WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT CREATING ELITE PERFORMANCE

What if your ability to learn a skill was 1% better? Over your lifetime the level of improvement this would make on your life would compound as you applied it to the acquisition of many different skills. This is what can be achieved through deliberate practice.

Similar to how simplified nutritional strategies are the ones that reach viral status, Malcolm Gladwell simplified the research into deliberate practice and popularised the 10,000-hour benchmark for elite performance.

Sure, that level of experience is going to be beneficial for any type of elite performance, but it is not just how much you practice, but how you do it. Deliberate practice is the pursuit of improvement via well-defined, specific goals and targeted areas of expertise.

The executive, when trying to establish a high-performance environment must consider are they teaching their team to learn a skill 1% better? Take a look at the comparison below of how to practice or deliberate practice can be applied to a skill like presenting:

PRACTICE

• Start with a general idea of the presentation style that is needed
• Do an online course, role-play with team members
• Practice until skills are at an acceptable level
• Get feedback from team leader, practice more and continue improving

DELIBERATE PRACTICE

• Start with a general idea of the presentation style that is needed
• Do an online course, role-play with team members
• Practice until skills are at an acceptable level
• Get a coach who can set specific targets and tailor practice to improve specific areas (e.g. body language, pace, and timing)
• Develop a way to measure improvement, by creating the different domains of a successful presentation, progressively make each domain. Track progress constantly.
• Create positive channels for feedback so that modifications are continuous (like learning how to assess the needs of an audience and adjust your presentation to match their need)
• Develop a definition of excellent performance: what to do in various situations, how to respond to objections, when to take risks and try new things.
• The coach designs training sessions to achieve maximum effort and concentration (constantly setting the challenge just beyond their skill level).
• Learn how to self-assess and create a mental visualisation, so they feel in charge and able to exploit opportunities to interact with the audience.
• Learn how to develop their own training sessions to elicit maximum effort and concentration, acknowledging physical and mental limits and learn to use self-assessment to address weaknesses.

Tiger Woods never considered himself especially talented at golf. What is father Earl, knowingly or unknowingly, instilled in him from an early age where the principles of deliberate practice? Tiger would routinely practice all of his shots on the driving range, constantly measuring his performance, but what he enjoyed the most was placing his ball in the most difficult of positions, amongst the trees, always with the aim to make par.

The magic occurs somewhere in this process once the wins pile upon wins, the hard work that it takes to acquire the skill then becomes particularly fulfilling. A passion develops when learning becomes self-directed.

The skills that interest your team members you must let the individual decide. But what executives can do is set them up for success by creating the right environment so that they can master the art of practice.