Getting Real about Deliberate Practice and Leadership Development
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Deliberate practice is the current magic stone of training and development. Articles, blog posts, books, and pundits have anointed the technique as the key to successful development. But there are problems with that assessment.
Not everything that's deliberate is deliberate practice. In his book, Talent is Overrated, Goeff Colvin uses Jerry Rice as an example of someone who improved through deliberate practice. But most of what's described is hard work on conditioning. That's laudable and effective but it's not deliberate practice.
Several commentators have latched onto Sully Sullenberger's career as an example of deliberate practice. Sullenberger was certainly deliberate in developing his skills and pursuing his interests. But most of what he did though both laudable and deliberate was not deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice has three parts. You need a specific task that you want to do better. You need a way to measure your performance on the task so that you get immediate feedback. And you need multiple trials so that you can use the feedback to improve performance.
There's no magic to this. It's concentrated hard work on improving performance, usually in areas of weakness.
Deliberate practice is an excellent tool to use if you want achieve excellence in a specific area. It's hard work. It requires discipline.
But deliberate practice should be only one tool in your development toolkit. The trick is understanding when to use it.
The research than underlies deliberate practice is now almost twenty years old. But it only gives us insight into a narrow range of domains. Specifically, researchers have studied music, sports, chess, exceptional memory, professional writing, and mathematical calculation.
All of those domains include specific skills that can be practiced and improved. Feedback, for the most part, is unambiguous. Practice can be surgically separated from performance.
But none of the research addresses complex human interactions in a dynamic environment. That's what leadership is.
Matters are not helped by Anders Ericsson's assertion in his Harvard Business Review article that: "deliberate practice can be adapted to developing leadership expertise. The classic example is the case method, taught by many business schools, which presents students with real-life situations that require action."
He's right, but only in part. That can be dangerous.
You can learn from case study. But what you learn is to analyze a situation and decide on a course of action based on what's there. That's only part of the game, and for most leaders, it's the easy part. There are significant ways in which case study differs from real life.
In a case study, you don't have to dig up any outside information. There are no surprises, good or bad. No one says, "I was talking to my neighbor playing golf on Saturday. His company uses a supplier in Malaysia that might be able to do what we want."
In a case study, you don't have to convince people up the chain to fit your new ideas into the budget. You don't have go to the board for approval. Remember Carly Fiorina and HP? Most observers would say that she got the strategy part right. But she had problems with the board.
In a case study, you don't have to implement the decision. You decide and it's done. At Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee had the decision part right. He got in trouble on implementation.
Lee's analysis was that the Confederates needed to take command of the heights south of Gettysburg. He directed his II Corp commander, Richard Ewell to take those heights "if practicable."
Stonewall Jackson would have interpreted that order as "take the heights if there's any possible way." But Ewell, commanding II Corps since Jackson's death two months before, was a more cautious commander. He interpreted Lee's order as "take the heights if you're sure you can do so." In the real world, you can't divorce analysis from implementation or from the personalities involved.
In a case study, there's no feedback. And, feedback is a key component of deliberate practice and development. But in real life you decide and implement and then you adjust.
Deliberate practices is not magic. It is a proven tool for skill development in specific areas. But you want to develop as a leader, there are many other things you should be doing as well.
Categories: leadership development,Career Development,Personal Development
Hi Wally - great post! I'd be very interested to hear about the other tools that should be used for developing leaders. Is this another planned post? I'll throw a couple out there for consideration: exposure, opportunity to observe, opportunity to take risks/fail and start over.
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You must be reading my To Do list, Amy. Tomorrow I plan to post some ideas about the components of an effective personal development program based on the research I've read. Stay tuned. Thanks for stopping by.
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Wally -
I really agree that deliberate practice is and can be only one part of leadership development. As you've pointed out, it works for some of the simpler building blocks, but not as well for the real-time, complex, unique challenges.
Here's a music analogy: I was a trunpet major in college, and I did hours of deliberate practice every day: playing scales for fluency and breath control, working on my tone, attack, volume. It was a perfect approach for those things.
But when I got into a concert situation, especially playing in an ensemble, those things I'd spent so many hours on were just the foundation. That real-life situation required a whole new set of skills and capabilities, many of which required quick intuitive leaps and moment-to-moment physical and mental adjustments.
You and I have seen lots of management panaceas come and go -- I suspect this is just the latest...
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What a great analogy. Thanks for adding it to the discussion.
One day when I was in the Marines, I came upon a magazine photographer. He was sitting on the ground with his eyes closed, running through an exercise where he set the focal length and shutter speed on his Nikon by feel. Since I knew that he was fairly successful, I asked why he was doing that.
He said that he worked on the basic mechanics so he didn't have to think about them when he saw a shot. All he wanted to concentrate on was the image while his hands did everything necessary without conscious thought.
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Actually erika this further proves DP is fact. You started down the path of practice but were expecting preformance at an e pert level. Before your newly wired brain was at a stage when expert levels of performance were potentially viable.
DP please read the full details and cross refernce
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You've hit the nail on the head when you say that deliberate practice is only part of it. Its also reflection, mimicry and modelling, and an ability to read relationships and others. For me, the biggest stumbling block in leadership development is emotional baggage, with closed mindsets in second place.
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Thanks for weighing in with that, Chris. I like the word mimicry. It really fits when you're talking about role models. It's part of the whole concept of Emotional Intelligence which is important but, it seems to me, hard to teach.
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Thanks for weighing in with that, Chris. I like the word mimicry. It really fits when you're talking about role models. It's part of the whole concept of Emotional Intelligence which is important but, it seems to me, hard to teach.
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One could also argue that deliberate practice involves honing not only your craft, but auxilliary skills like the art of negotiation, how to befriend and persuade people, how to think quick on your feet, even how to empathize. For many, these crucial skills may not come naturally, but can be developed through study and practice.
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You're absolutely right, Hayli. And those skillsets don't lend themselves to the strict terms of deliberate practice. That's why I like to use a broader term, "deliberate improvement."
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Leadership Development and its Best Practices seem to be indispensable for every business success. For my Leader Performance improvement I was grateful for advice given by Med Yones, the Finance Expert. His paper provides managers and leaders with the necessary information to implement a cure for poor organizational performance and its negative workplace politics. The paper addresses the following subject areas: 1. Leadership and Performance; 2. Strategic Alignment; 3. Performance Diagnoses Checklist; 4. Bad Politics and Performance Risks; 5. Treatment Challenges; 6. Best Practices for Curing Bad Politics.
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Specific task and way to measure your performance and multiple trials are part of a person's deliberation. Multiple trials to measure the performance of your performance is the most important thing. We must understand some basic principles first. We need feedbacks at every step. without feedbacks our decision making process cannot be complete. These multiple trials will provide the much needed feedbacks.
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I would argue that Sully Sullenberger performance was most likely effected by deliberate practice.
Pilots spend tremendous amount of time practicing in a flight simulator. Spending time simulating emergency situations and calmly working through a checklists and working to get out of it. These simulators give immediate feedback.
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I think that's an argument that makes sense. You can sure conclude that airline pilot simulator training meets the standards for "deliberate practice." The judgment hinges on what "frequent" repetitions means.
Whether it meets the technical definition of "deliberate practice" or not, it's still both deliberate and practice in the common meanings of those terms. And whatever you call it, you're absolutely right that it was part of the reason why Sullenberger was able to respond as he did.
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