Jim Tressel, coach of the top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes, has a mantra about practicing that he constantly proclaims and every one of his players believes-“Our goal,” he tells his players and coaches, “is to become better men and better players every day.” How does this happen in work and life?
We are learning that it would be incorrect to say that natural talent is integral to great success. Even though Tressel brings in outstanding recruits, the real secret to sustained individual and team success, he says, is painful and demanding practice and hard work.
What it is that makes athletes like Tiger Woods great? Many assume that Tiger has a one-in-a-billion talent. In other words, you’ve got it-or you don’t. Well, it turns out that it’s not that simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. You are not a born great golfer or CEO or investor or leader. Studies indicate that you will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. The good news is that your abundance or lack of a natural gift is irrelevant-talent indiscriminately applied has little or nothing to do with greatness.
The most important factor to consider is what great performers do to lift themselves out of the sea of mediocrity. We have all observed that in virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly, and then stop developing completely. Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? What do they do differently?
The first major discovery is that nobody is great without a specific kind of focused work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen that way. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established that researchers call it the “ten-year rule.”
So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough either for many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing? The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” In BUILT TO LEAD parlance, we call this “purposeful practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results, and involves high levels of repetition.
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times, however, with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80% of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day-that’s deliberate practice. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance. Jack Nicklaus never hit a single practice shot without an overarching purpose in mind.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age-18 months-and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.
The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of purposeful practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business, especially the skills it takes to become a great leader?
It’s all about how you do what you’re already doing-you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. Geoff Colvin (What It Takes To Be Great, Fortune, October 30, 2006) makes five suggestions for purposeful practice at work:
Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
As you do the task, focus on what’s happening and why you’re doing it the way you are.
After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary. Feedback is the breakfast of high-performers.
Continually build mental models of your situation-your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.
Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work. We want to give individuals and teams the opportunity to fail together-and learn to recover from our mistakes together.
Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development Chief Steve Kerr says, “It’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.”
The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they will coast to fame and riches if they find their natural talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up.
Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone on your team. That’s what BUILT TO LEAD is all about. Together we improve by purposeful practice.
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