Vincent Van Gogh couldn't find a model to paint.
It was winter. It was cold. And the models he wanted to paint were adamant about staying indoors or finding warmer locales.
So, he did the next best thing. He found an artist, Gustave Dore, whose work he admired and created the masterpiece you see here, modeled after Dore's original.
If copying and pasting was good enough for Van Gogh, why can't it be good enough for us, too?
---
If you were struggling with a problem at work or in your personal life, what would be the first strategy you would try to fix it?
Chances are, like many people, it might not occur to you that phoning a friend or acquaintance who has thought through something similar might be just the thing you need.
Katy Milkman, professor at UPenn’s Wharton Business School and author of “How to Change,” found that simply prompting people to think of a friend or acquaintance they could learn from when faced with a challenge or problem led them to a host of beneficial outcomes: People worked out more, and college students improved their GPAs.
But why? There’s a host of reasons, according to Annie Murphy Paul, who summarized the root causes of Milkman's findings like this:
New behaviors are more appealing when we learn from observation than from instruction because seeing those behaviors in action raises our own expectations about what's possible.
When we use strategies from people we know, we're more likely to put those strategies into practice because we trust the source they came from.
It's likely we share common traits with the people we seek out to imitate, which makes what they're doing seem all the more possible for us. Since we also see a part of ourselves in them, we also become more motivated to change because we see their success as attainable.
So, how can we use this strategy ourselves to get better?
---
Here's Paul's step-by-step guide for finding someone to learn from:
Identify a peer who does something well that you want to get better at. Choose someone who is more proficient than you are, but not someone totally out of your league.
Frame the request as a compliment: “I really admire the way you ________. Could you share with me how you do that?”
Ask for concrete and specific tactics — of the kind you would not have thought of on your own.
If the first strategy you’re given doesn’t work for you, keep asking around.
How could you foster this behavior on the team you lead? Here are three methods to try:
For the team you lead, think about how you can build collaboration by sharing this research and making it a habit to prompt your people regularly to learn from and imitate one another. You'll help foster a culture of collaboration and trust on the team, and people will get better at their jobs. Win-win.
In team meetings, talk about how you copy and pasted from someone else on the team or in the organization. You'll both model an effective leadership development technique and signal to your team that they should do the same.
In 1-on-1s, when one of your direct reports brings you a challenge, ask: "Who is someone on our team you might ask for advice and strategies with this?" If they can't think of someone, have someone in your backpocket to suggest. Then, follow up with them the following week to figure out what they learned.
As Katy Milkman writes in her book, “You’re likely to go further faster if you find the person who’s already achieving what you want to achieve and copy and paste their tactics than if you simply let social forces influence you through osmosis.”
It worked for Van Gogh. I bet it'll work for us, too.
---
New posts come out every Wednesday and Saturday by 8 am EST. To receive an email for each new post, fill out the form at the top of the blog here.
If you're already subscribed and not getting new post emails, check your spam folder and then click on "not spam" on one of the email notifications.
Comments