We often discuss the challenges of starting an encore career in my podcast, Creating Your Encore Career. However, something we may need to remind ourselves is that even if we are transitioning to a new sphere of the workplace, we are still experts in our fields! And the expert knowledge that we have obtained throughout our work experience will ultimately need to be passed down, or transferred, to others in our encore careers to ensure continued success.
To help us understand how cultivating deep smarts can help us in our encore careers, I turned to the book Deep Smarts: How To Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap. Through engaging with this book, I found the following helpful tips to share with you today.
The Basis of Deep Smarts
Deep smarts are cultivated through learning and experiencing various types of situations in the workplace. They are not necessarily a philosophical approach but more of an experiential one. Those with deep smarts have a systemic approach in their thinking, meaning they look at the whole picture. They can quickly recognize patterns because they have so much experience with various situations and they have a breadth of technical knowledge about the company, field, or line of work.
Transferring Deep Smarts to Novices
Experts need to have patience and appreciation for novices in their field. It’s also important to ensure the “catcher is ready for the pitch,” or that the novice is ready to hear the information you are distilling. Some of the various ways for transfer are through becoming a mentor or creating physical artifacts that will last as a means of accessing your expert knowledge. However, guided feedback from a coach may be the best approach for a novice to learn the deep smarts of an expert. Rather than critiquing or judging the beginner, coaching them through thorough rapid feedback helps to drive the experience home with encouragement.
Owning Your Expertise and Yet Being a Beginner
Deep smarts, such as fast decision making and the ability to extrapolate knowledge from prior data to solve novel problems, can also lead to shortcomings. Jumping to solutions based on outdated context or not staying current with the changes in the field both display the limitations of driving decision making on solely experiential knowledge. Truthfully, the best way to approach problems is by being both the expert and the apprentice: gaining experiential mastery while keeping an open mind. Cultivating deep smarts does not end with subject mastery–consistent learning and growing is always important. This means being open to asking questions, relying on others, and trying new approaches–skills that we may associate more with “rookie smarts.” Learning to embrace being both the expert and the apprentice will allow you to utilize your deep knowledge while developing a learning mindset that can help you tackle the swift changes that starting a new encore career will bring.
