Leadership is a Sport?

Leadership is often referred to as an art and a science, but is it a sport? A sport is an organized, competitive, and skillful physical activity requiring commitment and fair play. Well, maybe it's not a sport... but, can it be practiced like a sport? One of the surprising findings from research on world-class performers is that the difference between the good and the great is in their brains -- not in physical abilities. It is a seemingly superhuman ability to process information that produces tennis players that know where their opponent's ball is going to land before the ball leaves the racket, firefighters who "know" the floor is about to collapse, but have no idea how they know and chess players that can play multiple opponents simultaneously - while blindfolded.

The Science of High-Level Performance
Experts don't know more, they know differently. If ALL world-class performance is a function of changes in the brain, can you develop leadership skills like an athlete develops sports skills? Anders Ericsson and others have been diligently pursuing the alchemy of excellence in their research on the acquisition of high-level of performance. Popular writers, such as Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, Geoff Colvin in Talent is Overrated and Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code have described the processes by which the extraordinary abilities of world-class performers are created. Created - not born. The research shows that the process is pretty much the same regardless of the domain of performance, be it sports, science, or occupations. Nearly all people who reach the highest levels of performance get there with 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice". Deliberate practice is effortful study which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. It is easy to see how a special practice method would apply to sports, games or arts -- we are used to thinking of practicing these things. But, does it apply to leadership?

Practicing Leadership
I have been teaching managers how to use deliberate practice for over three years. Not only can you use it to build leadership skills, but the practice can easily be done as part of your regular job duties. To use deliberate practice you need to break leadership down into a practicable segment, create a practice plan that you can repeat, and monitor your performance until you can execute that leadership skill perfectly. The Prodigy Method training provides leaders with these practice segments and techniques. But think about it - leadership training classes are full of processes and techniques (e.g., for problem-solving, giving feedback, making presentations, etc). It is these processes, and techniques that we master with deliberate practice. Check out prodigymethod.com to learn more about how to use deliberate practice for leadership skills and see some examples.

For most of us, deliberate practice is not about becoming a world champion. But, in today's world, I don't know anyone who couldn't benefit from learning faster and reaching a higher level of proficiency. Leadership may not be a sport, but the research on learning is clear -- you can practice it like athletes do and at least double or triple the speed of learning.

Deliberate Practice for Thinking Skills

It is easy to imagine using deliberate practice to improve your skills in sports, music, technical occupations, or even in observable leadership skills like listening or giving feedback, but what about thinking skills? Effective leadership is about analysis, judgment, decision-making and other cognitive functions. Can you use deliberate practice to improve these aspects of leadership?

The United States Army would say yes. They have used deliberate practice techniques to teach leaders adaptive thinking skills. They define adaptive thinking as the ability to respond effectively under complex and rapidly changing conditions when a multitude of events compete for the leader’s attention. Traditional training techniques are not very effective in teaching this skill because traditional training teaches processes and techniques but does not teach someone how to recognize which technique is appropriate for a particular situation.

The Army’s Think Like a Commander (TLAC) program is designed to teach officers how to recognize indicators that should be considered in making a decision regarding combat operations and tactics. The results of the training program are impressive. People trained showed a 700% improvement from the beginning of the training to the end in speed and accuracy of identifying critical indicators. Not only did the trainees’ performance during training improve, but those who were trained on the TLAC program outperformed, in some cases, experienced officers who had already been deployed to combat situations.

Experience Doesn't Guarantee Expertise

Just because someone has been performing a job or hobby for a long time doesn't mean that they are improving their skills. Ask any weekend golfer who has played for 20 years and barely improved at all over that time. Don't make fun of those weekend golfers (or any other group for that matter), the research evidence is VERY clear --length of time spent on a hobby or occupation does not necessarily improve performance. I don't want to scare you, but here are just a few of the occupations where length of experience is not necessarily related to performance -- physicans, clinical psychologists, computer programmers, financial advisors, physics professors and auditors.

I know you are thinking "That's not true, I have improved dramatically at my job over the years." Yes, you probably have. But, if you are typical, you have only improved for about the first two years in a new job and then plateaued at an acceptable, but not prodigious, level of performance. And that is not because you stopped trying. There is a quirk of brain development that stops our improvement. The best performers know how to overcome this natural ceiling on improvment. So what is related to performance? The best predictor of performance is the amount of time spent in deliberate practice.