Improving Performance: Some Specific Techniques

Improving Your Skills by Developing Your Weaknesses

There are a number of ways in which you can start to work on areas of weakness. In drawing up a plan for your personal development, it can be helpful to include several different methods to address problems. This helps to maintain interest.

Options include:

Formal courses or learning opportunities, whether leading to qualifications or not;
More informal learning experiences such as reading, mentoring or shadowing (and see our page on Learning from Mentoring for more about this);
Applying your formal learning deliberately in a particular situation, to see what happens; and
Direct learning from your own experience, through a process of reflection (see our page on Reflective Practice for more) and expertise transfer.

Which you choose, and when, will depend on many factors, including financial implications because formal courses and qualifications usually cost money. It will also depend on the value that you think you are likely to get out of them.

Formal courses qualifications: an alternative view

There is a place for formal learning, of course. Many people embark on formal training or seek qualifications every year. However, if you can’t afford to pay, and your organisation will not fund your development opportunity, don’t despair.

Explore options for grants or bursaries that could fund your learning.

There are plenty of organisations that may be prepared to help, especially if you fall into certain economic groups, or work in particular sectors (for example, the voluntary sector). Do some research and see if you can find at least partial funding. This could bring your course within reach.
Be flexible about providers and/or style of learning

Some courses are more prestigious than others—but you may find that you can get what you want more cheaply by being flexible about your provider and/or style of learning. A fully remote course with the right curriculum could be both cheaper and a better fit for you than one that requires in-person attendance.
Build your own learning experience from online providers

There are now many, many learning options online—and not just SkillsYouNeed. Universities offer MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, that anyone can join. Providers like Coursera list enormous numbers of short- and longer-term courses. Much of this content is free or relatively cheap to access. You can therefore build your own course and curriculum to match your learning needs for a fraction of the cost of a formal university-led course.

Expertise Transfer

Expertise transfer is the process of drawing on your existing areas of expertise and learning to apply them in slightly different ways. In effect, it is a way of making sense of your challenges by using what you already know from another setting.

The key to expertise transfer is to identify something that you are really good at. Many people, especially when they are finding something difficult, find it hard to identify anything at which they are ‘expert’. But in this case, it means something:

That you can do relatively easily;
Where you do not need to be supervised; and
That you like or, at worst, feel comfortable doing.

It is helpful to identify something that has several stages to it, rather than just one.

Expertise transfer in practice

Identify the key challenge that you are facing, in as much detail as possible. For example, you may find it hard to do written work because you never quite know where to start.
Identify something that you do really well. This might be at work, or outside work, at home, or when you were studying, or a hobby.
Think about and list all the skills that you use to do that thing well. Whatever level of detail works for you is fine, but do think about them carefully in terms of not just the skill, but what you do with it.
Now think about how each of those skills might help you do the challenge that you have identified. Again, think about what you might do with the skill to help you address the challenge.
Finally, consider whether your challenge now ‘makes sense’: do you have the skills you need to do the job?

Learning from Mistakes

One of the most powerful ways to learn and develop is from making mistakes. While nobody would advocate deliberately setting out to do things wrong, mistakes happen to everyone, especially if you are prepared to take risks and try something new.

You can either treat mistakes as things to be hushed up and never spoken about again, or as learning opportunities. Making mistakes:

Gives you a chance to do things wrong, and then reflect about how you could and/or should have done them differently; and
Can, if you are lucky, uncover real truths about good ways of working and improve relationships.

Case study: A cautionary tale of a lost temper

Jan was not in a good mood. She had been under a lot of pressure at work. She was a civil servant, managing a small team, all of whom were working very hard and very long hours to meet demands from their senior managers and from ministers for more and more work.

She was currently chairing a meeting of about fifteen people, many of whom were from voluntary organisations. The meeting had been going on about an hour, and the voluntary organisation representatives had spent most of the hour complaining about the lack of support from Jan’s team. So far Jan had listened politely and explained several times that the voluntary organisations were very welcome to do some work on the area if they wished.

“But,” said one of the senior representatives, “we will need your team to provide some secretarial support. If we could just have two people for a few hours a week…”

Jan looked round the room, at the voluntary organisation staff nodding vigorously, and the other civil servants studiously not meeting her eyes, and she lost her temper.

“Look,” she said angrily, “this policy area is just not a priority for ministers. My team is working flat out on other things that ministers are actually interested in. If you want this work done, you’re going to have to do it yourselves. I can present it to ministers for you, but beyond that, no.”

She stopped, appalled. She had tried so hard to be conciliatory, and now she had just thrown several months, if not years’ worth of relationship-building straight out of the window. There was a long pause in the room. Then one of the voluntary organisation representatives said, slowly,

“Thank you for telling us the truth. Nobody’s ever been honest with us about this before in two years of working on this. We’ll set up some working groups and report back to you at the next meeting.”

The relationship improved enormously after that episode, and the group started to work together much more effectively.

Potentially, losing her temper was a huge mistake for Jan. She certainly took away the lesson that self-control was vital and that she needed to work on it.

But she also never forgot the importance of being honest with other people about priorities.

It is not always easy to learn from your mistakes, however. In many organisations—and, indeed, among many individuals—there is a tendency towards allocating blame for anything that goes wrong, rather than a focus on learning from the experience.

It is, therefore, important to develop a personal process that will enable you to learn from your mistakes and move forward positively. With luck, this will influence those around you too.

A Process for Learning from Mistakes

1. Take responsibility: own your error

You cannot learn if you are not prepared to take responsibility for your own errors.

In practice, this may also mean ‘taking the blame’, which may feel counter-intuitive. However, if you are prepared to own your error, you will be able to take action to put it right, openly and transparently.

We generally favour people taking responsibility for their own actions. It is seen as a sign of integrity and honesty. Being prepared to own your errors will therefore improve your reputation in the long term.

You will also avoid the reputational damage of people finding out from another source that you were responsible.

2. See mistakes as an opportunity to learn

Owning your mistakes is not just about being able to take steps to put them right. It is also about learning from them, and ensuring that they don’t happen again.

However, in order to do this, you need to reframe them. You have to stop thinking of them as embarrassing, career-damaging, or negative in any way. Instead, you have to start thinking about them as highlighting lessons for you and others, or for the organisation as a whole.

After all, if you made that mistake, others could do so too. Your actions now could prevent that happening in future.

3. Analyse your mistake in detail

The next step is to analyse your mistake to identify exactly what happened and why.

We don’t mean that you have to dwell on it miserably, constantly thinking about what went wrong. Instead, you need to examine it carefully, looking for the root cause, as a way to prevent it from happening again.

There are several techniques that you can use (the box below outlines two possible options).

Techniques for analysing errors

1. Four questions

Ask yourself:

What was I trying to do?
What went wrong?
When did it go wrong?
Why did it go wrong?

2. Five Whys

The ‘five whys’ technique is a well-known way to explore the root causes of problems and mistakes. The technique is simple. You start with a statement of the problem: in this case, the error that occurred.

You then ask why that occurred.

Once you have an answer, you ask why again, and dig deeper into the cause of the answer.

You repeat this until you have asked ‘why?’ five times. This is generally enough to have reached the root cause. You can then consider what do to address it.

This process highlights what went wrong, and also the action that is needed to avoid it happening again.

4. Put the lessons into practice

Identifying the root causes and the lessons from your mistakes is actually the easy part.

The difficult bit is what comes next: putting it into practice.

Unfortunately, when you are busy—which is, of course, when most mistakes happen—it may be tempting to just slip back to your old habits or approaches. It takes time to learn a new habit or work on a new skill, or develop a new process.

At this stage, you may need to revisit your personal development plan and add some new objectives or activities to help you to embed your new learning.

5. Review your learning

Finally, you need to take time to review your learning—which is why it is a good idea to include something about this in your personal development plan!

A final word

There are many different ways in which to learn and develop your skills. This page outlines some options, but there are many others.

The key is to recognise what will work for you, and to make sure that you do not focus on just one option. Variety is, after all, the spice of life, and this applies to personal development too.

The Skills You Need Guide to Personal Development