The big stars from sport, the arts and other fields can show companies a thing or two about honing their performance, says Mallen Baker
The irrational belief that you are the best performing, the most honest, the most ethical – take your pick – in spite of the lack of any objective evidence, is one of the most consistent phenomena in how groups behave.
One of the most interesting books I’ve read recently is Talent is Over-Rated by Geoff Colvin. It begins by looking at high-performing individuals – sportsmen, musicians, and others who have been acknowledged as the top achievers in their field. What actually got them to that position?
The traditional view is that some people are just born with talent. There is something genetic. Every now and then, nature just throws a genius into the mix and let’s them do their thing.
Colvin shows that this is just not the case. People get to the point of top performance when they have undertaken a long period of deliberate practice of the skills of their chosen field – probably guided by a great teacher.
So Mozart was a genius? No – he had been expertly and intensively schooled in music from the age of three by his father. By the time he wrote his first piece of music now considered to be exceptional, he had been learning and exercising his craft for eighteen years.
Tiger Woods had Earl Woods. Same story, different profession. Do we think that it’s a coincidence that the number-one British tennis player and one of the top British doubles players share the same mother – who happens to be a tennis coach?
There is, it seems, no substitute for hard work. And not just aimless hard work (the way that most people practise skills is not that useful) but carefully constructed and planned deliberate practice.
The best performers in those fields spend more time learning and practising than they do performing. They focus their development on areas that are in their “learning zone” rather than their “comfort zone” – which makes that practice difficult and not much fun. But as a result, they get better.
And they never stop. The best tennis players in the world have coaches. Being the best is a process, not a destination.
Of course, this is not how organisations work at all. They seek to hire “talent” – they will pay over the odds for those top performers. But for almost the whole of their time, they are expected to be productive. Whereas top athletes may have a 10 to one ratio of practice to performing, in business it is the opposite at best.
So, what are the lessons for a business that aims to excel in its approach to social responsibility (or indeed anything else)? It’s not that all your staff should be practising 10 times more than they’re performing, by the way.
Drive to improve
Let’s be honest, most of the skills used day to day in making stuff happen in business are the equivalent of driving skills. You learn to drive. You reach a certain level of competence that means you can drive safely, and that’s it. You may improve marginally over time through experience, but you don’t expect to keep learning new aspects of driving all the time.
So the edge in business comes from those areas where high performance really does make the difference. Where the definition of high performance is reset daily by how well the competition is doing, or in the case of corporate responsibility issues, how quickly society’s expectations on the business are changing.
And in this case, you might want to be mindful of the following principles.
First, the high performers are very clear about the skills they need to achieve their aspirations. They practise to achieve this, through deliberate focus on the things they currently can’t do well. The corrosive culture in business is where everyone has to pretend they are good at everything.
Second, the top performers fail all the time. They learn from the failures and build additional practice to get better. If your culture is that people are afraid to fail, then you’re also afraid to improve.
Third, the learning never stops. Even when you’re world champion.
Fourth, those guys have an objective way of evaluating their performance. If that’s not so easy or intuitive, you need to find ways to do it nonetheless. Stop kidding yourself that you’re the best and find out.
So what is it for you? Stakeholder engagement – driving, or virtuoso performance? Influencing across the business – defined by putting the issue on a meeting agenda, or by practising the empathy and people skills you’ve been working on? Sustainability reporting – a mechanical process dictated by a template, or real, effective communication?
Mallen Baker is founder of Business Respect and a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation.
mallen.baker@businessrespect.net