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Here are my core beliefs about leadership development.

If it's to be, it's up to thee. You may get lucky and be in a company that helps you. But your leadership development is up to you. Not your company. Not a coach. Not your mother. You.

Leadership is an apprenticeship trade. Most of what you learn about leadership will be learned on the job. Your challenge is to find ways to accelerate that learning and make it more productive.

You'll find a good overview of how this can work in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. I reviewed it on this blog. A book that will give you the same kind of overview, but from a biographical perspective is 19 Stars: A Study in Military Character and Leadership.

What you can pull out of both of these is that there are several factors that go into making success. I list them as ability, developmental assignments, deliberate improvement, coaching, hard work, family support, and luck.

Strengths and weakness are natural parts of who you are. In general, you are likely to have a more satisfying and successful leadership career if you seek to build on your strengths and find ways to make your weaknesses irrelevant.

Strengths are not skills. You will need to be constantly developing new skills. The book, The Leadership Pipeline, offers a good overview of what you will need at different levels in a large organization.

A great deal of your growth will happen on developmental assignments. Some of those will be permanent assignments. Others will be temporary. But with each one, there will be new learning and growth.

Sometimes those assignments will be what Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas named "crucibles." Those are times of turbulence and profound tension. Then the struggle is the greatest, but the learning and growth possibilities are also great. Even when an assignment is not a crucible, it still will challenge you to learn new things and develop new skills.

Marshall Goldsmith's excellent What Got You Here Won't Get You There has great advice on the importance of ongoing skill development. As you move up the ladder or into new developmental assignments, weaknesses and skill deficits that weren't important before will become the focus of your development.

That's when what I call "deliberate improvement" is important. Deliberate improvement includes deliberate practice.

Deliberate improvement is deliberate because you choose and work at thing that will make you better and more likely to succeed. The improvement comes from feedback.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Feedback makes it possible to learn and to do things better next time. You can provide your own feedback. You can get feedback from those around you, especially bosses, mentors and coaches.

In general, the more feedback the better. But there's a catch. Feedback that doesn't result in improved action is just conversation.

Deliberate improvement has three parts. You try to do or learn something. Feedback tells you how you're doing. You use that feedback to guide your learning or action. An excellent overview of this process is in the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.

That's hard work. The psychologists who study personal development seem to have agreed that it takes 10,000 to 20,000 hours to master a domain. They suggest it takes at least ten years.

We're not talking about just putting in time. We're talking about the deliberate improvement cycle of trying, feedback, and adjustment. Without that you don't have 10 years experience. You just have one year's experience repeated ten times.

The fact is that hard work is the one controllable variable in success. The successful people I know all work hard. They work hard at delivering results where they are. They concentrate on contribution. And they work hard on deliberate improvement.

It's that hard work, learning from the work itself, and deliberate improvement that help you exploit your luck. When opportunity shows up and raps on your door, all that hard work is what makes you ready to answer my mother's favorite question: "What good can we make of this?"

That brings back to the idea of leadership as an apprentice trade. Your challenge is to reap the greatest learning and development you can from each opportunity.

Leadership is not a straightforward set of challenges like those offered by playing a golf course or practicing clarinet fingering. It is a complex human art that is practiced in a dynamic environment.

In his excellent book, Crucibles of Leadership, Robert Thomas points out that leadership is an art where practice and learning are intertwined. We're aware of the learning and doing at once. We learn from the doing and attempt to do what we've learned.

The art of taking control of your own leadership development is using your hard work and deliberate improvement to prepare for the opportunities and challenges that will come. Then you can seize the opportunities and soar to meet the challenges.