DOES PRACTICE MAKE PERFECT?

Greetings, LinkedIn! By way of brief introduction, my name is Sam Shriver from The Center for Leadership Studies (CLS), the global home of the original Situational Leadership? Model. I am a proud member of our Product Development and Research teams, and this is my first LinkedIn article!

I have been in the training industry for almost 40 years (time literally flies!). I started as a leadership instructor for the U.S. Coast Guard, took a job with CLS and our founder Dr. Paul Hersey in June of 1983 and started a custom leadership development company (Performance Impact) with my wife, Maureen, in 1986, which we wound up merging with CLS in 2011.

Along the way I have been so very honored to write a couple of books (“From Coach to Coach” and “The Four Moments of Truth”) along with numerous topical articles in a variety of different publications. I also collaborate on a column with my famous friend and distinguished CLS alumni Marshall Goldsmith. As he would no doubt say at this juncture, life is indeed … good!

I wanted to write this article that I wrote for Training Industry to provide awareness to those with interest on the results of a research project we recently completed at CLS:

Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect … Perfect Practice Makes Perfect: An In-Depth Study of Virtual Leadership Development?

The project was inspired by the work of Anders Ericsson. In a sense, Dr. Ericsson has spent a highly distinguished career studying the relationship between natural talent and achievements of significance. His irrefutable conclusion? There isn’t one! What he has found is that achievements of significance are highly correlated with purposeful practice which includes:

1. Focus
2. Specific goals
3. Objective feedback
4. Getting “out of your comfort zone”

Dr. Ericsson studied chess players, musicians, athletes, memory mavens and a host of others. The common element between all these endeavors was an objective standard of measurement (i.e., you either won or you lost; played the virtuoso perfectly or you didn’t; improved or stayed the same).

Under the umbrella of Dr. Ericsson’s contributions and in conjunction with Training Industry, CLS conducted research on the impact of purposeful practice on leadership effectiveness. The research was structured as follows:

We started with more than 100 learners from five highly diverse organizations. The learners were randomly assigned to one of the four groups and participated in targeted pre- and post-measurement. In the spirit of complete transparency when we initiated this project (well before anybody knew anything about COVID-19), we didn’t assign too much significance to the fact that the entire endeavor was facilitated virtually (the training, the coaching, the microlearning). In retrospect, that may well be one of the most intriguing aspects of this investigation.

The following perspective is also important to keep in mind:

• The study (in its entirety) was eight weeks
• Coaching: Learners participated in two sessions with a skills coach (~ 15 minutes each)
• Microlearning: Learners engaged with four content reinforcement modules (~ 10 minutes each)

The results suggest reinforcement had an impact of significance on two of the five targeted measures:

1. Team Adaptability: This was highly confirmational. For 50 years, Situational Leadership? training has demonstrated there is no such thing as a good approach or a bad approach to influence. It all depends upon the task in question and the person doing it. Post-training reinforcement enhanced the ability of participants to align their leadership style more effectively with the performance needs of their team.
2. Intent to Continue Practicing: This one surprised us—and it probably shouldn’t have! It can be easy to overlook the value participants attribute to skill mastery prior to attending training. For lack of better terms: “How much do they want it”? We measured the resolve of participants for practicing what they learned post-event. Post-training reinforcement further enhanced commitment to the ongoing process of becoming a better leader.

Sincere thanks on behalf of all at CLS for taking the time to read this. We would be very interested in hearing any response, reaction or critique you may have after you have had a chance to review the article. Looking forward, we at CLS will continue our efforts to examine Situational Leadership? as a practical, commonsense language of both performance and change management for leaders at all levels.