Page 136 - The Power to Change Anything

Surpass Your Limits 125

Think about how deliberate practice with clear feedback
compares with the way we currently train our leaders. Rarely
do business school and management faculties think of leader-
ship as a performance art. Faculty members typically teach
leaders how to think, not how to act. So when would-be exec-
utives take MBA courses or graduate executives attend leader-
ship training, they’re routinely asked to read cases, apply
algorithms, and the like, but there’s a good chance that they’ll
never be asked to practice anything.
Granted, business schools typically offer a course in giving
presentations and speeches where the performance compo-
nents that students are asked to practice are so obvious. But this
is not the case with other important leadership skills, such as
addressing controversial topics, confronting bad behavior,
building coalitions, running a meeting, disagreeing with
authority figures, or influencing behavior change—all of which
call for specific behaviors, and all of which can and must be
learned through deliberate practice.

Break Mastery into Mini Goals

Let’s add another dimension to deliberate practice. We start
with a test. How would you motivate patients to take pills that
one day might prevent them from experiencing a stroke? If
they’ve already had one stroke, you’d think it would be easy to
get them to take the lifesaving pills. But let’s add a confound-
ing factor. The pills often cause leg cramps, painful rashes, loss
of energy, constipation, headaches, and sexual dysfunction. So
patients take a pill, and they will most assuredly suffer short-
term results, but maybe they won’t have a stroke sometime way
out in the future. This is going to be a hard sell. In fact, for years
many stroke patients didn’t take their pills because they didn’t
like the odds.
This all changed when researchers stopped focusing on
long-term goals (avoiding another stroke) and created a regimen