When working with diversity, its frustrating to deal with teams and people who are at different levels. Those who 'know more' are scornful of those who 'know less'. Those who 'know less' keep insisting they have value to add and don't feel appreciated. Those who have acquired tribal knowledge over years of pain work to use it to consolidate their power and further their agenda.
To perform leadership roles in an environment where skill and competencies are not equally distributed, you may do well to learn from Dreyfus and Dreyfus (see their book 'Mind Over Machine..'). Per this model, there are 5 levels of progression:
- Novice
- Advanced Beginner
- Competent
- Proficient
- Expert
There is a lot to learn on this subject, we will restrict this blog entry to a couple of key takeaways: Novices cannot learn from Experts, we know that intuitively but this framework helps explain why. Adjacent skill levels should be paired up to gain maximum synergy in competency development. Identify competencies needed based on the strategic need of an organization, initiative or project. Then apply the model. No one is a 'novice' per se, just novice in a competency.
To execute your strategy, establish learning plans and incentives to take the organization, teams and individuals from novice to expert in relevant competencies a systematic manner. Of course, you could always 'hire' instead of 'build'. If you 'hire' make sure you have enough people in each stage so that the newly hired 'expert' does not get rejected 'culturally' because there were not enough people in adjacent levels.
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