Author: Mark S. Brown

Knowledge or Skill: Is One Better?

Knowledge and skill are very different. If you have a recipe for Chicken Marsala but have little cooking skill, your dish will be lacking. If you are put in a kitchen and possess good cooking skills, you probably would struggle making a new dish without a recipe. A recipe provides the proven formula for success. For a great dish you need both knowledge and skill.

Last week I wrote about my first experience of being an official mentor. I was not prepared, and I did not know I was not prepared until things went badly. I lacked both knowledge and skill. It made me reflect on how it is important to consider both when you want to learn something new.

Sometimes I lean more towards gaining knowledge and at other times more towards building skill. It also depends on what I am learning. I am determined to be more focused on how I do both. It will accelerate the learning process.

People that don’t know how to cook, do not spend time looking at recipes. Good cooks like to look at recipes and occasionally learn a new dish. A chef will spend time experimenting and developing something new, but they still get ideas from other recipes.

I think this is a good analogy to think about. If we are learning a new process, a new language, a new system, or a new hobby, we should ask, “How are we gaining both knowledge and skill?”

You Can Be a World Class Mentor

Almost 25 years ago, I was assigned an employee to mentor for the very first time. I had no idea how to mentor someone, but proud and excited to be asked. I was also scared. Mentoring is not a skill that was taught in any class I took. I never received training. I was just expected to know how.

I scheduled the first meeting with my new mentee with no agenda. We were just going to meet each other and talk. My plan as a mentor was to share experiences and give advice. That is what a mentor does, right?

After the first meeting I became discouraged. I felt inadequate and worthless. I had no sense of the direction to lead my mentee. I was not sure how I could help this person.

We continued to meet, but the meetings were not productive. I struggled adding future meetings to my calendar because I had more important things to do. Activities in which I provided more value to the company than mentoring. After a few months we just stopped meeting. I had failed with my first mentee.

I am glad that over the next 25 years, I was able to develop world class mentoring skills. It would never have happened if I had not failed first. People that avoid failure, risk never experiencing the event that will positively change their life forever.

For some time, I avoided mentoring, but soon I was assigned another mentee. The second experience was better, but ultimately a failure. In fact, I continued to fail several more times. I learned from my mistakes. I sought out training. I learned more by doing than from books. I had to be willing to face my mistakes, and do the work required to improve.

Being a great mentor is not easy. There is not one single skill that automatically makes a good mentor. Good mentors have a long list of skills including listening, teaching, training, guiding, storytelling, coaching, and most importantly human personalities and motivations.

You can be a world class mentor. It requires life skills that grow through experience, failure, improvement, and practice. What lessons have you learned making you a better mentor? Have you learned more from a book, or by practice? What are you learning now, that will make you a better mentor?

 

The Pace of Success

I have been thinking about the pace of life. If you are like me, when things are moving too fast, you may feel stressed. But if things seem too slow, well you can also feel stress (or boredom, lack of accomplishment, etc). Life seems to have an appropriate pace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

Even when we are pushed to go faster in this time of instant gratification, I find that a slower pace when constant usually pays bigger dividends. It is persistence and perseverance that makes a difference.
A slower pace does not mean less work. The settlers that came to the United States over two hundred years ago found success through hard work. Imagine raising and growing your own food, making your own clothes, trading with your neighbors, and cutting wood for heat. The pace of life was much slower, but not easier.

Each of us has a different pace that is right for us. We are forged by our environment, but our environment changes over time. If we are not aware of our own internal pace, we risk losing our sense of grounding that helps us through the stress caused by the pace around us.

What pace is right for you? How do you maximize productivity without increasing stress?

Rules and Responsibility

Rules and procedures are a funny thing. They are used to define decisions, responses, and actions for a defined situation. The intent is to drive consistent, and planned processes. If you could create procedures and processes that cover all possible situations, then your results would be 100% consistent. Also, if correctly designed, your results would achieve 100% of your goal.

But can your procedures cover 100% of the possibilities? I think it depends on the scope of the operation you want to control. Two things I have been pondering about rules and procedures.

First, a person that is instructed to follow procedures without questioning or thinking loses all responsibility for the outcome of the situation. The outcome becomes the responsibility of the person or group that created the rules.

Second, if you want your employees, organization, or team to just follow the procedures, couldn’t they all be replaced by robots and computers? What value does a human provide in a situation?

These questions apply to current events every day. United’s procedures for handling planes with more passengers than seats revealed major flaws in the last few weeks. Employees followed the procedures, but the outcome was not what United would have desired. Could this disaster have been avoided if people were given the ability to override the procedure? Maybe.

We can also look at the rising use of automation, such as Tesla’s self-driving cars. Should a human play any part in driving or control? Or would we prefer to put 100% of the responsibility on the developers of the software and hardware that control the driving?

I think these two examples represent many issues we will face over the next fifty years. It is important that we think about how we want humans to add value, and how much control we are willing to put into procedures, rules, robots, and automation. Are there limits?