Can You Become a VP R&D Unicorn Applying the 10,000 Hours Rule?
The startup scene is a very stressful environment. It’s not for everyone. If you’re not being promoted every couple of years, pivoting into a new emerging technology as soon as it launches or exponentially growing your team, you may be blaming yourself for not trying hard enough. Don’t.
There were times when I felt that way. I built my career thinking it was a sprint. It’s not. I’ve seen so many people around me celebrating a premature promotion that sidetracked any chance at excelling at their current role. I’ve seen so many developers moving on to the next trendy technology before really mastering the language and frameworks they are currently using to deliver well designed and written code.
If you want to be the best at anything you should adopt the mindset of a MARATHON RUNNER.
VP R&D-ing is a craft. Like any other craft, learning and mastering it takes time. Lots of it. But it’s not just the time you invest. You can play tennis four straight hours a day over ten years and still stay in kids’ league. Like many of us who tried playing tennis “professionally”.
There are many elements in learning a new craft. If there is a shortcut to become an exceptional, one of its kind, VP R&D unicorn, I have yet to find it. It may take you years of learning and sharpening your skills before you truly feel you have mastered them all.
The 10,000 Hours Rule
The 10,000-hour was invented by Malcolm Gladwell and derived from the work of the Swedish Professor of Psychology K. Anders Ericsson, who studied the way people become peak performers in their fields focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice.
According to Gladwell, deliberately practicing and investing 10,000-hours in learning a craft will likely make you a peak performer and a world-class expert in your field. Bill Gates, Einstein and The Beatles are just few examples of peak performers Gladwell, author of Outliers, talks about in his book.
In contract to “regular” learning, where one may repeatedly perform the same exercise over and over with intention to improve, deliberate practice requires you to constantly get out of your comfort zone, set clear goals, and rigorously work towards them through constant small incremental improvement steps and concise feedback loop.
10,000 hours is an approximation, a magic number resulted from the numerous experiments and observations done in various fields. Thus, certain fields may require a lower number while other fields may need to invest a higher number than 10,000 hours.
As a VP R&D craftsman, you may be thinking you have already invested those 10,000 hours over the passing years; you have been drowning yourself in work, putting in 164-work hours a month, 12-months a year, over the passing ~5.1 years, but you haven’t turned into that unique unicorn, one of a kind, best VP R&D in your industry.
Don’t get alarmed.
Even with a clear notion of what deliberate practice is, none of us can deliberately practice 9-hours a day, day after day, 12 months a year, year after year. At best, we can have 90-mins a day of deliberate practice which results in mastering our practice over a period of 10–20 years, according to Gladwell.
So how do you break the mold? Are there any shortcuts you can apply to the 10,000-hours rule?
The truth is that the path to become a true craftsman in your field, and especially if you want to be one of your kind, part of an elite group, requires you to stride through the long rocky journey of blood, sweat and tears.
Having said that, I would like to let you in on a little secret that can drastically boost this process for you.
The Feedback Loop
Every job requires different qualifications. The VP R&D job description has common qualifications we all are quite familiar with: leadership, being tech-savvy, having good planning skills, architecting, prioritization, risk management, people management, negotiation and few more.
In fact, becoming a true VP R&D craftsman requires you to master a long list of micro-skills outside of these straightforward qualifications. Such lists may include additional micro-skills which are less obvious and rarely showing up on the job description, such as:
- Managing effective and productive meetings
- Interviewing
- Building autonomous and independently strong teams with junior and less experienced leads
- Building autonomous and independently strong teams with senior leads who have different expectations from you (vs. junior leads)
- Implementing organizational changes with minimal resistance
- Professionally letting go of employees when time comes
- Conveying direct fair and honest personal feedback to your directs
And many more.
Mastering every micro-skill through trial and error without any clear feedback loop may take you years and still not get you where you need be. Even with clear and measurable goals reviewed on a quarterly basis by your manager, it may still take you time to fine tune your managing skills and step up your game.
Both Ericsson and Gladwell have found that the feedback loop is a recurring significant element over the course of elite peak performers’ life. Direct, honest and constructive feedback identifying your weaknesses can drastically boost your growth and allow you to improve those weaknesses.
Constantly working through the feedback-loop and applying small incremental improvement steps is the key to perfection of every micro-skills as a path to true VP R&D mastery.
Here are few forms of the feedback loops you should consider.
Employee Feedback
When was the last time you have requested feedback from your directs? And please, don’t count those accidental 2-minute side-talk encounters with one of your employees when you were on your way to another meeting, and multiple people sidetracked you by approaching at the same time. When was the last time you intentionally asked for direct and honest feedback and allocated enough time to hear it through ? It doesn’t have to be official. A casual, “Hey, I felt like I lost the crowd while presenting my view-point of Sprint planning to the team. Do you mind helping me out to figure what was missing?” with one of the meeting participants is all it takes.
Easier said than done. I know.
It requires you to open up and admit (first, to yourself, then to others) there are things you are not doing well enough. Things, you may have worked hard to hide and make less obvious in your day to day act. Your weaknesses.
Some workplaces have a well-established feedback culture in which sending such invitations for feedback is more acceptable. In those places, people are less ego-driven and more open for constructive feedback. If that is already the case where you work, you are in luck, and things will be easier for you.
In other workplaces, where the organization is less accustomed to these kind of feedback requests, you may think that opening-up and directly asking for feedback weakens you — “I may be putting a target on my back by requesting feedback from my directs” — On the contrary, you’ll be amazed the kind of impact being authentic and open will have on your directs. Finally, they will feel that they, too, can open up to you and share their weaknesses with you (and ask for your help in improving).
Some feedback request examples from your directs may be around a recent meeting you drove and went totally out of control leaving everyone baffled. Or you sense a frustration is starting to build-up around a decision you have made and you need to better understand what you have missed in the process. Or you want to better answer the expectations of your reports asking them directly.
Peers Feedback
Peers are another excellent source of feedback that can help you boost your learning process and improve your weaknesses towards your 10,000-hours goal. As a VP R&D, your peers may be other VPs and Directors managing other departments in your organization, such as Product, Support, Customer Success, Sales and Marketing.
Since you interact with them on a daily basis, they constantly witness how you perform and how you engage in different activities and situations. They see when things go well and how you react during challenging times. Most importantly, they are also a great source of indirect, unofficial and non-intimidating channels for feedback from your directs.
A culture in which peer feedback is nurtured allows leaders to openly share both successes and failures with peers, welcoming feedback that can help everyone become better leaders.
Start nurturing such a culture by opening up to your peers and asking for feedback. For example, you can ask for comments on your personal and team’s annual goals. That will also nurture a culture of transparency. People will appreciate such questions and may reciprocate with sharing their own annual goals. You can also share with your colleagues a Powerpoint draft before presenting it to the larger group. By doing that, you signal to your peers their opinions count and receive immediate and unfiltered feedback that can help you build a stronger message.
Building Communities
Communities come in many forms and shapes and are another excellent source of feedback. Some people regularly attend Meetups while also actively engaging in various online Q&A forums. Others may go to conferences and hear from industry leaders about latest technologies, methodologies or case-studies and lesson learned.
Rarely, can you receive feedback that can personally help you grow. Primarily, these communities lack this aspect and will focus more on a specific topic with a very clear agenda.
If you really want personal feedback that will drastically boost your 10,000-hour work plan, I suggest taking a different approach. I recently joined a forum of VP R&Ds from the local hi-tech scene. We regularly meet and tackle various dilemmas we all encounter on a day-to-day basis. Not those theoretical dilemmas you may have listened to on a podcast or read about in a blog post. I’m talking about real work dilemmas challenging each of us every day.
Each VP R&D introduces a dilemma to the broader closed and discrete forum. When presenting, the VP R&D will talk about his or her thoughts regarding the actions taken thus far, internal team constraints, challenges and anything else that can add value and shed more light on the overall picture. Then, through a delicate, honest and unfiltered discussion, the forum will provide the VP R&D feedback about how the situation was handled, what could have been done differently, what seemed to be the right approach and what additional steps should be taken to resolve the situation.
I can’t stress enough how productive such forums can be. With the right audience and the right setting for discrete, open, egoless and honest discussions, you can dramatically boost your personal growth plan.
A Mentor
Personal trainers are common these days. There is no need for any convincing here. Everybody knows that if you want to achieve your sports goals — lifting heavier weights, running longer or losing weight — a personal trainer can get you there faster. Much faster.
Why should it be any different with a VP R&D?
It shouldn’t. An experienced mentor can drastically shorten your path and provide you with tailored, actionable feedback that will not only help you make the right decisions, but will also help you avoid irreversible mistakes that take you few steps back every time.
Such a mentor can be someone with proven track records from your industry that you already know and truly appreciate. It may also be a great reference you received from a dependable colleague. By being open and authentic with what you ask from that individual, you will be surprised by how many people are willing to genuinely help without anything in return.
You can also turn to someone who coaches professionally for a living. While there are plenty of great ones, make sure you have done your research while also taking the time to talk with references. It may come at a cost, but consider the tremendous immediate value you will be getting.
Consider this approach as if you are borrowing the 10,000-hours from someone who has already achieved Mastery in your field.
During your journey, you may also need to change mentors. A personal trainer that took you from couch to 5K may not be the right trainer for you in case you are training for a half-marathon. Similarly, a mentor that was right for you when you were running a small startup team of 10 engineers may not be the right one for you after you assumed responsibility of 40 engineers following an acquisition.
What next?
How can I put all of this valuable feedback into action and improve faster?
The feedback you receive by your directs, peers, community and mentor are all part of the Measure element of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Based on all of this you need to decide:
- What worked well that you want to preserve?
- What didn’t work well that you need to fine-tune?
- What didn’t work well that you need to pivot and try something totally different?
This is a long and demanding ongoing process — one you should be prepared for — and you should necessarily expect your work life to change overnight. On the contrary. You should expect small and incremental changes that gradually and gently step-up your game.
Does it worth the effort? Absolutely!
After all, there is no point in playing just for the sake of playing. Every time you sense that irritating itch that makes you uncomfortable in your sit and out of your comfort-zone, that’s when the universe calls and tells you to lean-in as hard as you can and take one step forward into mastery.
Thanks so much for reading! If you liked this article 👏 and want to step-up your VP R&D game even further, FOLLOW ME on Medium or on Twitter and get even more of the The VP’s dilemma insights as soon as they come out.
Feel free to leave me a comment or contact me at @raneitan. I take the time to closely read every comment and answer any question asked.
