Tag: training

Excellence is a process

I like this quote from Brad Stuldberg’s NYT article (NYT).

“Excellence is not perfection or winning at all costs. It is a deeply satisfying process of becoming the best performer — and person — you can be. You pursue goals that challenge you, put forth an honest effort, endure highs, lows and everything in between, and gain respect for yourself and others. This sort of excellence isn’t just for world-class athletes; it is for all of us. We can certainly find it in sports, but also in the creative arts, medicine, teaching, coaching, science and more.” — Brad Stuldberg

I studied music in college, and I made my living as a professional musician for a time. Excellence is the bar.

Imagine being called to work at firm. You are told you’ll have a week to prep for your first day. You spend the week learning all you can about the firm, the industry, and the people you’ll be working alongside. You show up day 1 and you’re put in front of executive leaders and asked to deliver your 90-day strategy, forecasts, and anticipated roadblocks and expected outcomes as your first meeting. Oh, and you are expected to be highly credible and people are supposed to instantly trust you.

That’s not a realistic example for an office, but it’s a realistic example for the type of stress and excellence required of a professional musician.

The way the professional musician makes her mark is her ability to show up. And her ability to show up and perform is a function of hours of careful and focused practice. She practices slow. She criticizes each move of her body and her instrument. She wonders if she can be even more efficient. She records herself. She listens to herself back (a painful exercise). She keeps at it until her execution approaches (or functionally is) flawless.

That professional musician shows up for her job — a rehearsal in the morning for the show she’ll be expected to perform that night. She puts the music on the music stand, takes out her instrument, tunes, and executes — near flawlessly. That’s the standard.

Two Takeaways

  1. As a manager, practice and become excellent at your craft. I obsess about talent, I write about my perspective on talent. I read, I think, I practice, I write, and I share what I learn with you. Get better at the thing that makes you, you.
  2. As a manager, teach your team how to practice like a professional musician. Identify the key behaviors your team needs to execute. Then, step through the behaviors slowly. Practice, give critique, offer best practices, and keep practicing until – finally – you’ve nailed it. There’s no substitute for work.

Certainty and confidence.

When you are enabling your talent on a new skill, they may express a lack of execution confidence. They may use words like “I’m confused about…” or “I don’t know about…” Your temptation might be to ask, “why didn’t you ask more questions in the training,” but that might be premature.

Principle: slow and methodical practice yields greater long-run returns.

I studied piano in college — music education and music composition. At a collegiate level, music students are taught that slow and methodical practice will lead to faster and more accurate execution. In the music world, near-perfect execution is the bar.

To create a practice similar to how a music student would practice, consider these steps.

Before training:

  1. Identify the outcome/output required of the process being trained.
  2. Identify why that outcome is important.
  3. Break the process down into bite-sized fragments.
  4. Identify a catchy metaphor that simplifies the process. “It’s like baking an apple pie,” or “it’s like sky diving,” or anything that gives the trainee a framework to understand the process.

Training:

  1. Explain the outcome and why it matters — steps 1 and 2 above.
  2. Explain the metaphor.
  3. Teach each step in the process from beginning to end.
  4. Teach the process from the end back to the beginning.
  5. Reiterate the metaphor.
  6. Ask your talent to teach it back to you.
  7. Look for the gaps in what they teach.
  8. Practice the gaps.
  9. Practice the whole process.

Finally, pick real-world low hanging fruit and push your talent out of the nest.