Episode 238 - Remember What It Was Like to Be a Beginner

Summary

The better we become at something, the harder it can be to remember what it was like not to know. New research shows that experts give more useful and actionable advice when they reconnect with their own experience as beginners. This episode explores a simple way leaders can become better coaches and teachers.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Leadership Today podcast, where each week we share practical tips to improve your leadership. This week we look at a challenge that comes with becoming more experienced: the better we become at something, the harder it can be to explain it to someone who's just starting out.

Think about something you've done hundreds or perhaps thousands of times. It might be running a meeting, preparing a report, handling a difficult customer, using a particular system or having a performance conversation. After enough practice, many of the steps become almost automatic. You don't consciously think about everything you're doing because you've built up knowledge and patterns that allow you to work quickly.

That's usually a good thing, but it creates a challenge when someone less experienced asks us for advice. We can forget what it was like not to know what we now know.

A new study published in the Academy of Management Journal explores this problem. The research looked at what happens when experts reconnect with what they call a beginner's mind. Rather than simply remembering an event from the past, people were encouraged to mentally revisit what it actually felt like to be a novice in that particular area.

Across studies involving managers and musicians, taking on a beginner's mind made a difference to the advice experts provided. When experienced people reconnected with their former beginner state, their advice became more concrete. And importantly, the novices receiving that advice rated it as more useful and were more willing to act on it.

It helps explain something we see constantly at work. An experienced leader might tell a new supervisor, "You just need to have a clear conversation and hold them accountable." That sounds perfectly sensible to someone who has handled dozens of performance conversations. But the new leader may still be wondering: How do I actually start the conversation? What words do I use? What happens if they become defensive? What should I prepare beforehand?

Expertise compresses all of those little steps. Once something feels obvious to us, we stop mentioning the thing