For the last fifteen or so years, many of my blog postings have been circling around the issues and tools of personal and career development. So, I’ve written about observable competencies, the specific abilities like managing your boss, dealing with difficult people, building coalitions, and even doing small talk. But in all my blogging I’ve never revealed my proprietary process, the specific actions I take to develop the observable competencies. Initially, because it was a clear competitive advantage distinguishing my service from the hundreds of psychologists digging around in the business sandbox. But secondarily because execs aren’t really interested in understanding the development processes. They were plenty interested in manufacturing processes, but not in the largely interpersonal or cognitive development processes. They just wanted to me bring these tools, the competencies unique to their needs and coach them.
The third reason, candidly, is that I’d been playing with my model for so many years that my process system was largely unconscious. Indeed, there’s a strong sense that I didn’t prepare for business, but my life prepared me for it. So, I didn’t choose my business: it chose me. Furthermore, I didn’t recognize until the summer of 2024 that all the sources for these processes, competencies and even my coaching lie within the humanities--until my close friend, Bill Bellinger, Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Baylor University, asked me to write a paper on the usefulness of the humanities in life and career.
History
So begin with the fact that the process tools of personal development and ultimate career success are not only built bit-by-bit, but they continually expand through our use and experience with them. Much like learning to play the piano or any other instrument. The more you work with them, the more difficult compositions you can play.
It’s pretty clear from years of experience and observation that the simple, most foundational process competency is analysis. The first of five: analysis, questioning, reflection, narration and creativity. And the five are clearly interrelated. Notice also, given the context, these process competencies can become observable business competencies. Narrative, for example, is often also used for selling services or products to customers.
This bit-by-bit orientation to process competency has a personal history that goes back at least to my 4th grade fascination with kid-fiction--specifically detective stories. But about the same time, the orientation quickly lapped over into my piano studies, culminating between 1950 and ‘52, with a superb artist and teacher who completed her studies under the great Beethoven exponent, Artur Schnabel. She would demonstrate how to break out more difficult passages into small bits for analysis, sometimes just the notes of a single bar: one hand, then two hands. All this, making the compositions more obvious and thus, usually more playable. I used that model to explain how to listen to what’s being said while paying attention to the important subtexts that are not being said. An interesting form of simultaneous cognitive multi-tasking.
Years later, the organizational specialist, Karl Weick, while at Cornell, drew the same conclusion in a 1984 study called “Small Wins.”