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LEADERS AS EXPERT PERFORMERS

Practice Can Trump Talent

INTELLECT, BREEDING, BEAUTY—none of these things has much to do with whether or not you develop as a leader through a crucible experience. Talent plays a role, undoubtedly, but it is a supporting role. No amount of native talent can prepare a leader for the infinite variety of circumstances she will face or the challenges she must surmount. No gene for resilience ensures that gems of wisdom will suddenly appear amid the turmoil of a crucible.

What distinguishes these leaders who do continue to learn and grow is their approach to learning. Each person I spoke with offered evidence, whether explicit or implicit, that they had fashioned a Personal Learning Strategy that enabled them to notice the tension that accompanies a crucible, to manage it, and, in virtually every instance, to resolve it productively. But these leaders don’t wait for crucible situations to call on their heightened level of awareness. Rather, they find it becomes part of the fabric of their everyday life so that, like accomplished performers in sports or music or the arts, these leaders practice as strenuously as they perform. And since they find themselves onstage much of the time, they extend that skill so that they practice while they perform—not simply to learn by doing, but to learn while doing.

In fact, the comparison between learning to lead and learning to perform in the arts or athletics ought not be an idle allusion. Business commentators often suggest that leadership is a performing art.¹ But missing from prior writing has been an active investigation of how leadership performance is related to, or enhanced by, leadership practice—and whether the distinctions so often used to grade performers, like novice and amateur versus eminent or outstanding, ought not also be applied to leaders.

This chapter explores more deeply the education of leaders and other performing artists. In it you will find some surprising similarities between the two and, more importantly, additional clues for how aspiring leaders can leverage crucibles to enhance their growth and to improve their performance.

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE

Talent is rarely enough to explain who becomes an eminent performer. Chess masters, for instance, differ from beginners not because they are blessed with superior memory or because of the way their brains are wired, but because they have what researchers describe as “a richer store of familiar moves.”² In other words, they have played more matches and therefore have literally seen more patterns and the strategies associated with them. Clearly, they haven’t seen every possible situation, but chess masters have acquired a way to do what psychologists call chunking: making a smaller number of units of information out of a vast number of discrete bits. Increased experience and practice enhances skill at reading situations (like chessboards) quickly and accurately.

Penn and Teller, a headline act in Las Vegas, blend comedy with magic by revealing how magicians create the effects we refer to as magic. They invite audiences behind the scenes to learn the fundamentals of magic—the so-called seven basic magic moves—so that they can understand how effects like mind reading and levitation are accomplished through dedicated practice.³ They demonstrate something very important about magic and, as I will suggest, about leadership, too: the moves that compose the foundations of magic should not be confused with magic itself. Mastering the moves makes it possible to do magic. The same goes for leading: the underlying moves are not leadership, though mastery and adroit combination can make someone a leader.

Actor Kevin Spacey, who is artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre Company and a winner of both a Tony Award and an Oscar, is one of many stage actors who have described acting as walking a tightrope: “An actor cannot connect with an audience until the audience comes to believe that—in that space and time, that theatre, that stage, and in that scene—he is who he portrays,” he said. “It’s not unlike walking a tightrope. It takes an incredible amount of practice. You can slip and when you do you fall—you lose your audience and probably your job.”⁴

So, what does this have to do with leadership? All an actor has to do is memorize his lines and emote, while an organizational leader faces a daily onslaught of unpredictable events and a constant tugging at his sleeve from any of a hundred stakeholders wanting his time. Right?

Yes and no. Consider Mike Eskew, CEO of United Parcel Service (UPS), one of the world’s largest employers and the world’s ninth-largest airline. Eskew has ushered in nothing short of a revolution in the global delivery business by means of new technology and new work practices. I asked him to explain how he stays on top of such a complex operation. His answer bore a distinct resemblance to Spacey’s: “I learn a lot by talking to people, just asking them what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “And I constantly remind people of something I believe deeply: we are part of something special, something noble. People make their customers better. They connect people. They make business run better. They keep assembly lines running. They save lives. Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t think I have some talent. But I’ve learned a lot from experience and from practicing a few skills in a disciplined way.”

Leaders like Eskew put a lot of stock in practice—yet you’ll rarely find that concept in the lexicon of leader development, and certainly not in the way medical doctors or athletes or musicians use it. For example, in his chronicle of medical education, surgeon Atul Gawande underscores the central role of practice: “People often assume that you have to have great hands to become a surgeon, but it’s not true,” he writes. “When I interviewed to get into surgery programs, no one made me sew or take a dexterity test or checked if my hands were steady … [A]ttending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to stick at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end.”⁵

Yet, in business, practice tends to be regarded as something one undertakes outside the mainstream of work—something you do “that doesn’t count.” Alternatively, a manager will complain, “I don’t have time to practice. I have to perform all the time.” But if you don’t have time to practice, it’s hard to imagine how you can improve your performance. There can only be one solution: when you don’t have time to practice and yet you seek to improve your performance, you have to learn how to practice while you perform.

THE EXPERT PERFORMANCE MODEL

Sporting analogies are hugely popular in business, but most books by retired athletes and coaches miss the mark when it comes to answering very fundamental questions at the heart of leader development, such as How do exceptional performers and coaches learn to achieve the results that made them famous? How do they mine experience for the gems of wisdom they proffer so glibly? Why have some lessons stuck with them while others have melted away? And finally, what do they do to keep in tune with the changes taking place around them?

The problem is not with comparing business or government leaders with athletes or artists or with misleading comparisons between sports and business (which has no time limits, goalposts, or players with numbers on their backs). Problems arise when we focus solely on outcomes—for example, the championship game, the stellar performance, or the brilliant stratagem—and overlook the activities that made those outcomes possible. Retired UCLA basketball coach John Wooden made this point to me emphatically: “Winning is a by-product of preparation. I’d tell the young men who played for me that my job is during the week. Their job is to play the game and try to be the best they can be,” he said.

Coach Wooden’s teams won ten national championships in twelve years and seven in consecutive years. Wooden himself reflected the dedication to personal improvement that characterizes eminent performers when I asked when he thought he got the hang of coaching basketball: “I never got the hang of it,” he said. “I hope I was a better teacher my last year than I was the year before. Ten years before I retired, I wondered if I knew anything. Twenty years before that, I knew I didn’t.”

Performance, particularly high-stakes performance, cannot be left to chance—whether the game is sports or business leadership. (See the box, “Practice and Play.”) That’s why it is essential to be attentive to the rigor and absolute dedication to personal improvement that drives expert performers. If preparedness is a vital precondition for making the most of crucible experiences, then, like consummate athletes, leaders need to be as prepared to exploit learning opportunities as they are to exploit business opportunities or chances to enhance the performance of their organizations.

Fortunately, recent research in the field of expert performance provides a stimulus to expanding our thinking well beyond conventional models of how leaders learn and how leadership is taught—beyond simple models of increasing span of control, responsibility, and authority.⁶ Scale and scope are undoubtedly important, but what’s missing from extant research is a trajectory for leaders themselves: something that takes into account the fact, as the performing arts do, that deep-seated aspirations drive outstanding performers, that individuals need coaches at every stage of their careers, that both inspiration and knowledge can be mined from a wide variety of experiences (not just classroom teaching), that disciplined practice is essential, and that to plateau as a performer is to stagnate—no matter how big the stage is on which you play.

Rather than sustaining a tired leadership debate between “born and made,” research on expert performance provides an empirically based guide to identifying the specific structured, intentional activities that can accelerate performance improvement. Moreover, models of expert performance suggest a shift away from excessive reliance on tests of innate talent and punch lists of “developmental assignments” and toward activities that leverage experience (off the job as well as on the job). Finally, research on expert performance suggests that “effortful study”—something very similar to a Personal Learning Strategy—plays an essential catalytic role in the evolution of outstanding performers. That is, just as a decathlete or a violinist needs a training regimen tailored to the demands of their profession and to their bodies and minds as individual performers, leaders need a Personal Learning Strategy that engages them as individuals and that charts for them (and the organizations they work for) appropriate opportunities to learn and grow.

NOVICE, ADEPT, AND EMINENT

How performers move up to the next level of achievement is a central question for students of expert performance—and one that ought to be of far greater concern to leaders, as well. Distinct levels of achievement are recognized in the study of expert performance (see figure 4-1).⁷

FIGURE 4-1

Levels of achievement in performance

Novices are beginners who have a limited repertoire of skills from which to select. They need explicit guidance in method and technique, no matter how talented, ambitious, or motivated they may be. Adept performers have mastered technique in key facets of performance but tend to be constrained to a limited array of styles or genres. Though they may perform at a high level in a given style or genre, they tend not to be innovators or originators of genres. Eminent performers demonstrate the greatest range and creativity. They are innovators who stretch boundaries and transcend the limits of a given style or genre. Eminent performers are almost entirely intrinsically motivated, and, paradoxically, they often consider themselves to be beginners though most everyone else sees their performances as the greatest expression of maturity.

Are these distinctions relevant to leaders?

They are, in two very important ways. First, novice, adept, and eminent performances are clearly distinguished by the results they produce—just as leaders are. Audiences and commentators are able to see, hear, smell, or touch the outcomes that distinguish one performer or performance from another. “Promise” or potential is not enough. Even when differences in levels of performance are difficult to judge in any objective way, critics and/or markets will eventually rank or assign value to the work.⁸

Second, the distinction between novice, adept, and eminent underscores important differences in ability to adapt and to innovate—clearly critical for leaders as well. An adept performer may shine consistently but prove unable to move between genres or to bring an original interpretation to a script or a musical score.

By focusing equal attention on results, adaptation, and innovation, expert performance points to a definition of eminence in leadership similar to the one Bennis and I offered in Geeks and Geezers: the ability to achieve outstanding results over the course of a lifetime by generating—through continuous learning—new responses to changing conditions.⁹ “Adept” leaders, then (to use the language of expert performance), recycle and repeat patterns of behavior virtually unchanged over the course of their lives. Think of an ensemble player, a method actor who’s on the big screen but never earns a leading role, or a semipro baseball player. They may achieve notable success, but they tend to be successful when they are not forced to develop beyond their current capacity—for example, when they find a domain that doesn’t change very often (or deeply) or when they move out of a place that is beginning to change (and find another that matches their style). This is more common than we’re led to believe among senior executives and CEOs. When the heat gets turned up, these leaders exit for other organizations that play to their strengths without exposing their weaknesses. For aspiring, highly motivated leaders, this is a losing formula.

Eminent or outstanding leaders, by contrast, resemble the Picassos, the Tiger Woodses, and the Martha Grahams, who relentlessly push forward the boundaries of their fields and, in the process, raise the bar for everyone with whom they work and/or compete. These leaders not only excel in times of turbulence and change, but they also make a habit of refreshing and renewing themselves—and often the organizations they lead—to achieve superior results over long stretches of time, even through the progression of very different eras.¹⁰

For example, Sidney Harman guided his audio and electronics company, Harman International (formerly Harman-Kardon), through a massive shift from analog to digital technology over many years. He later reflected, “One of the things I tend to do, which seems to me is an appropriate thing to do whether you’re a leader or not, is to contemplate the changes that are taking place in the world in which I participate and make a genuine effort to understand and interpret them.”

NOT BY TALENT ALONE

Leaders don’t become leaders on talent alone, any more than Jack Nicklaus “naturally” came to dominate the game of golf or Jerome Robbins was preordained to lead the world of dance. According to research in expert performance, four additional ingredients are essential for progressing from novice to adept: thorough grasp of method, ambition, instruction, and feedback.¹¹ A fifth ingredient, deliberate practice—or, in our terms, a Personal Learning Strategy—holds the key to eminence.

Grasp of Method

Individuals with great native talent will progress only so far—or so fast—without mastering the fundamental methods that define a domain of expertise. By method, I mean knowledge and technique for accomplishing what are agreed on as the desired results or effects. In magic these are called “moves,” in music they are the building blocks of chords and scales, and in ballet they are the basic “positions,” like first, fourth, and fifth position. Without a grasp of method, students may well spend precious time inventing tools and approaches that already exist, and risk blunting their ambition in the frustration of trial and error.

For example, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Eric Clapton described the great frustrations of being self-taught: “Not knowing, for instance, when I picked up a six-string guitar, how to tune it,” he recalled. “In quite an arrogant way, I refused to buy those ‘teach yourself how to play basic guitar’ books. So I had to learn how to tune the guitar on my own. Then, the next step was to put your fingers on different frets and try to make a chord … I was under the impression I was inventing all this stuff, you see. In actual fact, it had all been done before.”¹² To Clapton’s mind, it took much longer than he would have liked to learn the basics; he invented methods, certainly, but they weren’t always the best, and arriving at them took up valuable time.

What’s needed in order to grasp a method, according to studies of expert performers, is easily accessible knowledge and there’s plenty of it.¹³ For instance, to understand the boundaries of music, one must begin to study the work and style of various composers and other experts. So, Elvis Presley, for example, studied gospel music and blues musicians B. B. King and Furry Lewis to get a firm grounding in the most innovative music styles of the time. Later, raw talent, combined with incessant practice and a deep understanding of gospel, rhythm and blues, and country music, allowed Presley to pioneer a new kind of music: rock and roll. Repeatedly, Presley credited those deep musical roots for his success, not his innate talent.¹⁴ Likewise, chess players are strongly advised to assemble a capacious library of commentaries and analyses of great masters and their matches in order to create a richer store of familiar moves.

Most performing arts—and most active professions—maintain a “practice field” as a permanent feature of the work environment. Musicians, dancers, artists, and architects all have their studios where real works get done but where it is also possible to experiment, even play, as a legitimate part of work. Actors have rehearsal space, professional athletes have literal practice fields, and airline pilots and nuclear power plant operators have simulators—all dedicated to the sort of deliberate, intense, and meaningful practice essential to achieving and then maintaining a solid grasp of method.

The relevance of a firm grasp of method to leadership is obvious, but the implications are complex. HR departments and leadership consultancies are great places to look for both descriptions of the competencies that leaders should have and the catalogs of the underlying skills they have to master, such as observational and listening skills, self-awareness, communication, and the ability to resolve disputes (among others).¹⁵ These skills are akin to the moves to which Penn and Teller draw attention in their study of magic. That is, by themselves, they will not create the effects that people recognize as leadership (or magic); yet mastering them individually and gaining dexterity in their combination can create those effects.

However, naming skills is not the same as creating the conditions to master them. What’s often not clear is how leaders (whether novice, adept, or eminent, or at whatever position in the formal hierarchy) are supposed to master those skills. It’s essential not only to name the skills that underlie the competencies, but to illustrate how they can be systematically practiced inside and outside of work.

Ambition

Ambition, like talent, is essential both for sustained superior performance and for the dedication necessary to continue learning. Even when loosely defined (like the dream of winning a championship), the desire for accomplishment can propel a person through the early and often trying stages of learning as a novitiate. Amateur is, after all, derived from amare, the Latin verb “to love,” and clearly some measure of passion for your subject is what’s needed to sustain you in the early stages of learning.¹⁶ But ambition gets stoked by encouragement as well. Singer-songwriter Johnny Cash recalled how at seventeen, after cutting wood all day with his father, he’d come in the door singing old gospel songs. His mother would say, “Is that you?” and then she’d hug him and say, “God’s got his hands on you.”¹⁷

But, like talent, ambition alone is not sufficient for superior performance. Desire might run deep, but it is rarely limitless. Thus, performing artists must manage their ambition and, quite importantly, renew it. For instance, ambition quite often gets sapped in the demand for practice. Among novices (as well as many adept performers), practice is something to be endured in order to simply play and, once they are playing, something to do to improve performance (win).¹⁸ Competitions and public exhibitions can provide a short-term encouragement to practice, of course. But until practice actually becomes part of the fabric of performance—where the artist recognizes that practice, rehearsal, and performance are moments in the same process—ambition will be consumed in just overcoming continual inertia.

In fact, in many fields it takes ten years of deliberate, intentional practice to achieve the status of expert, according to research on expert performance. So for anyone who has taken up and dropped a dozen or more hobbies or sports, it’s painfully obvious why we don’t practice: our desire to improve isn’t high enough to drive us to continue the routine, repetitive grind. And practice does not end once someone has achieved public acclaim.¹⁹ Even when we have an admirable personal goal planted firmly in our minds, the specter of mind-numbing repetition without a sip from the victory cup can shrivel that vision in seconds flat.

For anyone hoping to make the leap from novice to eminent performer, continued evolution requires something richer than just winning a contest, for example. It may mean finding a way to gain deeper insight into the dynamics of your topic, including its aesthetics, or it may mean facing challenges like transcending established convention. In their studies of leaders, James Champy and Nitin Nohria describe this trajectory as the arc of ambition: the upward incline of an idea and its originator with accompanying struggles, the peak of success, and the inevitable decline that eventually occurs.²⁰ The challenge for eminent artists and leaders—and for adept artists and leaders who have experienced success once—is in repeating the arc, first by letting go of an idea or a mode of performance that has lost its luster and then by continually searching out new genres to master.

Consider the case of Mayo Shattuck. Before joining Constellation Energy Group’s board and eventually becoming its CEO, Shattuck had risen in the ranks of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown on the basis of a combination of personal ambition, analytical skill, and raw imagination. Taking over the reins of a 150-year-old utility known for its conservatism in a period of dramatic change was nothing if not an audacious move: this was in the early days of deregulation, when Enron’s creative accounting practices were first drawing suspicious looks. But Shattuck felt deep down that tremendous human and financial potential resided just beneath the surface of the organization. It was his ambition to unleash that potential. According to Shattuck, that could not be accomplished without top-to-bottom change. Specifically, he knew he needed to develop among his managers a sense of competitive, commercial behavior in a company where, in his words, “no one had ever had to market or sell anything.” He took a chance and hired people from outside the organization for their functional rather than industry expertise.

The results have been astounding, and clearly Shattuck’s ambition helped his company buck the odds in a volatile environment. Not only has Constellation chalked up a record string of profitable quarters—while many competitors reeled in the wake of Enron’s collapse—but also the company has achieved broad-scale change in under five years, a turnaround comparable to GE’s resurrection under Jack Welch.

As with grasp of method, ambition too connects to leadership in organizations—but, again, looking at leadership through the lens of expert performance reveals some interesting twists. Most important among them is the content of individual ambition and how it is shaped. The content of an individual’s ambition is rarely questioned in the early stages of their career. Of course, it’s routine for a job interviewer to ask an applicant where he or she plans to be in five to ten years. But it’s quite unusual in those situations to ask what a young man or woman wants to do with their life, what they want to be known for, what mark they want to leave on the world. It’s unfortunate that those questions—questions often prompted by suspension crucibles as we discussed them in chapter 2—are not asked, because they might encourage organizations to more closely examine what they want from leaders (current and future). What’s more, such questions could force young managers to ask themselves whether they truly want to lead—and why. In the absence of a definition made richer by such reflection, ambition can quickly get focused solely on “winning.”²¹

In any case, in order to prevent stagnation, organizations will most likely need to help individuals clarify and evolve their personal ambitions over time. And individuals, like adept and eminent performers, will need to find ways to enrich their ambitions if they are to renew themselves as leaders, a topic I’ll address in more detail in chapter 5.

Instruction

A great teacher or coach can bring a wealth of experience, an objective eye, and an ability to match instruction and pace to the personality and learning style of the performer. People who achieve eminence routinely seek out the best teachers they can find—regardless of their demonstrated native ability. For example, actress Jodie Foster, who by age twelve had been acting professionally for nearly a decade, credited the Academy Award nomination she received for her role in Taxi Driver to the light-handed coaching she got from fellow actor Robert De Niro. “It wasn’t until I met Robert De Niro … that I understood that there was more to acting than just being a puppet,” she recalled. De Niro would take her to coffee shops in Spanish Harlem, where they would rehearse their lines and, more importantly, where they could immerse themselves in the social context called for by the script. “Having been a child actor, of course, I knew my lines, so now I was really bored,” she said, “because I’d have to do these lines over and over again with this adult.” But later he’d begin to improvise here and there. “Suddenly I learned that improvisation was about knowing the text so well that you could deviate from it in a meaningful way, as if you had been living this conversation, and always find your way back to the text. That’s a lesson that most young actors don’t really get.”²²

But the relationship often goes both ways: clever students know how to make good teachers even better. They can do a great deal to engage, enlist, or as psychologist Robert Kegan aptly puts it, “recruit” mentors. Not only do they convince mentors to work with them, but they make mentors/teachers want to do the best job they can—often because of the protégé’s genuine rapt interest that encourages the mentor to reveal aspects to the topic that are linked to his or her passion.²³

Michael Klein’s mentor was his grandfather, a man who had left a blue-collar job with General Motors with $5,000 in savings and bought a tiny company that pioneered paint-by-numbers kits. Within three years, his grandfather grew the business from five employees to over eight hundred. Klein recalled how his grandfather instilled both the knowledge and the confidence that would help him become a millionaire by the age of nineteen and then a successful CEO of several Internet-based companies. He took young Michael aside one day and told him that, rather than money, he wanted to pass on to him the knowledge he’d gained in business. “‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know and teach you anything that you want to learn from me,’” Klein recalled him saying. “And I remember thinking about it and thinking, ‘You know, why not?’” From that day on and until the day his grandfather died, the two talked on the phone for at least an hour every day, and his grandfather would take Klein along on his business travels. “Just the act of seeing … what enthused him about being a businessman, sort of set the ball in motion for me in terms of my desire to learn what made it possible for him to do those things,” Klein said.

Indeed, for anyone seeking eminence, a teacher is always part of the equation. And of all the ingredients of expert performance, instruction might seem both the most relevant and the most familiar to leadership in organizations. After all, businesses spend billions of dollars annually on leadership training alone.²⁴ However, on closer examination, instruction of the sort depicted by the literature on expert performance turns out to be pretty rare in business. Skilled coaches capable of the kind of assessment, dialogue, and on-the-spot feedback that promising musicians or baseball players need are rarely allocated to business managers early in their careers. Executive coaches are familiar and growing rapidly in number, but they are an expensive commodity usually reserved for the upper rungs of the hierarchy. Classroom-based and electronic training have increased in both quality and availability in recent years, though they remain incredibly sensitive to business cycles; but who would ask a budding Derek Jeter or Mikhail Baryshnikov to learn their trade from a DVD?

The obstacles to effective instruction for young leaders are not simply ones of cost, exclusivity, or shortfalls in supply. The challenge has as much to do with the antagonism between “learning” and “leading” in most organizations. That is, as Ed Schein has noted, one of the core weaknesses of leadership (in the American context especially) is the importance attached to avoiding situations where you have to admit publicly that you don’t know something.²⁵ Worse yet would be for a leader to publicly admit that he or she doesn’t know something about leading.

Feedback

Feedback, especially immediate feedback, is vital to anyone who ventures into the world of performance. Sometimes the feedback is obvious: fidgety silence can mean as much as, if not more than, thunderous applause. But more often, the message is nuanced; cellist Yo-Yo Ma is highly regarded by the musicians with whom he plays, as well as by audiences, because of his ability to read their moods and to adjust on the fly to inspire them both. Feedback enables a performer to adjust, perhaps even to change her style quickly, and so to improve both the result and the audience’s experience.

But feedback can be expensive too. For example, a baseball batter only gets a few chances to work on his batting stance during three or maybe four appearances at the plate, and it can be risky, to say the least, for a novice to try something new in real time. That’s why performers like Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz are so special: their ability to experiment and adjust in the midst of performance enables them to take advantage of every opportunity for learning.

Feedback is vital to organizational leaders, too, and they are often as hungry as performers (and politicians like former New York City mayor Ed Koch) to know “how am I doing?” But even with a broader and more routine use of 360-degree assessments, employee surveys, balanced scorecards, and the enormous potential of enterprise software packages to pump out performance numbers, there is no effective substitute for immediate feedback, whether the leader in question is a frontline supervisor or the CEO. Indeed, for a CEO like Nestlé’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, a campaign to revitalize an ailing giant won’t generate meaningful results for months or even years. Yet, getting that feedback is critical to the learning process. That’s why Brabeck-Letmathe, like other leaders such as UPS’s Mike Eskew, mentioned earlier in the chapter, is constantly in contact with the people most likely to see results first: frontline employees and customers.

So what does all of this add up to? It would be a huge mistake to conclude that research on expert performance has arrived at a formula for eminence: a do-it-yourself cocktail where one combines a modicum of talent, a grasp of method, ambition, instruction, and feedback, and stirs. The journey to eminence is never simple or linear. The closer you get to the pinnacle of your field, the more you realize how little you really know. Or as Picasso remarked in his eighties, “It has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like children.”²⁶

What’s missing is a vital and catalytic ingredient in the evolution of an expert performer: the discovery, application, and refinement of a Personal Learning Strategy (PLS).

TOWARD EMINENCE: ADOPTING A PERSONAL LEARNING STRATEGY

Many performers and many leaders are unconsciously competent. They can do the things that warrant the label adept or eminent, but they are hard pressed to explain what it is they do or how they learned to do it.²⁷ The few who are consciously competent may not call their approach a PLS, but they recognize that their style, combined with their vision, is something they own, that’s driven by their ambition, that’s tailored to how they learn best, and that borrows from sources of inspiration they prefer (or find handy) to keep adapting and creating—whether they are personal experience, crucible events, or the works and lives of others.

A Personal Learning Strategy lives in both the head and the heart. For anyone aspiring to eminence, it’s essential to investigate both.

In the Head

The cognitive side of a PLS consists of lessons about how one learns and learns best. Revelations about learning cumulate over time—sometimes in isolation and other times with the assistance of coaches and critics.

Take the case of Pinchas Zukerman, noted Israeli violinist, winner of two Grammy Awards, and music director of Canada’s National Arts Centre.²⁸ As an adolescent violin prodigy touring the world playing to overflow audiences, Zukerman recalled being struck one evening by a profound “aha.” He realized that although he was good—very good—he suddenly understood that he had made it thus far because of simple talent. If he wanted to progress further, he’d have to change. “I would have to embrace a form of discipline that I had only flirted with up till then,” he recalled. “I had to dedicate myself to disciplined play.” For Zukerman, a Personal Learning Strategy grew out of two powerful insights: that there were borders to be crossed, and that crossing them would require him to learn new things in a new way.

Or consider the case of Dee Hock, who developed, in 1968, the concept of a global system for the electronic exchange of value and a new form of organization for that purpose: a decentralized, nonstock, for-profit membership institution to be owned by financial institutions throughout the world. That organization, Visa International, is now a $1.5 trillion enterprise jointly owned by more than twenty thousand financial institutions in more than two hundred countries and territories.

Hock believes that the concept of the organization derived from a deeply personal dissatisfaction with existing models of the business enterprise and the behaviors they induce on the part of leaders. He pointed to one experience in particular that triggered his search for an alternative form of organization, when he was just a young manager in a remote branch of a consumer finance company with three direct reports. “Our average age was about 191/2, and we just trashed the company manual and started doing things as common sense and circumstances seemed to indicate,” he said. “Within two years, this little office was leading the company in every measura ble category. Growth, percentage of profit, we met a credit and loss recovery. We collected more bad debt than we charged off. And I thought ‘Wow, this is great. Here I am 21 years old.’”

But as Hock put it, “We couldn’t hide any more. The anonymity was gone. And that great fist of corporate power just came down and crushed us for not following company policy.” Hock went on to describe how that led him to evolve his own working definition of a Personal Learning Strategy, as a “living process” of reading, thinking, comparing, analyzing, puzzling, and constantly questioning himself. “And worrying about why I felt so oppressed by and often abused by organizational structures,” he added. “And why I found myself becoming oppressive and abusive in the process.”

Recognizing that there are boundaries that define any form of expression, and that they as individuals can learn what’s necessary to go beyond them, is what prods performers like Zukerman and leaders like Hock to go further, to see what else they can discover or, better yet, invent. They are apt to devise pathways for themselves that, of necessity, pass through periods of severe testing, via crucibles—whether it’s submitting themselves to the authority of another in order to learn or stumbling through unknown materials and dynamics—because they know (or sense) that that is how they will continue to grow and how their art, whatever form it takes, will continue to evolve.

In the Heart

The emotional side of a Personal Learning Strategy is no less important than the cognitive: it is in the heart that most eminent performing artists and outstanding leaders believe that inspiration lives. There is no reason to doubt what they say. The intensity with which Tiger Woods approaches tournament play suggests that winning is not just an intellectual exercise. The same can be said for how a musician like Paul Simon sets about assimilating aboriginal rhythms into rock and roll, or for how Starbucks founder Howard Schultz talks about his vision of building a compassionate company. It is a force that will not be denied. Embedded within that surging energy is a desire to accomplish something grand: to make a mark on the world, to leave a lasting memory or legacy, to be recognized, to have one’s meaning understood.

But the heart is not just a repository. It is a lens through which feelings and experience are clarified, magnified, interpreted, and reproduced. Not surprisingly, performing artists frequently (though not exclusively) point to significant objects and events in their lives and in the lives of those they observe as a source of inspiration. Bill Russell, remembered best for his central role in the Boston Celtics basketball dynasty that won eleven championships in thirteen seasons, found inspiration at an early age from an unlikely source: the library. His mother made sure he had a library card, and Russell spent a lot of time with, of all things, books on Renaissance art. At home, he’d practice drawing some of the paintings he’d seen. “Most of the lines and the dimensions were correct,” he said, “but I somehow missed the paintings completely. I realized—as a kid—that what these artists had that I didn’t was a distinctive quality, a kind of signature statement … The way I took to Leonardo and Michelangelo was eventually how I took to the game of basketball.”²⁹

Sometimes it’s a phrase or a sentiment that serves as the source of inspiration that guides both the heart and the mind. For example, Frances Hesselbein refuses to call herself a leader—despite having held formal leadership roles in the Girl Scouts, starting with thirty ten-year-old girls in the basement of the Second Presbyterian Church in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, through to her retirement as executive director of the Girl Scouts of America, an organization comprising nearly eight hundred thousand members. For Hesselbein, the word that best summarizes her objectives and her style is opportunity—because she has so often found herself surrounded by it. But she tries to remember what management guru Peter Drucker once told her: “‘Frances, remember your job is not to provide energy, it is to release energy.’ So I keep saying to myself, How do I release the energy of other people, not think I have to do it?” she said. “But I release the energy … You and I have loads of opportunities. How do we disperse them? How do we open up opportunities to a lot of people who aren’t as fortunate as we are? … It’s all part of a larger philosophy. You can’t just have a passion for your work. You have to have passion for living. It doesn’t stop when you open the door of your office or begin when you open it.”

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Should a Personal Learning Strategy—the catalytic ingredient that does so much to distinguish eminent figures in the performing arts—have a place in leader development? Although my answer would be a resounding yes, I think the real question is, Does a PLS have an analog in practice? That’s not so clear.

Certainly, students of leadership have devised many useful developmental models that strive to take into account what roles the head and the heart play in becoming a leader, how those roles change over time, and how organizations ought to take each into account.³⁰ Most important among them have been the extensions into the realm of emotional intelligence, with the incumbent focus on self-awareness or, as Ellen Langer has suggested, mindfulness.³¹

Yet while experts on leadership often draw comparisons between business and performance, many of their models of leadership development don’t include the need for a Personal Learning Strategy—something that expert performance stresses so clearly. I have come to believe that three aspects of the PLS are vital: (1) A method for extracting insight from experience. Without it, aspiring leaders will miss the rich and frequent opportunities to learn from the challenges that life continually dishes up, including crucible experiences that can define them as leaders. (2) A powerful aspiration that encourages one to grow and adapt. This is something quite private and yet profoundly public in its consequences. It is individual and idiosyncratic and therefore difficult to shape into classroom lessons, and yet, as we will see, it is the glue that holds a Personal Learning Strategy together. (3) A concept—and a regimen—of deliberate practice that connects learning and performance. Practice may not make perfect, but unless practice occupies a central and honored role in leadership, it’s hard to imagine how novices will ever become adept or eminent—that is, something most aspiring leaders truly desire.

In the next three chapters, which compose part II, Crafting a Personal Learning Strategy, I offer a very practical, hands-on approach to exploring the intersection of experience, aspiration, and deliberate practice.