I wonder if someone more skilled with Web Servers than you are would find it even easier to pick up IIS? Some of my models talk about the ability to adapt a practice to a different context – usually in the knowledgeable space. If you’re finding that you can leverage some of your Java knowledge then probably you’re approaching that level.

I’ve recently started spotting the different levels of granularity within practices and am exploring this myself; your comments and posts also give me food for thought!

All people are great individuals. More than anything, it’s about finding the right skills to be growing.

The weird thing is, everyone loves learning and improving themselves. Applying learned abstractions to different problems makes the brain produce all kinds of lovely chemicals. I usually find that anyone who’s got themselves into a rut has just forgotten how much fun it was, and it’s not so hard to lift them out.

There are occasional people who like their rut more than others. I let them be, and concentrate on the ones who are willing and have fun. Eventually the atmosphere of learning, the expectation of self-improvement and the buzz and transparency around it mean they either join in or leave.

So, grow the strongest skills and the strongest people, and the rest will take care of itself.

With regard to coaching and goals – I may ask for help occasionally from people that I think are really strong in a skill, but that’s a bit different to setting goals. You can’t set people’s goals for them. You can ask them what goals they have, and the models help them find areas they’d like to improve in, but it’s a pull rather than a push process. And, yes, both coach and coachee need to try things out and get feedback on whether it worked.

If you need to do this with exponential scaling, find people with coaching skills and grow those! I do this full-time now, and consider myself very lucky!

Thanks for your comment on my blog, I thought I’d share my reply here as well.

Thanks for that great post, I found it extremely interesting and it has given me a lot to think about. Here are some of my immediate thoughts.

One of the consistent themes I am getting from your post is the fact that you’ve had the opportunity to work with and help grow the skills of some great individuals, they were driven and sufficiently self-starting to grow their skills in the first place. So, it all really starts and ends with the quality of the people you’re working with. You can help, guide and point but you can’t make people grow their skills. So, the types of people you work with really counts.

I really like how you basically propose that it is not just knowledge flowing downhill, you can get your beginners to push and prod the more experienced practitioners to become more expert, I think that is great. Although once again, the quality of the people is paramount in my opinion.

Here is another thought, coaching someone takes time and the ability to frequently re-examine and adjust your course. It would be tough if all you did was set some vague goals every 6 months and that’s all. It is almost like personal agility, you need to be able to retrospect and correct your course etc. It sounds to me like you’ve been able to do that with some people which is great. I do have to say that most teams find it really difficult to do this as it is a massive time commitment and would grow exponentially with the size of the team.

Those are some of my immediate thoughts, but you have given me much to mull over and I’ll let it bounce around my head for a while . And on top of all that you’ve reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on the stages of competence model as well (should probably do that before I forget again). Thanks for sharing.

It was really interesting reading about the model from someone who’s actually properly used it to teach people. I only think about it more randomly when assessing my level of skill so my experience is much narrower than yours.

One thing I’ve been trying to work out which maybe you know is how narrow a skillset would you find it useful to apply the model to?

For example a colleague and I were discussing how web servers work and in particular IIS and I realised that I know very little about the whole process.

I pretty much just follow a set of steps and if something goes wrong then I was completely stuck and didn’t know how to proceed.

From my understanding that’s how a Novice would act.

My colleague understood a bit more what was going on and asked me if I understand how it would work if we were working in Java land.

I knew that a bit better and we realised that there was quite a lot of overlap between the two which then made it much easier for me.

It doesn’t feel like what I’ve described is broad enough to be called a skill but it seems like there are differing levels of ability when working with web servers (for example) such that someone who was an expert would pretty much be able to solve any problem that might happen around that area whereas someone novice wouldn’t know what to do.

I like the idea of the .5’s that you described – that seems really useful for a continuous progression between the levels instead of it being purely discrete.

I still find it quite hard to assess my own skill level – I think this probably links to the fact that I’m not yet competent at using the Dreyfus model – although I find it easier to look at people who are better than me at a skill and through talking to them work out what areas I could get better at.

I really like this model – it seems to provide a way for you to internally measure your progress which I think is great.

Thanks for posting your thoughts.

Mark