The YES! Leader Closes the Skill GAPS

Let’s say that you wanted to improve a particular skill in your leadership toolkit – for example, influencing others.

You could start your effort by reading a good book on the subject. This would help you grasp the best practices involved in moving people to think and act in a certain way. But while a book can increase your general knowledge of the topic, it wouldn’t make you proficient in actually using the skills in your daily work.

So you might go a step further and organize a discussion group to talk about the book. The group could identify ways to apply the best practices to particular situations, discussing (for example) case studies drawn from the members’ own experience. This would go beyond providing you a flashcard-level knowledge of concepts and give you an increased understanding of how the concepts could be used to vary the approaches you take to your actual work.

Yet at this point, when it comes to your skill-development effort, you’re still primarily working in your head, at the level of recognition and realization. In order to truly change your behavior, you need to embed new skills (as my applied improvisation colleague Gary Schwartz says) “in your bones” and start developing your muscle memory.

So your next best step would be a strategy of actually practicing the skills that you’ve been reading about and discussing with others. In your discussion group, for example, you might create role plays that would call on members to verbalize and vocalize a persuasive message that they might actually be called upon to deliver in their work. Your role play could involve a written scenario that describes the situation, such as “You are Jeff, a manager trying to influence your manager, Najila, to adopt a new process in your department.” After brief preparation to plan what you might say in the role of “Jeff,” you would then interact with “Najila” (another role-playing participant) in a semi-scripted, semi-improvised scene that would let you practice coming up with the right words and saying them out loud. You would then get feedback from the other group members.

You’re now getting closer to your goal of implementing new behaviors. But a role play is still, after all, an artificial situation that only resembles real life. For one thing, in real life you don’t often have the luxury of pre-planning an approach as to what you’ll say. Further, real-life interpersonal interactions involve an emotional component that can only be simulated (and usually not very well) in a role play. Finally, a role play essentially says, “OK, get ready now for a situation involving the use of influencing skills,” and then constrains the roles and reactions of the role-players to those set out in the written scenario (“You, Najila, are risk-averse and value the status quo”). Real life situations are of course much more ambiguous (or, to use the technical term, messy) than that, calling for quick action on your part based on instant processing of data, taking into account factors such as power relationships, interpretation of body language and tone of voice, urgency, long-range impacts, and myriad other considerations.

To get the most from your practice, you need to create situations that more closely resemble real life. This will allow you to use your developing skills in order to synthesize many complex considerations into an effective action – on the spot, in real time. In our “influencing skills” example, your discussion group could enlist the services of trained improvisational actors to portray a group of skeptical managers whom you are trying to persuade toward a certain course of action. The actors would just be given a broad outline of the situation and their roles and then respond in a realistic manner to your attempts to change their way of thinking.

The progression of development steps described above comprises what I call the GAPS Model of development. The GAPS Model conveys the idea that development starts with recognition of a “gap” between our current level of skill and our desired level. Just as a wide chasm can’t be crossed with a single leap, a skill gap can’t be effectively traversed with a single development method, such as reading a book or taking a class. Instead, the gap must be progressively filled in with development activities that build upon each other, as follows:

Grasp – Developing a basic understanding of the concepts and procedures that comprise the skill.

Apply – Developing an ability to recognize how the concepts and procedures are or could be used in different situations.

Practice – Developing an ability to put a concept or procedure into action in a controlled environment via role plays or skill practices.

Synthesize – Developing an ability to select and use the right concept or combinations of concepts to address a given situation or scenario, usually in ambiguous circumstances that simulate actual situations and time frames.

The GAPS Model can be used to identify a multi-step strategy (similar to the “influencing skills” example I described above) for developing complex interpersonal and leadership skills. But it can also be used to design and evaluate an individual training program to assure that it doesn’t overlook any of the steps or become too heavily weighted toward (say) Grasp-oriented activities that might be more effectively covered as prework, leaving classroom time for more interactive Practice and Synthesize activities.

So when you’ve completed each of the GAPS steps, you should be ready to hit the ground running on the other side of the chasm, right? Well, probably not – and this is the point where even the best development strategy can break down. Next time, I’ll talk about strategies to continue the learning even after the training.