Stephen Billing’s Blog

You know you have to adjust your leadership style to suit your team members. Tick. But how do you decide where your team members are at? Have you come across Patricia Benner’s very interesting way of thinking of the development level of people as they move From Novice to Expert?

Rather than using simplistic two by two matrices of task / relationship needs like situational leadership does, Benner applies to nursing practice the work of Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus who studied groups of people who rely heavily on the synthesis of expert practice such as chess players and airline pilots. It is interesting to consider how to lead and help people develop depending on their stage of skill acquisition.

The Dreyfus brothers identified five stages of skill acquisition for adults moving from novice to expert practitioner in actual applied situations. This is a situational not a traits or talent model of skill acquisition. It distinguishes between the level of skilled performance that can be achieved through principles and theory learned in a classroom, and the context-dependent judgments and skills of the expert that can only be acquired through experience of real situations. Think about a key member of your team, someone you are finding challenging at the moment. Are they:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert 

1.  Novice

Starting out, a novice is a beginner with no context who needs rules to follow. The rules by definition are context-free. This rule-based behaviour is limited and inflexible. But with no experience to draw on, novices require rules to guide them. However following these rules legislates against expert performance because the rules cannot tell the novice what relevant task to perform in a given situation. The rule can only say how to perform a task once it has been decided that the task should be performed.

Students are not the only novices. Any manager entering an unfamiliar situation they don’t have experience of may be limited to a novice level of performance in that situation.

Implication for leaders: Stay close to the novice performer and provide rules to follow so that they can learn how to do various tasks.

More in future posts…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.