5 Principles of Deliberate Leadership Practice
Lynn Harris
8-minute read
“We are what we repeatedly do.” i
Will Durant
Organisations invest considerable time, energy and money to select and develop good leaders. They do this out of enlightened self-interest - they know that much of their success is dependent on the quality of their leaders. The question explored in this article is: as an organisation and as a leader, are you getting a good return on this investment through adopting a practice mindset and creating deliberate leadership practice?
Practice vs Performance Mindsets
A mindset is a set of assumptions and beliefs that inform your behavior. To change your behavior, you likely need to change your mindset. As organisational leaders, if you don’t question your existing mindsets, you are unable to adapt to the rapidly changing world around you. For example, you could hold onto an unhelpful mindset of certainty, believing that it is important as a leader to know the answers and demonstrate to those you lead that you do. Alternatively, a more helpful mindset taps into the Power of Doubt, where you question your own assumptions, open your mind to alternative possibilities and seek out others to test your thinking, and in doing so encourage others to do the same.
Challenging and changing your mindsets can, however, be difficult. Mindsets are often so firmly held that you are unaware they exist and therefore do not think to question them. You then run the risk of doing what you have always done and becoming out of touch and irrelevant. To support your development as a leader, there are two mindsets that are particularly helpful to challenge - practice and performance.
A practice mindset is endemic in sports and the arts – educated in the arts, my son does not question the need to practice piano every day if he wants to improve; professional sports people devote countless hours of practice every day to stay at the top of their game. Practice is expected and formalized in sports and the arts – why not leadership?Instead, most organisations and leaders tend to favor a performance mindset.
“Everyone is trying to look good, display expertise, minimise and hide any mistakes or weaknesses, and demonstrate what they already know and can do well. In a culture of practice, in contrast, everyone is learning and growing.” iii
In reality, this is not an either/or situation. To learn and grow as leaders, practice must join performance as essential leadership mindsets. A practice mindset sees leadership as a life-long practice; a continual striving to be better, with no end point. It is a mindset not influenced by role or hierarchical position. Rather, it is an understanding that to be the best leader you can be requires continual adaptation and deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice
We know that becoming good at anything requires practice – a lot of practice! But not all practice is created equal.
“…not every type of practice leads to improved ability. You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.” iv
Deliberate Practice involves guidance and feedback from an experienced colleague, mentor or coach so that you can intentionally adjust, adapt and improve the skill or behavior you are practicing. 10,000 hours or 3,000 repetitions (depending on which research you read) is pointless if you are practicing poor or ineffective skills and behaviours. Deliberate practice can therefore be defined as ‘adapted repetition based on experienced guidance.’ Deliberate practice not only works because you practice the right things, it also works because repetition affects the inner workings of your brain. Essentially, repetition builds up the myelination of your neural pathways, making them faster and more efficient.v Over time, this enables you to embody a new behaviour or skill, such that it becomes something you can do without expending too much energy or having to think too much about it. Think how easy it is to drive a car or ride a bike as a result of repetition and deliberate practice. Also think how easy it is to do both these activities badly as a result of repeated poor practice. To embody effective 3 leadership skills and behaviors it makes sense to commit to deliberate leadership practice, supported by coaching and feedback.
Deliberate Leadership Practice
At the beginning of this article I posed the question ‘as an organisation and as a leader, are you getting a good return on investment through a practice mindset and deliberate leadership practice?’ Investing in any leadership development opportunity – whether it be a stretch assignment or a development program - is probably a waste of time and money unless you also make a commitment to deliberate leadership practice. This brings certain benefits:
“In naming what we’re doing ‘practice’ we signal that we’re experimenting, trying something on, working at improving. And we clarify that practice is what we’re supposed to be doing – trying hard at something to get better at it. We’re creating conditions in which we won’t feel pressure to demonstrate expertise, conditions that will allow us to experiment, that will allow us to gather feedback, that will help us learn.” vi
This seems obvious, but the discipline of practice isn’t easy. How many times have you gained awareness of a change you want to make, enthusiastically practiced it for a week or two, only to revert to your old behaviors, particularly when under pressure?
Adopting a practice mindset and following the 5 Principles of Deliberate Leadership Practice will considerably increase your chances of sustaining any mindset and behavioural change you choose to make, thereby producing a good return on investment for you and your organisation.
5 Principles of Deliberate Leadership Practice:
Self-disruption: “For any new behavior or way of being to become embedded and natural, you must first find a way to interrupt your automatic old behavior. “Without disruption, the best you can do is set up a new practice or behaviour alongside the old. This rarely works when you most need it to, because the older behaviour has been practiced for so much longer and is so much more automatic — it will nearly always takeover when you’re under any kind of pressure.” vii
Embark on any new leadership development opportunity prepared to deliberately disrupt your established ways of thinking and doing. Try something you have never done before and notice how you think and feel about it. Ask others to question and explore your assumptions. Make yourself uncomfortable and see what happens.
Mindset: Adopt a Leadership as Practice mindset. Know that you are signing up for a life-long practice to be the best leader you can be. Do not expect a stretch assignment or a leadership development program to be an end result in itself, but rather a catalyst and an opportunity to practice being an even better leader.
Emotional engagement: You must care about the mindset, skill or behavior that you choose to practice. If you don’t care you will be unable to maintain any kind of attention or consistency. Ask yourself the simple question, ‘why does this mindset, skill or 4 behavior matter to me?’ If you discover that you have no emotional engagement with it, choose something else to practice that does matter to you.
Attention and repetition: Attention attracts energy. Be intentional about what you choose to practice every day. Each morning, ask yourself the question, what am I practicing today or in this meeting or with this person e.g. a mindset, a skill, a way of being? Then practice, practice, practice until the mindset, skill or behaviour becomes part of who you are. And then practice something else.
Quality of practice: it’s pointless practicing the wrong things or practicing something unskilfully. You therefore need a coach or experienced colleague to set you on the right track and allies to help you along the way. Engage people who care about you by disclosing what you are practicing and ask for their support and challenge. Be specific about how they can help you and ask how you can help them in their own practices.
You don’t have to adhere to all 5 principles, but the more of them you can incorporate into your leadership practice, the more self-aware, adaptable and effective you will be. A good start is to ask yourself right now - What am I practicing today?
Lynn Harris is a founding partner with Leadership Mindset Partners https://www.leadershipmindsetpartners.com/
i Will Durant – American writer, historian and philosopher 1885-1981
ii Richard Strozzi-Heckler The Leadership Dojo. Build your foundation as an exemplary leader. Frog Books 2007
iii R. Kegan & L. Lahey An Everyone Culture. Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization.2016 Harvard Business School Publishing
iv K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406
v Annie Bosler and Don Greene. How to practice effectively…for just about anything. 5-minute TEDEd video https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=277&v=f2O6mQkFiiw&feature=emb_logo
vi R. Kegan & L. Lahey An Everyone Culture. Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing vii Amanda Blake. Developing Embodiment – course materials