and understand the nuggets within it. Think about what you can do to create interesting stories,

for example, by writing studies, carrying out surveys or generating interesting statistics.

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Drawing This Together…

Building expertise is a powerful way of achieving lasting success in your life. Expertise in the right subjects at the right times marks you out as a person that people will instinctively want to learn from and follow – in your chosen area of expertise. And it‟s ultimately people who are seen as experts (albeit, those whose expertise includes managing other people and leading organizations in the chosen area) who reach the level of eminence in their industries or professions, with all of the rewards and respect that comes with this. The good news about building expertise is that while raw intellectual or physical ability governs who can enter a field of endeavor, it only has a limited effect on who reaches the very top of that field. The bad new is that success is driven mainly by intense and intelligent practice (not necessarily work) spread over many years (10 or more years seems to be typical). If you want to develop real expertise, you‟ve got to build a real depth and breadth of knowledge and experience in your subject, and the only way to build this is to work at it – doing sometimes

quite boring practice at a time when your friends are having fun. Practice really does make perfect - as does a strategic approach identifying the skills you need, a restless approach to identifying opportunities for expertise development, and a pushy approach to make sure that you get these opportunities. Humility also “makes perfect”, by helping you to be alert to the new skills needed in new situations, by helping you to keep on learning, and helping you get the information you need from people who may have only small pieces of the big picture. But once you‟ve got this in place, and you‟ve started to communicate and market your expertise in a way that people find interesting and engaging, the world‟s your oyster! So what about you? If you choose a field that interests you, and for which you have the basic qualifications, you too can be a respected expert. Are you going to make the effort needed to achieve eminence?

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