Elite Performance

During a recent overseas trip, I had one of those serendipitous moments. To kill some time while waiting for my wife to finish some gift shopping, I popped into a nearby old-fashioned bookstore. While browsing, I unexpectedly discovered a book (a very old one at that) on a topic I had been thinking about only a week earlier – peak performance in sport and the lessons this offers for excelling in any field of endeavour, including business.

On flicking through the book, I was immediately drawn to the author’s central premise:

“Success is possible for all of us but requires hard work and self-belief rather than innate ability.”

While this may sound simplistic and old fashioned, it certainly resonates with me. Which is why I found Matthew Syed’s book, Bounce: The myth of talent and the power of practice, an interesting read.

Syed is a former international table tennis champion turned sportswriter. His book is replete with powerful lessons about what drives elite performance. He draws on (then) ground-breaking work in psychology and neuroscience to uncover the secrets of top athletes. The recurring theme of his book is that talent is not genetically determined nor is excellence preordained. Rather, success on the sporting field (and in any other area of life) is based on “purposeful practice”.

According to Syed, there are no short cuts to success. Rather, it takes 10,000 hours of purposeful practice to become a sporting champion. This is intensive practice with clear and challenging aims. Most of us practice things that we can already do. However, the most effective practice is when you repeatedly try something new which is beyond your current capability until you master it.

The 10,000 hours of focussed and deliberate practice is based on studies by Swedish psychologist, Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, the results of which were published in Psychological Review in 1993. Ericsson’s theory was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers: The Story of Success. As Syed outlines in Bounce, many great sportspeople (and high achievers in other fields) reached their 10,000 hours of practice early in life.

Examples include Tiger Woods, Venus Williams and even Mozart. These individuals were not child prodigies who were naturally blessed with amazing skills. Rather, they were all beneficiaries of extraordinary upbringings. Each had parents who introduced them to a particular activity at a very early age and lavished them with parental training, support and encouragement behind the scenes. Each child practised unusually hard over many years to excel.

Tiger Woods is a good example of someone who epitomises the rigours of practice. His father understood the importance of early practice and gave Tiger a golf club shortly before his first birthday. Initially, Tiger practised at home and at eighteen months had his first golf outing.

By the age of three, Tiger’s practice sessions took place on the driving range and putting green where he would hone his skills for hours at a time. “By his mid-teens”, Syed notes, “Woods had clocked ten thousand hours of dedicated practice, just like Mozart”.

While extolling the benefits of purposeful practice in sport and the arts, Syed laments that it is not practised in business. Talent management in organisations is void of the expert mentoring and coaching that one sees on the sporting field. “Tasks”, according to Syed:

“are often repetitive and boring and fail to push employees to their creative limits and beyond” with objective feedback “ …often comprising little more than a half-hearted annual review”.

The prevailing view in many organisations is that supervisors do not need specific skills in the functions they oversee, just general knowledge and talent as a manager. Syed challenges this conventional wisdom using the example of a UK government minister who changed portfolios seven times in seven years.

“This is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to football to ice hockey to baseball and expecting him to perform expertly in every arena”, argues Syed.

To further prosecute his case, Syed cites the collapse of Enron (some years ago now) as an example of poor talent management. Enron believed in the philosophy espoused by management consultants, McKinsey & Company, that

Enron learned the hard way that having industry specific knowledge and experience is also important.

Please allow me to end this viewpoint by pointing out that the much-vaunted 10,000-hour rule has many critics. It has been variously called a bogus threshold, an over-simplification and even a myth. The critics may well be right in saying that 10,000 is not a magical figure. Regardless, we all know that it takes copious practice to be the world’s best at any task. Greatness requires enormous time – however long that may be.

In the commercial world in which many of us “play,” it takes a lot of time, practice and dedication to reach the elite level in your sport of “business.”

All food for thought!