How to get better at everything: influence, leadership, and more

As a professor leadershipI work with postgraduate students and executive clients to achieve real improvement in their influence, leadership and communication skills. When I start discussing how to improve workplace performance, listeners tend to say, “Practice makes perfect.” This is a nice and simple statement, but it is far from the truth. Doing something over and over again doesn’t necessarily make you better at it.

Experience and expertise are not the same thing

We usually use the term “experience” as if it means “expertise”. In the workplace, someone with years of experience dealing with customers, leading a team, or presenting ideas has had a lot of experience doing these things. We assume this means they are experts because we combine related terms. Instead, when experience and experience are independently defined, experience is a relatively poor predictor of experience.(1,2,3)

Neither experience nor practice automatically leads to improvement

Experience does not automatically lead to improvement beyond a certain level, because when we have the skills needed to achieve average performance in our work, we shift our focus from developing skills (methodology) to getting things done (results).(4} A year of experience may make you feel like you are learning new skills, but statistically speaking, you are relying more on the same skills you have worked on in the past.(5).

Dr. Anders Eriksson, a leading expert on the practice, offers a useful analogy.(6) A new tennis player practices all elements of the game, including the forehand and forehand. But when he feels ready to play, that player will naturally lean on what has worked for them in the past (such as a strong forward) and avoid what hasn’t (such as a weak back). As a result, the player’s forehand becomes stronger and the backhand becomes weaker. This underrated skill cannot be improved even in years of tennis because the player does not try to improve his hands. They are trying to win.

At work, the actual experience of mastery is rarely seen because our work lives leave neither the time nor the motivation to stop chasing results and instead improve methodology. Even if we find time to practice a skill, we can’t help repeating the elements we’re already good at. This is because it is more interesting than focusing on where we are weak. In a study of soccer players, average players found training more fun and easy than expert players because the former only repeated what they were good at, while the latter focused on where they had the most room for improvement.(7)

In short, experience and practice do not provide the improvement we seek, but there are approaches that produce results.

How You Can Really Get Better: Step by Step

Based on the work of Erikson, his colleagues, and other researchers, we can identify powerful factors that contribute to improved performance. Whether I’m working with a room of MBA students or one-on-one with individual clients, I’m better able to meet these conditions, fostering skill development in others.

1. The reader must actively seek improvement. Improvement requires work, not imagination, so the student must make the necessary effort.
2. Change small and regular goals from big and rare ones. Walking twenty minutes three times a week is a six-hour gym workout you’ll never do again. Developing a skill is basically changing a habit, so start small if that’s what you need to start with.
3. Break down the general skill into specific parts. A common mistake is to set a vague goal, such as “Improve customer interactions.” Customer interaction should be broken down into specific components such as “Ask Effective Questions” and “Show Active Listening” so that the actions required are clear and specific.
4. Work with an expert who uses an expert model (not personal opinion) to provide feedback. The student must imagine what good is, and the model of “good” must be empirically verified to produce the desired result. The expert uses the model to provide regular feedback on where the gap between the learner is and where it needs to be.
5. Start where you have the most room for improvement. These are usually the skill components you’ve been avoiding. A concentrated effort here will not only strengthen your overall skill, but also improve it confidence that you can improve.
6. Practice in a “training zone” that has the same paradigms but less risk. Airlines use flight simulators so pilots can build critical skills without endangering real passengers or real planes. The more relevant the learning context is to a real-world environment—taking risks into account—the more transferable these skills are. As with flight simulation, build customer communication skills while working with actors or peers rather than live customers.
7. Expect and accept success. If you do things you are not good at yet, you will fail. In the real world, you instinctively avoid failure; in the study area, you have to wait for it. Take it as a sign that you are on the right track.
8. Repeat with improvement. Iteration is an important part of improvement. Each time you repeat a skill component, keep doing what you’re doing well, but improve on what’s not yet on target.

In short, if you don’t consciously work to get better, you’re not likely to get better; you do. Few people will improve on their own, but the right guidance and the right strategies can allow you to improve to a level that years of experience won’t.