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As a professor of leadership, I work with postgraduate business students and executive clients to make real improvements in their influence, leadership, and communication skills. When I start discussing how workplace performance improves, the audience tends to offer up “Practice makes perfect.” It’s a nice, simple statement, but it’s far from true. Doing something over and over again doesn’t necessarily make you any better at it.
Experience and Expertise Are Not the Same Thing
We routinely use the term “experience” as if it means “expertise.” At work, someone with years of experience meeting customers, leading a team, or presenting ideas has had plenty of practice doing these things. We assume this means they are an expert because we conflate the terms involved. Instead, when experience and expertise are defined independently, experience is a relatively poor predictor of expertise.[1,2,3]
Neither Experience nor Practice Automatically Leads to Improvement
Experience does not automatically lead to improvement beyond a certain level because once we have the skills needed to achieve average performance in our jobs, we switch our focus from developing skills (methodology) to getting the job done (outcome).[4} Years of experience might make you feel as if you are learning new skills, but statistically significantly, you become more and more likely to rely on the same skills that have worked for you in the past.[5]
Dr. Anders Ericsson, a leading expert on expertise, offers a useful analogy.[6] A new tennis player practices all elements of play, including backhand and forehand. But once he or she feels ready to play matches, that player will naturally rely on what has worked for them in the past (e.g., strong forehand) and avoid what has not (e.g., weak backhand). As a result, the player’s forehand becomes stronger and the backhand, weaker. That backhand skill is unlikely to improve, even in years of playing tennis, because the player is not trying to improve their backhand. They are trying to win.
At work, real skill practice is rare because our busy working lives leave neither time nor incentive to stop chasing outcomes and instead improve methodology. Even if we do find time to practice a skill, we can’t help drifting toward repeating the elements we are already good at. That’s because it’s more enjoyable than focusing on where we are weak. In a study of footballers, regular players found practice more fun and easier than expert players because the former simply repeated what they were good at, while the latter focused on where they had most room to improve.[7]
In summary, experience and practice don’t provide the improvements we seek, but there are approaches that deliver results.
How You Can Actually Improve: Step-by-Step
Drawing on work by Ericsson, his colleagues, and other researchers, we can identify powerful factors that drive performance improvement. Whether I am working with a room of MBA students or individual clients one-on-one, the better I can satisfy these conditions, the stronger the skill development I can enable in others.
- The learner must actively want to improve. Improvement takes work, not wishful thinking, so the learner must be motivated to make the effort required.
- Aim for small and regular over large and infrequent. Twenty minutes of walking three times a week beats one six-hour gym session that you never repeat. Skill development is essentially habit change, so start small if that helps you start now.
- Break the overall skill into specific parts. A common error is to set a vague goal such as “Improve at customer interaction.” Customer interaction must be broken into specific components, such as “Ask effective questions” and “Demonstrate active listening,” so that the actions required are clear and concrete.
- Work with an expert who uses an expert model (not personal opinion) to give feedback. The learner needs to picture what good looks like, and the model of “good” should be empirically validated as leading to the desired result. An expert uses the model to give systematic feedback that closes the gap between where the learner is and where they need to be.
- Start where you have the most room to improve. These are usually the skill components that you have been avoiding. Focused effort here will not only strengthen your overall skill, but it will also build confidence that you can improve.
- Practice in a “training zone” that has the same paradigms, but less risk. Airlines use flight simulators, so pilots build critical skills without risking real passengers or real aircraft. The more the training context matches the real-world environment—minus the risks—the more transferable those skills will be. Like a flight simulation, build client interaction skills while working with actors or peers, not live clients.
- Expect and embrace failure. If you are doing things you are not yet good at, you will fail. In the real world, you instinctively avoid failure; in the training zone, you should expect it. Embrace it as a sign you are on the right path.
- Repeat with refinement. Iteration is a crucial element of improvement. Each time you repeat the skill component, maintain what you are doing well, but refine what is not yet on target.
In summary, unless you are deliberately working to improve, chances are you are not improving; you are performing. Few people will get better on their own, but the right guidance and the right strategies can enable you to level up in ways that years of experience will not.
