Your Expertise Got You That Performance Director, But It Can Be The Very Thing That Limits Your Success
Your expertise likely helped you get to where you are at. In high-level sports performance, most people who rise to become the head of a department or a performance director were first experts in a specific professional domain.
Unfortunately, the very expertise that helped you advance in your career might now be holding you back.
Expertise
When I say expertise, I am referring to the vast knowledge and the specific skills you’ve honed with-in your domain. Whether it’s sports-medicine, strength & conditioning, or sports science, you have needed to build these to become considered an expert.
Expertise can be broad or deep. Width reflects the breadth of different knowledge with-in your specific domain. A performance coach may have high-level skills in strength training, conditioning, mobility, and speed development. This would be an example of a wide range of knowledge in their domain.
On the other hand, a different coach may know everything there is to know about getting an athlete stronger. They know lots of methods, progressions, and details about building strength. However, they don’t know much about energy systems training, speed, and agility, or developing mobility. They have a great depth of knowledge, but not a wide range.
When advancing into a role as a performance director, a breadth of knowledge will be more useful than a great depth in a narrow domain. If your knowledge and experience is very narrow, you will have a harder time as you move into a role that is broad by definition.
Success Is A Prerequisite
Part of achieving a relative level of expertise in your field is to produce results. This is what you are there for, after all. People generally hire you, retain you, and promote you when you are capable of getting results.
I use both knowledge and skills here because we regularly find the two separated. Some people have a lot of skills. Some an extensive database of knowledge. But only when you have both are you a true expert.
Combined knowledge and skills are needed to get results consistently. If you have just skills, you’ll get results in some cases, but don’t have the knowledge to adjust or choose which skills to use. On the other hand, if you have extensive knowledge but no application skills, you’ll never be able to get the job done when it counts.
Expert Thinking Can Be A Curse
As you build your expertise, you are forming a range of experiences and a knowledge database that you can fall back on. You’ve probably used these again and again to get results.
There is a well know Zen parable that helps illustrate the challenge of expertise.
In a long ago era, there was a wise Zen master whom . People would come from far and near seeking his wisdom.
He was once visited by an important, high ranking university professor who wanted to question him about Zen.
The master suggested they should have teat as they discussed this. As the professor continually asked questions, the wise master began slowly pouring the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but the master kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow onto the table and his expensive robes, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is full. No more will go in!”
The Zen master turned to the professor, smiled, and said, “Like the cup, you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup? Come back to me when you have a beginner’s mind.”
Thinking Fast
To get results you had to develop effective skills and extensive knowledge. You have had success and this has given you a positive experience about the way you solve problems.
This knowledge and experience becomes part of your Type 1 thinking, as discussed by Nobel Laureate author Daniel Kahneman. In his book 2011 book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, he discusses many reasons why expertise fails us.
Type 1 thinking is fast, unconscious, intuitive, and emotional. When we have to solve a problem, it uses all the experiences and successes we’ve had to find answers. That’s great when you are working in your domain and facing known issues and situations.
You can come up with answers fast, and your large knowledge base sets you up for a higher probability of success.
It also feeds into a lot of common human cognition biases and can apply faulty heuristics. Heuristics are a sort of logic tree we develop to decode complex challenges. Unfortunately, they are built on our domain and experiences.
As a performance director, you have to go beyond your expert domain. When working in a VUCA high-performance sports setting, your past success can limit your solutions.
Creative Problem Solving
VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. (you can read why high-level sports VUCA here) Creative problem solving as a skill is essential because the high-performance sport is a VUCA environment.
Solving problems in new and novel ways often puts experts in a specific domain at a disadvantage.
They already know all about how things work in their field. It’s part of why they were successful and considered an expert. It’s also why they can have trouble thinking about creative solutions. They know too much.
To paraphrase, if you’ve always had a hammer, and always pounded nails successfully, it’s hard to be successful when presented with anything else.
Creative problem solving requires you to have the skill of asking great questions. Part of creativity is reframing things and asking questions well. This helps strip away assumptions and preconceptions, which allows you to explore original solutions.
This is where the Type 2 thinking of Kahneman fits in. It’s slower, more deliberate, logical, and reflective. It involves asking questions and examining an issue from a broader perspective.
When we cultivate our Type 2 thinking, we have a chance to overcome some of our inherent biases. We can look at problems from different points of view and won’t rule out ideas as fast.
An Expert With A Beginner’s Mind
Your expertise got you into that high-performance position. Use it. Keep your Type 1 thinking sharp.
At the same time, understand that to lead a high-performance team, you will need to develop a new and broader set of skills. Develop your Type 2 thinking and become a great detective asking questions and solving problems creatively.
Think fast and slow to overcome your expert’s handicap.
