Rookie Smarts

Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work

Liz Wiseman

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780062322630
• eBook ISBN: 9780062322647
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Is it possible to be at your best even when you are underqualified or doing something for the first time? Is it still possible, even after decades of experience, to recapture the enthusiasm, curiosity, and fearlessness of youth to take on new challenges? With the right mindset—with Rookie Smarts—you can.

In a rapidly changing world, experience can be a curse. Careers stall, innovation stops, and strategies grow stale. Being new, naïve, and even clueless can be an asset. For today’s knowledge workers, constant learning is more valuable than mastery.

In this essential guide, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explains how to reclaim and cultivate this curious, flexible, youthful mindset called Rookie Smarts. She argues that the most successful rookies are hunter-gatherers—alert and seeking, cautious but quick like firewalkers, and hungry and relentless like pioneers. Most importantly, she identifies a breed of leaders she refers to as “perpetual rookies.” Despite years of experience, they retain their rookie smarts, thinking and operating with the mindsets and practices of these high-performing rookies.

Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: “Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up?” The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie.

Rookie Smarts isn’t just for professionals seeking personal renewal; it is an indispensible resource for all leaders who must ensure their workforces remains vital and competitive.

PART ONE

ROOKIE SMARTS: LIVING ON THE LEARNING CURVE

CHAPTER 1

THE RISE OF THE ROOKIE

The ark was built by amateurs, but professionals built the Titanic.

—RICHARD NEEDHAM

During the 1970s, the National Basketball Association (NBA) experienced what Alon Marcovici called “a decade of parity.”¹ In this era, when the players’ shorts were still short, no one team dominated. It was anyone’s game. Although well respected, in 1979 the Los Angeles Lakers hadn’t clinched an NBA title in eight years. At the time, the phenomenally talented seven-foot-two center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, anchored the team. Despite his wicked skyhook, Abdul-Jabbar hadn’t yet led the team to a victory in the finals. It was in this situation that the Lakers secured first-pick rights for the 1979 NBA draft.

Enter Earvin “Magic” Johnson II, the six-foot-eight point guard from Michigan. Johnson had played two years for Michigan State, where he averaged 17.1 points, 7.6 rebounds, and 7.9 assists per game and earned the nickname “Magic” for his ability to make every team better.² For Magic, life was “a joyous journey,” and the opportunity to play on the Lakers and learn from Abdul-Jabbar was a thrill.³

While the sports world called him Magic, his teammates called him “young buck” for his childlike enthusiasm. When Magic spontaneously hugged Abdul-Jabbar after Abdul-Jabbar’s last-minute, game-winning skyhook, the big guy remarked, “Take it easy, kid, we’ve got 81 more of these to play.”⁴ After thirteen games, head coach Jack McKinney sustained a serious head injury while cycling, so assistant coach Paul Westhead (who had more experience as a Shakespearean scholar than an NBA head coach) took over. Sixty-eight games later, the Lakers made it to the finals, going up against the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Sixers brought a veteran lineup led by the phenomenal Julius Erving. The Lakers took a 3–2 lead in the series with strong performances from Abdul-Jabbar and company. But the team faced another distressing setback in game five when Abdul-Jabbar, who was averaging 33 points a game, sustained an ankle injury that would prevent him from traveling to Philadelphia for game six.

The Lakers would surely get beat without their star center, so said the pundits. Experienced advisers to the new head coach suggested he send the “B team” to Philly and save his best players for the seventh game back in Los Angeles. Instead, Westhead decided to play Magic at center in game six. Coach Westhead gave Magic the news. Magic assured his team that he would not just play center, he would be Kareem. The team wasn’t convinced. He was good, but he was a bit unpredictable, and he was just a rookie.

Boarding the flight to Philadelphia, the players were quiet as they passed Kareem’s noticeably vacant seat, 1A. Even when Kareem didn’t travel, no one dared sit there. But that day, Magic did. According to the NBA Encyclopedia, “Magic plopped himself down in the first-class seat always set aside for Abdul-Jabbar. Then he went through Abdul-Jabbar’s normal routine, stretching out in the seat and pulling a blanket over his head. This done, Magic looked back at his coach and winked. ‘Never fear,’ he told his teammates.”⁵ Magic intended to carry the team, but not as Earvin Johnson; he was going into game six as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The rumor mill spun at the outlandish idea that Magic might play center. Before the game, a reporter asked the rookie about his readiness to guard Erving and if he would play center. Magic responded, “I’m going to do my best wherever I play. [This season’s] been a learning experience. But I enjoy challenges. And it’s a challenge tonight to see what I can do.”⁶

ESPN’s Rick Weinberger described what happened when the rookie point guard lined up at center in Kareem’s spot: “Sixers center Caldwell Jones turns to Magic and said, ‘You gotta be joking, right?’”⁷ Magic was unsure which foot to put into the tip-off circle, but he was grinning nonetheless. He lost the tip-off, but then took control of the game as he transformed into a smaller version of Abdul-Jabbar.⁸ Playing center, forward, and guard, Johnson scored 42 points, and made 15 rebounds, 7 assists, and 3 steals. He scored 9 points in the final 2:22 and led the team to a 123–107 victory, winning the NBA finals for the Lakers and receiving the NBA finals Most Valuable Player award.⁹ Many consider that game on May 16, 1980, the greatest rookie performance in NBA history. The stronger team was beat by a flash of rookie brilliance.

But, was this magnificent performance an isolated incident, a fluke? When a rookie performs exceptionally, is it magic? Is it luck? Or is it something more ordinary, more accessible?

Rookies are more capable than we might expect. We often see it on the athletic field, but it also plays out in the halls of the workplace. Is it possible that the rookies inside our companies might be our most valuable players? Research conducted by my team suggests that, in many cases, inexperience can work to your advantage: It can spark a dazzling performance, and help you compete with, if not surpass, even the most talented, experienced players. Not only does inexperience confer an advantage, but also it is desperately needed in today’s rapidly evolving world of work.

A QUESTION OF EXPERIENCE

To understand the promise of inexperience, we must first recognize the lure of experience.

Experience is the steady hands of a master craftsman, the accumulated knowledge, both broad and deep, of a venerated professor, or the wisdom of a guru atop a mountain dispensing pearls of wisdom gathered throughout a lifetime. We admire the master teacher who can tame an undisciplined classroom with a single stare. We idealize the image of an organization guided by a seasoned executive, surrounded by expert technicians and a skillful staff. We gravitate toward experts because they represent safety, comfort, and certainty.

It’s not merely wishful thinking, either. As we gain experience, we accumulate a repertoire of tools, techniques, and resources that can be repeatedly leveraged. It just makes sense that a veteran sales executive with a well-worn Rolodex of contacts will outperform the new sales associate starting from scratch.

The prevailing view also holds that experienced people have better intuition—the ability to understand new problems immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. Intuition guides a veteran firefighter to take the north stairs rather than the south stairs. He isn’t sure why, but it feels right, and it later proves right. Several researchers have shown a link between experience and greater powers of intuition. One study concluded that intuition is the brain unconsciously drawing on past experiences and external clues to make decisions. Another study found that participants who possessed expertise in a particular task domain performed as well, on average, using their intuition as they did when relying on analytical means.¹⁰ In short, experts have better intuition, because they have amassed more data points on which to base gut feelings.

We generally assume that it takes years to achieve this kind of mastery. Psychologist Anders Ericsson’s oft-cited study (referred to as the 10,000 hour rule) shows that in professions such as music, medicine, and sports, mastery is achieved after roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.¹¹ This equates to roughly five to ten years of relevant work experience. Coincidentally, to the frustration of many young professionals and career changers, five to ten years is the typical minimum experience level required just to be considered for many jobs.

For years, we’ve elevated experience to a position of primacy. We idolize the idea of someone at the top of his game or the peak of her career. The master is the manager, the mentor, and the teacher, who, having climbed the mountain, will guide others to the top.

But this is not the whole story. Research offers some intriguing insights into the genius locked inside decidedly average nonexperts. Indeed, studies have shown that a group of rookies can outperform individual experts. Behavioral scientists at the University of Chicago showed that expert pathologists poorly predict a cancer patient’s survival time based on viewing a biopsy slide; yet when the decision of a group of less experienced individuals is aggregated, the readings are much more accurate than the predictions of individual experts.¹²

It has become clear that most jobs don’t require anywhere near ten thousand hours of practice to attain mastery. Business author Josh Kaufman claims most career skills require only twenty hours of practice to master. And several studies show that practice accounts for only 30 percent of the variance in ability among those considered experts.¹³ Ericsson’s famous study focused primarily on violinists, surgeons, and athletes, professions requiring mastery of precise physical motions. A large workplace study conducted by the European Union in 2007 showed that the ability to mobilize the skills and competencies of the people around us has a bigger impact on our performance than does the amount of experience we have.¹⁴ Most professions today do not require this sort of physical precision. Have we too quickly assumed that the degree of experience necessary to achieve virtuosity in physical and technical pursuits is also required in the knowledge realm?

Finally, companies are finding that the amount of previous experience an employee has is not correlated with job success. For example, when the U.S. call and customer care center for Xerox Services implemented personality testing and cognitive skills assessments in 2010, they found that a customer service person’s previous experience had no bearing on either their productivity or their retention.¹⁵ A study from the IE Business School in Spain and the NEOMA Business School in France found that CEOs in S&P 500 corporations with former experience as a CEO performed worse than those without such experience.¹⁶

The upside of experience may be less pronounced than once imagined, while its downside may be even steeper. What we know might actually mask what we don’t know and impede our ability to learn and perform. All too often, the person doling out the advice is the one least likely to learn.

THE LEARNED AND THE LEARNERS

January is hardly the prime time for a retreat in Seattle. But the leaders of the sales and marketing readiness group for this global company are holed up at a winter lodge for an off-site team workshop and strategy session. The goal of the off-site is to refocus the group’s priorities for the next six months. It is this group’s responsibility to ensure that sales and marketing staff thoroughly understand and can appropriately sell a new product by the time it is released. Commensurate with their importance, this group is well funded, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a staff of 140 people.

Chris,¹⁷ the group’s general manager, is a bold thinker who has been tasked with leading an important change: General management wants the sales and marketing teams to start thinking about the company’s products in terms of lines-of-business (that is, which products would be useful for particular types of businesses) instead of clusters of functionality (what the products do). Chris’s management team consists of veteran training professionals with a massive wealth of experience. But Chris has also recruited two new players, Sara and Angela—both of whom are experienced and successful sales leaders but complete novices in the employee-training arena.

The team has isolated themselves in this winter lodge to plan key initiatives for the second half of the fiscal year. During one exercise, each member of the management team is asked to craft a “challenge question”—a concrete objective that will focus the team’s energy on quick, sustainable wins. Sara, just starting her third week on the job, suddenly blurts, “This is going to be really hard. I’m just getting started and I have no idea what I’m doing.” Chris tells her this just might be her superpower.

Each person works independently and then shares their challenge question with the group. The veterans go first. Carina begins by explaining that she ignored Chris’s list of priorities and came up with her own: She figures she has a better handle on what needs to be done. Another member of the team, Will, lays out an ambitious challenge, which is quickly countered by another veteran on the team: “Isn’t this what we’ve been trying to do for years?” Will quickly explains that his team will be more inspired by his lofty vision than by a series of smaller, tactical challenges. Carlos articulates a challenge to introduce a new online program. When asked how he would engage the executives inside the company, Carlos brushes it off, declaring, “I’ve learned to keep the executives out of things. I usually just ask for their opinion on issues that don’t really matter. I know what needs to be done.” Each of these veterans has missed the mark. Each one has relied on their own expertise to craft a plan of attack independent of their colleagues.

Next come the rookies. The newest member of the group, Sara, nails it. Her challenge question aligns with Chris’s priorities and orchestrates a much-needed small win that will garner attention and support from internal clients. The rest of the team is stunned. Someone comments, “Wow, pretty good for a newbie.” Next comes another rookie, Angela. Her challenge is pretty good, but it’s not yet great. During the...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Rookie Smarts: Living on the Learning Curve
• Part II. Cultivating Rookie Smarts
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: The Research Process
• Appendix B: Frequently Asked Questions
• Appendix C: Learning Experiments
• Appendix D: Learning Itineraries
• Appendix E: Rookies and Perpetual Rookies
• Appendix F: Discussion Fire Starter
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Ad
• Books by Liz Wiseman
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher