{"id":679,"date":"2014-10-08T11:46:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T10:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/?p=679"},"modified":"2014-10-07T14:46:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T13:46:29","slug":"t-shaped-learning-curves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/t-shaped-learning-curves\/","title":{"rendered":"T-Shaped learning curves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"no\"?--> Being good at what you do doesn\u2019t make you a good manager or leader at it. Tough but true. As\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ideo.com\/people\/tim-brown\">Tim Brown<\/a>\u00a0IDEO&#8217;s CEO says \u201cThey have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T &#8211; they\u2019re mechanical engineers or industrial designers\u201d. He was talking about the people who design user interfaces, but the principle is valid for anyone moving \u2018up the scale\u2019 of promotion.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/T_curve-e1412689466744.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-711\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/T_curve-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"T_curve\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>You can be a great accountant, for example (the vertical of the T) but as soon as you get promoted and <em>become in charge of accountants<\/em>, that\u2019s only the narrow fulcrum where\u00a0the horizontal line balances on the vertical line of technical skills. In other words, you need to broaden out, pretty darned fast. What\u2019s on the rest of the horizontal is the kind of stuff we training (obviously!).<\/p>\n<p>So what\u2019s on the horizontal? The obvious\u2026 anything to do with people\u2026 motivation, delegation, performance management, making presentations, time management, being emotionally intelligent, dealing with conflict, prioritisation\u2026 you get the idea.<\/p>\n<p>But as the Hitch Hiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy famously said \u201cDon\u2019t panic\u201d. A lot of these things are things that \u2018normal people\u2019 have experience of. Anyone who\u2019s tried to coax kids into doing their homework or instrument pracice will understand motivation and performance management. The only difference is that when you\u2019re dealing with adults, a lot of this kind of thing goes out of the window and we forget what we know. We fall back on fear-based approaches designed to cover our backs and minimise the damage if things go wrong.<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s <strong>now<\/strong> how we raised our kids, is it!? \u00a0We didn\u2019t (just) try to stop them screwing up\u2026 we tried to help them fly.<\/p>\n<p>Why is leadership of adults different in any way except that you can use longer words and that kids are often more sensible than grown ups\u2026.? \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Being good at what you do doesn\u2019t make you a good manager or leader at it. Tough but true. As\u00a0Tim Brown\u00a0IDEO&#8217;s CEO says \u201cThey have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T &#8211; they\u2019re mechanical engineers or industrial designers\u201d. He was talking about the people who design user interfaces, but the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":712,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}