Practise a lot

Practice in the world of business tends to be confined to education: MBAs, skills training, leadership development courses. Once we have finished our ‘formal’ education, ongoing training tends to be sporadic and ad hoc.

The rest of our practice is ‘on the job’: we practise our business skills on our colleagues and on our own businesses.

This isn’t great. One good way to really ‘practise’ is with a coach or mentor who helps to draw meaningful conclusions from our experiences to date and who presents us with useful ‘What if?’ scenarios to help us sharpen our insights and skills.

People with real talent – like you – can probably deliver a better performance than someone with less talent. But someone who really puts in the graft of hard practice will eventually catch up.

Your experience to date represents your ‘practice’ so far. That’s good. How much better could you be if you could pack in more practice?

Geoff Colvin is now senior editor-at-large for Fortune magazine. When, as a journalist there, he was asked to write a piece for a special issue on great performance in business, it got him thinking. What was the secret of great business performance?

Most of us tend to assume that some people just make better businesspeople than others, just as we assume that great golfers, or great musicians, must have some kind of special, innate talent. Colvin looked at the research and decided that this just wasn’t the truth of the matter.

“You are not a natural-born clarinet virtuoso or car salesman or bond trader or brain surgeon,” he concluded, “because no one is.”

What makes people exceptional at what they do, in business as in sport or the performing arts, decided Colvin, is “deliberate practise”.¹²

He was so convinced of this that he wrote what was to become a best-selling book: Talent is Overrated: What really separates worldclass performers from everybody else.

A core aspect of ‘deliberate practice’ is setting goals for ‘how to get better’, and then keeping track of your own performance. Here’s what Colvin has to say about goal setting:

Self-regulation begins with setting goals. These are not big, life-directing goals, but instead are more immediate goals for what you’re going

to be doing today.

In the research, the poorest performers don’t set goals at all; they

just slog through their work.

Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome – win the order; close out my position at a profit; get the new project proposal done.

The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. […] Within [any] activity, the best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving

a particular passage. […]

The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their

own minds, and ask how it’s going.¹³

Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated