Professional development can sometimes be focused on the specific skillsets suitable for your industry - you may pursue a particular qualification concerning a type of technology you are utilising or a particular methodology.
However, do you ever look at what you would class as an "A* player" in your industry and wonder what they do differently? Think of a person you admire, either in business or personally, and we will guarantee that they demonstrate some core meta-skill competencies that propel them from good to great.
We all share the same ability to learn the technical aspects of any role or job that we choose, but how we develop ourselves to thrive in our environments, which we argue, is of greater importance than specific skillset learning.
Gustavo Razzetti developed the model that we use at Browning Consultancy to share the concepts of meta-skills. He defines them as;
"A master skill that magnifies and activates other skills. A high order skill that allows you to engage with functional expertise more effectively; a catalyst for learning and building new skills faster."
The core to the successful development of meta-skills is adaptability. How comfortable are you with change, and how can you pivot and rework pre-existing plans, beliefs, skills to aid you in your ever-changing journey? Feeling comfortable with change in this instance is not necessarily the same as demonstrating emotion, either upset, shock, even anger from the immediate aftermath of that change event. Moreover, it is looking at how you move forward from that point in time. Can you harness the emotion and the feelings into a force for good and have the adaptability to respond so that you continue to thrive?
Razzetti's model splits adaptability into three core pillars;
Creativity
Resilience
Self-Awareness
Creativity
Creativity comes from a place of problem-solving. You don't need to be artistically minded to be creative. Creativity comes in many forms.
When faced with a roadblock, do you try and find an alternative path? Do you try and remove the roadblock? Or are you frozen in time until someone else removes it for you?
Can you take a concept that you believe in and then innovate and apply it to a slightly different setting to benefit the team or process you are looking to improve?
Are you able to embrace experimentation over perfection and refine your path until you reach the desired outcome?
Most corporate innovation initiatives fail, as they are too focused on process rather than adapting and innovating, focusing on culture and actual behavioural change.
Creativity also takes the form of improvisation - the ability to solve unexpected problems quickly and adeptly. Have you ever been in an emergency or an entirely unpredicted situation? How did you react?
Creative problem solving by utilising the toolset you have and improvising on its use to solve your immediate problem is a transferable skill to be used across both personal and professional arenas.
Resilience
Every action creates a conclusion, and that outcome can be either negative or positive. However, a negative result does not mean that it means "game over". Resilience is the ability to keep going despite the setbacks, the uncertainty and the single-minded
determination to achieve your objective. This resilience could be perceived as stubbornness or single-mindedness if overused; however, this is a crucial meta-skill to develop and refine, and this can be done in a number of ways.
Experimentation and the ability to look at failures as opportunities to learn and adapt your path/plan are critical to any transformation journey. No plan survives the first implementation, and dead-ends, diversions and false starts are part of the landscape. Learning how to use experimentation to your benefit to understand your solution areas that work well and the areas that require improvement and adjustment can help you develop a continuous focus on reaching your goals and objectives.
Resilience also takes the form of how you react and respond when things do go wrong. Resiliency is the capacity to rise above adversity. It is our thoughts that shape our behaviour and our perceptions of the world.
It is also crucial for us to focus on the lessons rather than the mistakes from that experience. Everyone is human, and errors are inevitable. Still, the learning is far from inevitable, and teams need to focus on what can be learned from successful implementations and ones that did not achieve their intended outcomes.
Self Awareness
Self- awareness is crucial in leadership - a self-aware leader has by far more impact and ability to lead than one with little to no self-awareness. The same can be said for teams - high self-awareness teams make much better decisions, interact better and manage tensions and conflicts more productively.
Self-awareness, however, is the hardest and rarest of the meta-skills to develop - Dr Tasha Eurich states that 90% of people believe that they are self-aware; however, the reality is that only 15% of that group actually are.
Knowing oneself is not just understanding ourselves and our motivations and understanding how others perceive us and how they change depending on our mood, situation, relationship, etc. It is also essential to reflect on yourself and how you are perceived, and how you also perceive your reality. Accepting reality rather than fighting or denying it enables us to focus our attention on what happened rather than what we wish would have occurred.
Finally, to be genuinely collaborative, you need to develop and display empathy. Without the skill of seeing things from other perspectives, it prevents us from seeing a whole landscape and diminishes our ability to listen and understand different points of view.
To conclude, when you are mapping your professional development, do not just focus on technical skills.
How can you adopt tactics and working practices to strengthen and balance your meta-skills?
Focusing on these areas regularly and undertaking intentional and focused action to improve upon these will positively affect your objectives and goals.
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