FOCUS THE MASTERY PARADOX
The danger of the growth precipice When you’re at the top of your game, the risk of sharply declining performance is – counter-intuitively – at its greatest. Are you ready to make the leap into a new phase of growth? Writing Whitney Johnson & Amy Humble
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re you trapped on the alluring but perilous plateau of Mastery? On the S Curve™, our model of human growth, the high, flat end of the S represents Mastery. Here, we have reached our objective, and ease displaces effort. Mastery is great in theory: employers love their people to be fully qualified, even over-qualified, for their roles. They often hire and promote that way. Employees also like Mastery – for a while. It’s comfortable and there are few real challenges. The problem is we don’t work optimally in Mastery for very long. Mastery is a plateau that becomes a precipice. We’ve exhausted the growth experience available on our S Curve, and we stagnate. We start phoning it in. Mastery is where an employee who is very, very good at what they do begins to feel like they can’t do it anymore. Their job is simply too boring. There’s no feeling of being stretched and little sense of accomplishment. They need a new S Curve to climb.
As leaders bask in the glow of their mastery, they risk becoming prisoners of their own success
The S Curve and the perils of Mastery Each new skill learned or challenge faced is its own S Curve. We start at the relatively flat Launch Point
each time we begin something new, then move to the steep-sided Sweet Spot as we gain momentum and knowledge, and end in the flat plateau of Mastery when we’ve reached our objective. Mastery is appealing. It offers a sense of security, a safe haven where one’s competence is unquestioned because we are masters at our craft. But herein lies the paradox: as leaders bask in the glow of their Mastery, they risk becoming prisoners of their own success. The sheer reality of being at the top can stifle their future growth and potential. It’s akin to mountaineering, where the summit is the goal – the high end of the climbing S Curve. But it’s rarely safe to stay at a summit for long. The world’s highest and most demanding mounts boast altitudes of 26,000 ft or more above sea level. Their peaks are death zones: stopping for long can be fatal, as oxygen levels at such altitudes are insufficient to sustain human life for an extended period of time. Mountaineers who reach the peak of the tallest mountains are at a high risk of anoxia, an absence of oxygen reaching the body’s tissues. Similarly, Mastery can be its own death zone for growth, particularly when we perceive our current peak to be the highest one possible for us. There isn’t enough growth at this point to sustain us for long. Learning – or rather, the brain activity and chemicals associated with learning – is the oxygen of human growth. Our brains are complex and malleable supercomputers that, due to neuroplasticity, physically change when we learn. Each time we run a hypothesis as a part of our brains’ highly attuned prediction models, new synapses form between neurons that were not previously connected. Our brains run these predictive models constantly, making an incredible number of predictions each day, building or strengthening neural connections, and ultimately impacting our conscious and subconscious actions. But these predictions don’t just impact our actions. They also impact our feelings and drive, because of the influence of dopamine, the feel-good chemical responsible for making us feel motivated. When we predict something correctly, we are rewarded with a small dopamine spike. It feels good, and we want to get it right again. We learn to take the actions that deliver dopamine, strengthening those neural pathways. Our brain creates new synapses, new pathways, and we learn. We grow. At the high end of the S Curve, in Mastery, our actions become automatic. Our competence is high, but our brain rewards are low. We don’t get the dopamine spike that we once had, because we are no longer uncertain. We know our predictive model is accurate, so we are no longer rewarded when we guess correctly. We are no longer creating new synapses, but rather are taking the welldeveloped pathways we’ve created. We’re becoming
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