💡 Telling someone to “work smarter” is useless. It assumes they already know what working smarter looks like. But, seriously, since only The Working Dead work at making their jobs harder, if a person already knew how to work smarter, they’d be doing it. Beginners can’t work smarter because they don’t yet know what working smarter looks like. They have to work hard first, because working smart is usually built on thousands of hours of working hard.
But there are two fundamental ways for a beginner/new Team Member to reduce the number of hours it takes for them to be able to work smarter:
⚡ 1. By Self-Directed Learning: A beginner/new Team Member enhance their knowledge and skills autonomously through activities like reading, observing, and trial and error.
⚡ 2. By Social Learning: This method leverages the knowledge and experiences of others through formal education, mentorship, coaching, and collaboration with their peers. This method offers structured guidance, immediate feedback, and the opportunity to learn from the successes and setbacks of others, which accelerates the learning curve.
☑️ By combining these two learning methods, beginners/new Team Members expedite their journey towards working smarter while aligning it with their unique working and thinking styles.
However, beginners and new Team Members don’t know what they don’t know. And one of the things they don’t know is that these two methods of making it easier to work smarter exists. It’s every Team Leader and Team Member’s obligation to, as soon as possible after they join the Team, introduce them to these methods and then encourage them to use them both.
The benefit to the Team when a new Team Member is able to work smarter is to move the Team closer to being World Class.
I could be wrong…but I’m not.
❓ What techniques/approaches are you recommending to a beginner/new Team Member so they can more quickly learn to work smarter?
More importantly, what techniques are you using so that you can continue to learn how to work smarter?