Building Mastery: What Leaders Do That Helps — or Impedes

This is a time when we are all asking how best to prepare for a long working life. With expanded life expectancies and fast-paced technological development, this is a necessity.  The idea here is that rather than taking the straight path of full-time education, full-time work, and then full-time retirement, every individual creates their own individualized sequence of stages.  However, in thinking through this idea and seeing it play out in careers and communities throughout the world, it’s clear that to make this highly adaptive and flexible model work, there must be strong threads running through a person’s life that bring stability to their working experiences and working identities.

Over the past two years, the author’s research and observations have been about these strong threads. One such thread is mastery — the capacity to create a deep body of knowledge and skills, in the way that craftspeople master their crafts. The foundation of this kind of command is what the author calls micro skills — those skills that we each build that together add up to a capability and whose combination is valuable and unique. Over the period of a working life, areas of mastery are explored and added to — in part through the recombination of existing micro skills and the addition of new ones.  The following five takeaways emerged from one of the session she did along with her team with 96 attendees from 23 countries who represented over 23 organizations from the higher education, HR practices, oil and gas, management consulting, and legal sectors.

1. Mastery is an idea whose time has come again.  Current domains of expertise cited included project management, negotiation, coaching, managing a complex team, strategic thinking, and stakeholder management. When looking forward and describing future areas for development, many said that mastery would come from the human-plus-machine interface. Many specifically referred to mastery built with AI.
2. Mastery is still built through observation, repetition, and feedback.  The answer from the attendees reveals that  what worked for the glassblowers in medieval Venice still works today i.e., advancement through three stages: apprentice, journeyman, and master.  Online learning, which we have put such store in, failed to be seen as a significant development option in building deep proficiency, if we can trust the feedback of the small attendees.
3. Demonstrating mastery to others is a challenge.  Walk around the glassblowing shops in Venice, and it’s clear who is the apprentice and who is the master.  But how does a master demonstrate their work and burnish their reputation when there isn’t a way to certify their qualifications?  Comments included “sharing case studies of my work,” “LinkedIn,” “testimonials,” and “being exemplary.” Some made comments along the lines that they hoped that if they did good work, then their network and connections would do the rest. Others simply said, “I don’t.” It’s not easy to do.
4. Companies don’t always step up to support mastery.  Mastery can take decades to really develop. Lack of organizational support has emerged as the main tension when it comes to developing mastery.
5. GenAI is seen as a partner rather than a threat.  The arena how AI could help or hinder is quite cloudy,  So it’s no surprise that when asked, “What is your attitude to AI and your own mastery?” nearly half of webinar attendees — 44% — responded, “I don’t know.” Still, of those who had a point of view, 36% agreed that AI “could really help me develop mastery.” Only 11% said they were “worried it will speed up work and reduce my practice time,” and just 9% were “concerned it will stop me learning.”

Yes, we do want to build mastery, and, yes, we have a sense of the role of practice, learning from masters, and feedback. That puts the role of the leader at center stage: to be seen as actively developing high levels of expertise and skills for themselves while giving others the space and connections to develop their own mastery.