It’s a phenomenon you see all too often on the ski slopes. In fact, it’s not out of place to suggest that the vast majority of recreational skiers are perfectly competent, but little more than that. They are capable of navigating their way down most slopes, as long as conditions are good. The tells of a merely competent skier are always there, however, not least in the way that their upper body will move far too much, and the hesitation they show on steeper slopes. When things get a bit bumpy (during or just after fresh snowfall), what technique they have quickly falls apart.
That this should be the case owes itself to our natural impatience to learn fast, and to learn just enough to make ourselves competent in something. Of doing just enough. Beyond that, there is a tendency to view further formal instruction as a chore, a waste of time (not least when it comes to an activity such as skiing, which is expensive). Why throw away a week’s holiday improving your technique when it’s much more fun simply remaining competent and doing your own thing? It’s why the best skiers are those who took up the sport young, when ski school was a parent-mandated obligation.
For those skiers who do persevere with instruction even when they are already broadly competent, the rewards are many. The ability to ski well (and elegantly) on any slope, to ski off-piste, to ski fast. Far too few decide that the rewards are worthwhile, however, especially those of a certain age with a disdain for instruction from others who might be younger.
Why are we so afraid of improving our skills, or learning new ones, the older we get? It’s a phenomenon that is all too common in business too.
The parallels are almost embarrassing in their precision. The middle manager who stopped attending conferences once they got promoted. The salesperson who has made the same pitch for a decade, immune to feedback, baffled by their declining close rate. The executive whose last genuine attempt at self-improvement involved a two-day leadership retreat in 2019. The average employee attends fewer hours of training after 40 and is less likely to start an optional course. It is not so much laziness as what psychologists now call the ‘peak competency trap’: once we have built an identity around what we can do, we instinctively avoid the humiliation of being bad at something new. Our appetite for risk narrows just as our comfort zone widens.
The brain’s excuse
There is, to be fair, some neuroscience behind this. Research at MIT has identified a brain circuit critical for maintaining the motivation to learn, one that becomes harder to activate as we age. “As we age, it’s harder to have a get-up-and-go attitude toward things,” notes Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT. But the neuroscience is rather less damning than the excuse it provides. Skill decline is only present in those who do not use their skills much at work or at home, according to longitudinal research published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research. The brain, it turns out, is rather more accommodating than most people give it credit for. Use it and it performs; park it in cruise control and it obliges just as readily.
The costs, in business terms, are not trivial. Some 74 per cent of workers feel they are not achieving their full potential due to a lack of development opportunities, but this framing rather flatters us. The real scandal is how many workers are not achieving their full potential because they have simply decided not to bother.The number of adult learners in Britain fell by 47 per cent between 2010-11 and 2022-23, a collapse that the Learning and Work Institute has linked directly to a shortage of qualifications and skills in the workforce. Companies are spending ever larger sums trying to fill that gap (global workplace training is now a 400 billion US dollars industry) whilst simultaneously watching much of that investment evaporate. Only 25 per cent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe that training measurably improved performance.
Sharpening your edges
The good news, for those willing to hear it, is that the rewards of pushing past competency are as real in the boardroom as on the black run. Learners who set career goals engage with learning four times more than those who don’t, according to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, which sounds obvious until you reflect on how few people set any such goals at all after their thirties. The research on cognitive ageing tells a similar story: older adults show significant cognitive benefits from learning, provided they have the opportunity to do so, according to work published in Scientific American. The ceiling is far higher than most people assume.
None of this requires the reinvention of oneself, or the sort of disruptive self-improvement regime beloved of productivity influencers. Any ski instructor will tell you that the difference between a competent skier and a genuinely good one often comes down to a few sessions of targeted, uncomfortable work, making conscious what has become unconscious and lazy. Business is no different. The professional who commits to deliberate practice in a weak area, who seeks out a mentor younger than themselves without wincing, who treats instruction as an asset rather than an affront, tends to pull clear of their peers in ways that are neither mysterious nor accidental.
The merely competent skier, wedged safely in the middle of the piste, is perfectly fine on a clear day. But give them something more challenging, such as a change in conditions, an unfamiliar slope, and their limitations show quickly. And in business, as on the mountain, the weather has a way of changing without too much notice.
Photo: Dreamstime.
