Grow and lead for all of us

Leadership development

More deliberate practice for managers, not less

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Professor Phil Rosenzweig of IMD thinks that deliberate practice—using feedback and correction to improve skills—can can help executives perform better. I couldn’t agree more.

However, he cautions against applying the laws of deliberate practice too widely. “We do ourselves a disservice,” he writes at strategy-business.com, “by implying that we can practice our way to success in all circumstances.”

I beg to differ.

The reality I see in organizations today is not too much deliberate practice, but too little. How many managers do you know who spend excessive amounts of time practicing new skills, asking others for feedback, and reflecting on how to improve? How many are applying the laws of deliberate practice to situations that don’t call for them and therefore producing negative business results?

These problems don’t exist in any of the organizations where I’ve spent time over the past twenty years. In these organizations, managers spend 99 percent of their time in performance mode. Intentionally practicing managerial skills, reflecting, and getting feedback  are, at best, afterthoughts. [Read more…] about More deliberate practice for managers, not less

Why do books about talent ignore management?

Why do books about talent ignore management?

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outliersThere is a big gap in the recent literature about developing talent through conscious practice: minimal attention on leadership or managerial skills. For example, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers describes how the Beatles and Bill Gates became extraordinary at their technical crafts by practicing repeatedly over time. The book popularized the 10,000 hour rule named by psychologist Anders Ericsson. Similarly, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code and Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated reveal the rules of deep practice and deliberate practice, respectively, mostly through the examples of athletes, musicians, and teachers. On an individual level, they talk about breaking skills into chunks, practicing the chunks slowly, and correcting mistakes along the way. On an organizational or cultural level, they talk about apprenticing young people to masters and igniting talent hotbeds that inspire them to commit to long-term deliberate practices.

This is exciting and powerful stuff. Unfortunately, none of these books talk in depth about how to apply deliberate talent practice to management or leadership. OK, I lied: the Epilogue to The Talent Code contains two pages on business, specifically Toyota’s use of kaizen events to continuously improve processes and create high quality products. But, other than this, there is very little about the skills of management. Why the gap? [Read more…] about Why do books about talent ignore management?

Learning to lead

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The challenge lies in making use of on-the-job experiences. This means finding better ways to identify developmentally significant jobs, to move the right people to them and to help talented people learn from them. How well these things are done is far more important than how formal or elegant the procedures are.

—The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, 1988

In 1988, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published an important study. Important because of the insights it contained, and important because it has largely been ignored for the past 25 years. CCL interviewed successful executives to better understand how they got better at leading. These were in-depth interviews, the kind that allow participants to tell stories about their experiences and reveal what they had learned.

The researchers found that the primary way successful executives learned was from on-the-job experience. Not training, not books, but the work itself. Hence the title of their book, The Lessons of Experience. [Read more…] about Learning to lead