Expertise Through Practice

This week, I facilitated a manager workshop on how to grow and develop people and teams. One question sparked a great conversation: “How do you develop your people outside of formal programs?” It’s a great question. IMO, one of the highest leverage actions a leader can take is making small, but consistent actions to develop their people. While formal learning experiences absolutely a role, there are far more opportunities for growth outside of structured settings from an hours in the day perspective. Helping leaders recognize and embrace this is a major opportunity. I introduced the idea of Practices of Development (PODs) aka small, intentional activities integrated into everyday work that help employees build skills, flex new muscles, and increase their impact. Here are a few examples we discussed: 🌟 Paired Programming: Borrowed from software engineering, this involves pairing an employee with a peer to take on a new task—helping them ramp up quickly, cross-train, or learn by doing. 🌟 Learning Logs: Have team members track what they’re working on, learning, and questioning to encourage reflection. 🌟 Bullpen Sessions: Bring similar roles together for feedback, idea sharing, and collaborative problem-solving, where everyone both A) shares a deliverable they are working on, and B) gets feedback and suggestions for improvement 🌟 Each 1 Teach 1:  Give everyone a chance to teach one work-related skill or insight to the team. 🌟 I Do, We Do, You Do:Adapted from education, this scaffolding approach lets you model a task, then do it together, then hand it off. A simple and effective way to build confidence and skill. 🌟 Back Pocket Ideas:  During strategy/scoping work sessions, ask employees to submit ideas for initiatives tied to a customer problem or personal interest. Select the strongest ones and incorporate them into their role. These are a few examples that have worked well. If you’ve found creative ways to build development opportunities into your employees day to day work, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you!

These two well-intentioned words are keeping you from your promotion: "It's handled" (And all its variations... Olivia Pope) "Yes!" "On it." "I'll do it" "Leave it to me." "I know exactly how to solve this." Your expertise is the reason why you're where you are today. You're the "go-to", problem solver, pattern seer. The very expertise that got you here becomes a comfort zone. I've seen this time and time again (even in myself during my career). The hardest transition isn't making it to the next level, it's switching gears. Moving from practicing fluency to influence. Because fluency is about what you can do. Influence is about what you can inspire. Here's why this shift matters: When you're fluent, you solve problems. When you influence, you build problem solvers. Think about it: Every time you say "I'll do it" you're positioning yourself to solve every problem instead of enabling others to grow through the challenge. The most powerful shift happens when you: Turn your expertise into others' confidence Make your knowledge shareable, not just showable Create space for others to rise Because executive presence isn't about doing more. It's about enabling better. Your expertise got you here. Your ability to exist beyond it will take you everywhere. #aLITTLEadvice

They say experience is a great teacher. How do you leverage it? I rely heavily on experiential learning as a customer service trainer. Customer service reps have valuable experience from... * Serving customers * Being customers * Interacting with other humans The trick is optimizing what you learn from experiences. David Kolb created a four-step experiential process that anyone can use. 1. Experiencing: doing something. 2. Reflecting: evaluate how it went. 3. Thinking: decide how to adjust. 4. Acting: trying something new. My Customer Service Tip of the Week emails are built around this model. 1. Experience Each tip starts with a relatable story or example. For instance, I went to REI to buy hiking poles for my wife and a knowledgeable sales person used her expertise to help me make the right decision. 2. Reflecting The tip asks you to think about how the tip applies to you. The expertise tip suggested making a list of the top ten product questions customers ask. 3. Thinking Think about how you can use the tip when serving your customers. The expertise tip suggested coming up with extra helpful answers to each of the top ten questions. 4. Acting Apply the tip right away with the customers you serve. This process is self-reinforcing. Trying a new approach leads to a new experience. You can then repeat the steps and continue learning. I bet you already do this! What is one customer service skill you learned from experience?

What’s more valuable: time spent or impact made? Too often, I see people lean on their years of experience 5,10,15+ to showcase their value. "I have X years doing Y" becomes their go-to line. Time spent doesn’t equal expertise. Years logged do not guarantee results. Experience is a part of building expertise, but it isn't the full story. Expertise and performance are the details needed to tell the story. What did you learn during those years? How did you grow, adapt, and innovate? What measurable impact did you create? Think about your career like this: Your experience is your foundation. Your expertise and performance are what turn that foundation into a final product. If you focus only on *what* you’ve done, you’re underselling yourself. Instead, highlight: → Skills you’ve mastered → Problems you’ve solved → Results you’ve delivered Self-advocacy isn’t bragging. Owning your impact is how you control your narrative. Don’t let others define your worth based solely on time. You’ve done more than “put years on paper.” Show them what those years *mean.* How do you articulate your impact?

Sometimes I’m jealous of academics and their clean, tidy toy problems… But here’s how we can make their theories work in the messy real world. Decision science often involves translating theoretical concepts into actionable real-world strategies. This translation is crucial in environments where uncertainty and variability are the norms, such as in our Toyota supply chain management. Consider the theoretical frameworks that emphasize reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. These theories provide strategies for adapting decisions dynamically as new information becomes available, similar to how a GPS recalculates routes in real-time based on traffic changes. 🎯 Practical Advice: 1️⃣ Start Small. Implement theoretical models on a small scale before rolling them out across the organization. This allows you to observe the model’s performance and make necessary adjustments. 2️⃣ Use Hybrid Models. Combine theoretical models with heuristic approaches. This can provide a balance between optimal and practical solutions, especially in complex and uncertain environments. 3️⃣ Frequent Re-evaluation. The real world is dynamic. Regularly revisit and update your models to align with new data and changing conditions. 4️⃣ Cross-functional Teams. Engage experts from various domains (data science, operations, IT) in the implementation process. Their diverse perspectives can help identify and mitigate practical challenges early. For instance, global supply chain disruptions challenge us to go beyond traditional models. Theoretical optimization might dictate certain stock levels and operational efficiencies, but real-world scenarios require us to adapt to unforeseen shortages and demand surges. The art lies in applying these adaptive, learning-based theories to continuously refine our strategies, ensuring they remain robust amidst volatility. The beauty of this approach is in its adaptability. It’s about learning from the environment and iteratively improving processes, mirroring the way algorithms learn and optimize based on new data. 💭 How do you balance the elegance of theory with the messy realities of practice in your field? #DataScience #Optimization #StochasticOptimization #ReinforcementLearning #SupplyChainManagement #OperationsResearch

Too often, leaders—especially new leaders—assume that if something hasn’t happened yet, it must mean the team doesn’t know how to do it. But skill and experience are only part of the equation. You will find plenty of situations where teams know far more than current results suggest. They may have deep experience that hasn’t been fully leveraged in the current environment. I always laugh when I think back to an executive who put an Amazon practice on a pedestal, assuming none of the current team had ever worked at Amazon. Several ex-Amazon team members spoke up and put things in perspective—but the leader was so sure that if anyone had been ex-Amazon, the current problems wouldn't exist. You have to actively surface what your team already knows. Consider organizing peer teaching days, product fairs, or learning events where people can share their expertise untethered from current initiatives. You’ll likely be surprised by what you learn—and by what you observe about how your team thinks and operates when given the chance. When it comes to building skills, remember: knowledge × skill = practice. People need opportunities to practice—not once a quarter, but often enough to build real fluency. If you only give people a handful of chances a year, you’ll get "demo fluency," not real mastery. Tighten the loops. Create more reps. Spread the learning across the organization.

Find your sweet spot and help your team find theirs. Each person on your team is on their own career journey. As a leader of the team, it’s your responsibility to nurture and support career development AND to keep a pulse of the overall health of the team. Here’s an approach I’ve used in the past that I hope you'll find helpful. The key to high performance is to find the sweet spot where each person on the team is really motivated by their work and also has a high degree of skill to actually do the work well. A great starting point is to have a conversation with each person on your team to get a sense of where they are in their journey. Using this framework can give you a sense of where they are in these four quadrants, and help you prioritize how you spend your time supporting the team. It can also be a useful tool for you to think about where you are personally on this arc. 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐀 (𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠) People usually start here. Eager to learn and seek out opportunities to stretch, but haven’t yet developed a high degree of competence in the work. * Action: connect them to experts to learn from and shadow. Expose them to stretch assignments to learn by doing. 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐁 (𝐒𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐭) This is someone that’s really motivated by the work and is recognized as an expert. * Action: find out where they want to continue to grow to build upon their expertise. This could be expanding the scope of their role to anchor on areas of strength while exposing them to new opportunities. Find opportunities for them to mentor and coach others. 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐂 (𝐃𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐙𝐨𝐧𝐞) Someone that’s been doing the same thing for too long may become less interested in the work over time. It’s a natural progression. This is when people may be at risk of leaving or under performing. If they stay in this headspace for too long, they may become less effective in their role because they’re not motivated to learn new skills as the role evolves.  * Action: these are often people on the team that have been around longer or have more experience in a certain area. Look for opportunities to reboot and spark interest. These are great opportunities to leverage their expertise to apply to other types of adjacent work. For example, an experienced sourcer may be getting burned out from high volume engineering and could be energized by getting exposure to executive or leadership level searches. 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐃 (𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐎𝐮𝐭) When someone is here they’re not engaged with the work and don’t have a high degree of competence in the work either. This is a place that isn’t healthy for the team or the individual. * Action: find a role that plays to their strengths either on your team or elsewhere in the company. If there isn’t an opportunity internally, it may be time to help support them in finding something externally so that you can bring on someone that’s more motivated and qualified to do the work.

I know schools are operating with less—less funding, less staffing, more stress. But the one thing you can control? How you develop your teachers. The hard part? Thinking creatively about that while juggling a million other things. So, let me share two practical and actionable ideas. When I was a high school principal, I didn’t have a curriculum team or a talent development department. But I still needed a team that could execute with clarity and consistency across classrooms. Because here’s the thing: once you’ve taught the basics—your vision, your systems, your expectations—the real work begins. That’s when you need your team to: ✅ Apply what they’ve learned ✅ Pick apart the nuance ✅ Think through what it looks like in practice And that’s exactly where most PD falls short. Here are two low-lift, high-impact strategies that helped us bridge the gap between theory and action in summer PD and beyond (and if you're not a school leader? These 100% translate, with a few alterations) ✅ Lesson Study + Problem-Solving Protocols- Don’t just ask teachers to “collaborate.” Give them routines that help them plan, look at student work, and tackle shared challenges together. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s collective learning. (see link below with a few) ✅ Case Study PDs- Your team won’t master your approach to transitions, discipline, or culture after one session. At the end of every PD, I started asking: “What do you anticipate being hard about doing this?” “Where do you still feel uncertain?” Then I used their responses to create case studies we could workshop together. Real dilemmas. Real conversations. Shared judgment. None of this required a budget. Just time, intention, and a commitment to learning in community. 💬 What’s one move that’s helped your team turn vision into practice?

One of the biggest roadblocks I see in tech careers is the tendency to hand over our experience to third parties as a form of validation. The truth is, companies hire you for your skills and abilities, not just where you went to school or worked. Too many people focus on the “where” instead of the “what.” They miss out on showcasing years of valuable experience simply because it’s not tied to a formal job title. Let me share my story. Before I landed my first tech role, I was the volunteer IT guy while working in accounts receivable. I also became the go-to tech support for my family, using VNC and remote desktop protocols to troubleshoot and fix their computers. And for the past 14 years, I’ve served as the director of IT at my church, handling everything from support to firewall configuration. These experiences weren’t part of my “official” job, but they were pivotal in building my tech career. By taking ownership of this work, I was able to secure my first role and continue to advance. The lesson? Own your experience. It’s your story to tell. You don’t need to tie it to a paid role or seek third-party validation. If you’ve done the work, it’s yours to showcase. Your experience is your superpower. Start leveraging it today. #TechCareer #CareerGrowth #OwnYourExperience #SkillsMatter #TechJourney

💡INCOMMON IDEA - BRING SOMEONE INTO THE “ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS”: Here's an idea you can implement today! Provide folks on your team the experience and exposure of attending leadership/management meetings, product/process design sessions, sales/customer calls, or anything that's on their list that they haven't been part of yet. ❗IT WORKS! Everyone remembers the first time they were in a new "room" (either in person or remote) - it's an incredible and important growth experience. And it's super simple to make happen...so give it a shot today : ) 📒 ACTION: We have common sense ideas and best practices like this embedded into our Coaching module in our InCommon platform. Here are some ways to create this experience for a member of your team. 1) Identify the Right Employee(s): This is an extremely powerful experience to provide for ‘high potential’ team members. Initially identify 1-2 members of your team that you feel will benefit from this experience. 2) Identify the Right Meeting and Approach: While not all meetings are appropriate to have someone attend, any opportunity that you can provide for a member of your team will be a beneficial experience for them. You could have people join for an entire meeting or just for a portion of the meeting if that’s more appropriate. They can be an active participant and give a short presentation to the team or just a passive participant and listen to the discussion. 3) Follow-Up: After these experiences, take time to recap, answer any questions they might have, explain how/why certain decisions were made, and seek feedback from them. 4) Expand Over Time: You can provide this opportunity to different members of your team over time. Here's a one-minute video to help you and your team get started....