A few years back we did some research with Lillas Brown of the University of Saskatchewan on learning and leadership. We were looking at whether there was a relationship between how leaders learned and how effective they were at leading. What we found was most intriguing. We discovered that it didn’t really matter what the learning style was. Someone could be an active experimenter, an observer of others, a person who engages in emotional dialogues, or someone who loves to read or be in the classroom. The style is not the thing. What did matter was the extent to which individuals engaged in whatever style worked for them. The more they engaged in learning the more successful they were as leaders.
This probably doesn’t come as any surprise, but here’s the rub. Organizations these days seem to want us to develop leaders in two days or less. It’s all part of the trend to instant success. Well, guess what? It isn’t going to happen. There’s no such thing as instant leadership – or instant expertise of any kind. Those who are the very best at anything got to be that way because they spent more time learning and practicing, not less.
Regardless of whether we're talking about sports, music, medicine, computer programming, or leadership raw talent is not all there is to becoming a top performer. Florida State University researcher and expert on expertise, K. Anders Ericsson, writes: “Until most individuals recognize that sustained training and effort is a prerequisite for reaching expert levels of performance, they will continue to misattribute lesser achievement to the lack of natural gifts, and will thus fail to reach their own potential.” Ericsson raises the possibility that the search for talent may even mislead us into thinking that we can close the leadership gap simply be finding the best talent and putting them in the right jobs. I’m persuaded by the evidence that this is an illusion. Instead of chasing after a fantasy, I think we need to get back to the basics of skills training and hard work.
What truly differentiates the expert performers from the good performers is hours of practice. You’ve got to work at becoming the best, and it sure doesn’t happen over a weekend. If you want a rough metric of what it’ll take to achieve a modest level of expertise, the estimate is about 5,000 hours of practice over a period of ten years. That’s about two hours a day, every day, with time off for weekends, for ten years. So the next time someone says the organization ought to cut leadership development back to a couple days a year, show them that number and then ask them if they would rather have professionals or amateurs running the organization.
Posted by Jim Kouzes
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