When selecting leaders and team members for new roles, assignments, and projects, organizations place a premium on experience.
Experience carries weight because leaders rightly believe it is impossible to acquire mastery without it. Hence, experience is typically viewed as the primary driver of expertise and knowledge attainment in nearly every workplace.
The presumption that experience is a strong predictor of expertise is widely held across the globe. Leaders demonstrate this belief in most of their people decisions.
For instance, experience is almost always one of the key attributes that leaders depend upon to discern skillfulness when hiring new team members. And when it comes to promotions, pay raises, and new roles, experience is nearly always a critical factor.
Despite this common wisdom and practice, research has shown that experience is an imperfect proxy for expertise.
Studies have consistently found that experience is a weak to average predictor of expertise because the relationship depends heavily on the kind of experience people have.
Some people do the same things over and over without honest feedback, new challenges, or deep reflection. Their understanding, knowledge, and expertise plateau early in their tenure because their experience is routine.
Repeating the same practices over a long period doesn’t necessarily translate into new learnings.
For example, researchers studying physicians found that accumulated years of experience did not reflect improved performance or knowledge beyond what was learned during medical school, unless that experience was complex and full of unique challenges.
The physicians with the greatest mastery were those who saw a high variety of cases and learned to adapt their behavior to changing contexts.
In another example, race car drivers with fewer years of racing often possess far greater expertise and skill than many of their more tenured peers. Studies confirm that deliberate training, feedback, and continuous refinement are much stronger predictors of expertise for drivers.
Years of performing even a complex task at an average level do not translate to true expertise, much less mastery.
The lesson for leaders is not to abandon experience as an important signal, but to dig into a person’s experience to learn what expertise has actually been acquired from it.
Good leaders are highly curious about what challenges people have faced and how they have overcome them, what deliberate practices they have created to improve their skills, and what tough feedback they have received along the way. The breadth and variety of the situations they have encountered are also essential to scrutinize.
The key takeaway is that two people with the same tenure can differ tremendously in actual expertise. Leaders must explore the difference.
Is it 20 years of experience, or two weeks of experience over 20 years? The answer requires careful inquiry and a rejection of the notion that experience alone distinguishes expertise or wisdom.
