Can we employ deliberate practice in the workplace?
Is there anything that junior employees could do to grow faster?
Or that senior employees could do to keep growing?
Yes. It’s called “Deliberate Practice.”
Deliberate practice is a proven tool that we can use to become better salespeople, better managers, better writers, better speakers, better at dealing with difficult customers, better marketers, and so on, if we can figure out how to apply it in the workplace.
What is Deliberate Practice?
Psychologist Anders Ericsson, and others since him, have found that far more than innate talent, deliberate practice is key to achieving expertise. Deliberate practice refers to practice that consists of “considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all.”1 Deliberate practice is one of the defining factors that enables someone to become a master golfer, or ballet dancer, or chess player.2
Deliberate practice is generally not “fun”. It’s often mentally taxing (e.g. in the case of studying or creative endeavours) or physically taxing (as in the case of practicing a sport), or both. It requires focus and effort.
To learn a new skill, and to learn it well, the most successful people apply deliberate practice.
Throughout my high school and college years, I did my best to employ deliberate practice – with a fair amount of success. Then I found that in the work world, the “necessary skills” seemed to be a moving target, making deliberate practice much harder to employ.
My success with deliberate practice
As a high school student, for example, I learned to leverage deliberate practice on the SAT by finding out which math problems I was worst at, and then rigorously practicing that type of problem until I got better. (I remember thinking at one point as I studied, “I’m going to love when this type of math problem comes up on the test, because I’ll finally be so good at it.”) I self-graded every practice exam I took, dissected my errors, tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong. I got to the point where I could get a perfect score on the practice test, though I never got a perfect SAT score, but I did well enough to get into Stanford.
In college, I tried to implement deliberate practice principles in my classes, and found that I generally succeeded when I did engage in deliberate practice as opposed to when I didn’t.
Once I started working, it took me a while to realize that I was missing opportunities for deliberate practice.
But when I began working in management consulting, project tasks were not as well-defined as homework assignments has been. My work mainly involved creating powerpoint slides. But there were no standards, and the feedback I got seemed random.
I wasn’t sure how to practice and improve. There were many things I wanted to improve, but it was hard to get enough reps at them, in a row, with consistent feedback, to get better.
Lack of a clear right answer can make deliberate practice difficult
In many business roles (as opposed to professional roles such as law and medicine, with clearly defined career paths) deliberate practice may be more difficult, because there is no clear ‘right answer’. For example, in medicine, a medical diagnosis is either right or wrong. In sports such as baseball, you either hit the ball or you didn’t. But in many areas of business, defining the problems, defining the goals, and figuring out achieve said goals can be more difficult.
However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Perhaps deliberate practice is worth trying in your workplace, if you can figure out how.
Suggested next steps include:
Identify a few areas in your work where you’re trying to improve
Figure out what would indicate improvement in those areas
Discuss with your colleagues or with your boss to get their feedback
Look at your work schedule and see if you might be able to use specific hours of the day to practice the thing you’re trying to get better at
Discuss with your boss to identify opportunities for you to employ your deliberately-practiced skill
Some suggestions include:
Post-meetings: after meetings where you were taking an active part, you may devise a list of questions to ask yourself. This may only take five or ten minutes after a meeting. If you have back to back meetings, you may have to batch these at the end of the day. Doing these things not in real time isn’t ideal, but it may be better than nothing.
You may consider asking yourself questions like:
Did I do my best to run an effective meeting? Did we accomplish my objectives? If not, why not, and what could be done better next time? (These are questions you can ask yourself if you ran the meeting.)
Did I do my best to participate in the meeting and to add value? Did I learn anything in the meeting? (These are questions you can ask yourself if you didn’t run the meeting.)
Summary
Deliberate practice can be an effective way to improve our skills. Deliberate practice is possible, and often rewarded, in school. In the workplace, however, it can be harder to figure out what to practice deliberately as well as how to practice it.
Figuring out how to do effective deliberate practice in the workplace may yield great benefits.
More suggestions of ‘deliberate practice’ can be the subject of another post. In the meantime, are there methods of deliberate practice that you’ve used in the workplace, or in life outside of school? If so, leave a comment!
1https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert
2Ibid.