Deliberate practice in your team
The quality of practice in teams impacts performance significantly. Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash
I'm a big fan of K. Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice. He defines deliberate practice as "a highly structured activity engaged in with the specific goal of improving performance".
At its core, this is about making sure that doing the right work and getting the right feedback helps to accelerate progress. As opposed to the 10 000 hour rule, you can see the difference between an approach that focuses predominantly on volume of practice and one that differentiates between the impact of that practice.
Like many approaches to human behaviour, there is some pretty strong debate in academic worlds from both sides of the fence. Having read from both sides, I have landed here:
It's not any type of practice that leads to improvements,
it's enough deliberate practice.
The implications for your team are significant. It means the difference between being passive and active in your team's current and future performance. It means taking an active role in the development of your team's performance - committing yourself to learning, adapting and creating the conditions that make success more likely. It's not sufficient to rely on experience or time in a role alone. It takes focused time, energy and attention to drive performance.
Deliberate practice still needs a lot of time and energy committed to it. Taking this approach increases the return on that investment. It's not easy work and certainly not comfortable. As K. Anders Ericsson writes in the excellent book, Peak:
“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice:
If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”
If you want your team to be improving both individually and collectively, here are two great questions to guide you:
Are we doing the right work?
Are we getting the right feedback?
Keep on asking them. Use the answers to do better work and get better feedback.