We all know the secret to success: learn your craft, gain experience, and then execute flawlessly, again and again. But what if experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? “The rookie space is actually where we tend to do our best work, rather than our worst work,” says Liz Wiseman, author of the new book Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work. She argues that true excellence comes from professionals who are willing to risk putting themselves into new situations where they can learn and grow. It’s not just about the Zen concept of ‘beginners’ mind’ and seeing problems in new ways, she says. “It’s almost like desperation-based learning, which is, I think, the most powerful form of learning.”
“I found that inexperienced people bring in five times the amount of expertise to a problem…they’re gathering it in from other people because they lack it themselves – which means they tend to bring in more current expertise,” says Wiseman. “They operate in very lean, agile ways. I call this ‘fire-walker mode.’ They're very cautious because they don't know what they're doing. They're reading signals. They're listening to their stakeholders. They're seeking feedback…They end up out-performing experienced people when it comes to knowledge work, innovation and speed of deliverables. Those are the areas where they tend to do amazing things. They operate in these hungry, scrappy ways.”
A rookie mindset isn’t just for recent grads, however. “Where I think this can be easily misunderstood is [people often think] that “rookie = young person,” she says. “I think it's easy to say that millennials bring a certain kind of thing and if you're not a millennial, you're a has-been. But it's just not the case at all.”
In actuality, the best performers she studied were experienced professionals with a grounding in the business world, but who were new to certain industries or tasks. “The highest performing rookies were not young newcomers,” she says. “They were experienced executives who were taken out of Domain A and put into Domain B. They've got a base of experience and expertise to draw on, but then they're now pushed out into that discomfort zone again. Which means, as an executive, they can't rely on their own answers and their own expertise. They now need the team and it forces them to work in very different ways.”
So how can you tap the power of the rookie mindset? If you’re a manager, says Wiseman, “if you want a fast, cheap way to drive employee satisfaction up in your team, give people bigger challenges.” Her research indicates that employees start to feel ready for a new role or new job after a year, and start to feel stale in their jobs after two years. To lengthen the amount of your time that your employees feel fresh and energized, “about every three months, feed someone a new challenge. A wise manager is going to feed their team a steady diet of challenges.”
A micro-version of this is swapping jobs with a colleague for a day or a week (of course, unless you’re in charge, you should ask your manager first). Wiseman herself has been following this recommendation and, when we met for an interview in New York, was preparing to do a job swap with a Vice President of Marketing at
In a fast-moving business environment, says Wiseman, “The speed of what you learn is a lot more important than your accumulated knowledge. The best professionals are going to stay out in this rookie space. They're not going to rest on static expertise.”
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.
