The Art of Picking Someone's Brain

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For both the young and the young at heart, continued learning is key to keeping your skills sharp and your career on track. Your organization probably offers some form of formal training and, of course, there’s a whole world of resources out there for self-study, but one of the most powerful ways to learn is simply picking the brains of talented colleagues. Unfortunately though, simply asking someone to tell you everything they know rarely reaps rewards. So how can a knowledge-hungry employee successfully suck as much skill and wisdom as possible from the brains of colleagues? Harvard Business blogger Steven DeMaio recently shared a story of a brain picking session that worked well for him in the hopes it might guide others:

I have a colleague in publishing who works has a different but overlapping area of editorial expertise. Recently, instead of doing a bit of freelance work for her independently and having her interpret it later, I suggested that, as an experiment, I do it live with her on the phone.

On the call, I started to ask myself the same questions aloud that I would have asked alone in silence, commenting explicitly on each choice I made. She simply recorded my work quietly at first, but as she quickly became comfortable with the process, she began querying me as I went along and thereby refining my work in real time, rather than after the fact as she normally does. We eventually came to anticipate each other’s approaches so well that the process sped up as we progressed. Instead of my spending two hours and her spending a subsequent two, we spent a total of two together, each having gained insights that will improve my performance and hers in the future.

Besides saving themselves duplicate work and therefore time, DeMaio also benefited from seeing how his colleague’s mind works. “The real a-ha moments,” he says comes from those times when he can “witness a colleague’s thought processes in the raw, when she’s not in ‘collaboration mode’ but in her own mode.” So how can you put DeMaio’s insight to work for you? Presentations and group projects have value, he says, but to get an inside track on a smart mind in action, DeMaio suggests you “identify a task of moderate length that your colleague can comfortably observe while you think aloud.” It’s a simple idea, but could also be a powerful one. Has anyone out there tried anything similar?