CULTURE OF PRACTICE

Practice doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How well practice is supported within any group or organization—be it a basketball team, a school, or a multinational corporation—can determine whether people embrace it and eagerly take on new challenges or whether they resent practice and fail to engage in it. Great practice, then, is not merely a triumph of design and engineering, but a triumph of culture. By “culture” we mean the expectations for interactions between people in the organization, as well as their core beliefs: the ideas individuals take for granted and think of as “normal” within a particular organization or system. How people think about and talk about practice in the car ride home and the days after; their ideas for their own development and improvement; and how they react to and support their peers when they are watching them practice: all are critical to the life of a talent-driven organization.

Dr. Yoon Kang, director of the Margaret and Ian Smith Clinical Skills Center at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has established a culture rooted in the practice of intentional, repetitive, and iterative activities that help turn medical students into accomplished doctors. This should come as no surprise. Medical schools are designed to be places where students learn the practice of medicine. But not all medical schools are created equal when it comes to creating a culture of practice. In many schools there is a culture of sink or swim. Historically, at Cornell as in most medical schools, doctors were trained to conduct intakes and physical exams in the classroom setting. Students were then sent into a hospital to conduct patient interviews, learning on the job.

With a more recent emphasis on patient safety (in 2004 the licensure to become a doctor made it a requirement for students to interact with an actor-patient), all medical schools started integrating simulated practice and role plays into their programs. “Standardized patient encounters,” first used in 1963 at the University of Southern California by Dr. Howard Barrows, became the norm in medical schools across the country. Students perform exams on actor-patients who are specifically trained to follow the details of the case, making the experience as realistic as possible. This prepares students to establish rapport with patients, effectively perform examinations and other clinical skills—all necessary career benchmarks. Standardized patient encounters provide students, as early as their first year at Weill Cornell, the opportunity to perform core job tasks and get immediate feedback, a vital practice experience that could not be created with real patients this early in a doctor’s career.

While all medical schools revved up their programs as a result of the changes in the licensing exam, Dr. Kang had long been dedicated to finding ways for students to better learn through practice. In particular, she thought it was critical for doctors to practice establishing rapport with patients to ensure better diagnosis and more effective treatment. At Cornell students applied this skill in the setting of the performance, diagnosing an actor-patient, responding with empathy and sensitivity, and using active listening to respond to the medical details of the case. Several studies have shown that when there is strong rapport patients are more likely to follow a doctor’s advice.1 If medical students practice only discrete clinical skills and leave med school without the ability to establish rapport, they will be less effective overall in treating their patients.

Cornell uses a lens of practice and feedback for all aspects of the program, even the design and construction of their training facility (Rule 12). Not only do they replicate the performance environment for practice; they use physical space to create a culture of practice and constant improvement. For example, a central observation area is outfitted so that faculty can observe students practicing with the actor-patients; there are one-way mirrors and the technology to support wireless headsets so that instructors can change the audio channels to observe several rooms simultaneously. Rooms are also outfitted with AV equipment and microphones so that every interaction is recorded. This creates a longitudinal database so that students and professors can track their progress and ensure that practice has a positive outcome on student performance in medical school and beyond. As we saw with the football coaches in the Introduction, coaches have long analyzed game tape, but taping practice is actually more important. Part of building a culture of practice is videotaping practice; it sends the message that improvement through practice matters.

How does your space build a culture of practice and send the message that practice is one of the most important things you do? In his article for Harvard Magazine, “The Twilight of the Lecture,” Craig Lambert describes how Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur realized that his students were not actually learning or retaining information from his lectures. He reflects: “The students did well on textbook-style problems . . . they floundered on simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”2 When he shifted his approach to focus more on active student learning and less on lecture by asking his students to discuss and explain problems to each other, students were better able to understand and retain information two months after taking his course. However, simply incorporating more active learning into all classrooms is no easy fix, and this is where the skills center at Cornell comes in. Lambert and Mazur point out that in most classrooms there is an “architectural resistance,” as “most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums. They are built with just one purpose: focusing the attention of many on the professor.”

At Cornell, where the entire space is set up for practice, observation, and feedback, a culture of practice flourishes. For the first round of feedback on practice, after a simulation, the patient takes off his actor hat and, using a detailed checklist, gives the medical student three pieces of feedback from the patient’s perspective to evaluate the exchange (for example, the student did or didn’t greet me by name; did or didn’t listen to my heart or lungs). Actor-patients are trained to use constructive language, to tell the student how it felt to talk to the doctor, and to address the nonverbal messages the doctor was sending during the encounter. Dr. Kang says that some of the more advanced actor-patients have actually modeled the feedback for students (fulfilling the rules we described in the chapter on modeling). Following the feedback from actor-patients, students debrief with faculty, during which the emphasis is on the clinical aspects of the diagnosis. Finally, students review the video of their performance and conduct a self-assessment on their performance (Rule 22).

As we saw in Rule 23, practicing together and exchanging feedback builds isolated individuals into a collaborative team. In contrast to the cutthroat med school cultures of yore, imagine a culture based on collaborative practice and the exchange of feedback in the spirit of becoming the best doctor you can be. At Weill Cornell, aspects of everyday culture are engineered to promote effective practice and feedback. How do you create a similar environment on your team or in your organization? The rules that follow will help you on that path.

RULE 31 NORMALIZE ERROR

When you punish your people for making a mistake or falling short of a goal, you create an environment of extreme caution, even fearfulness. In sports it’s similar to playing “not to lose”—a formula that often brings on defeat.

– JOHN WOODEN

We know a woman who is a breathtaking skier. She tells an interesting story about her breakthrough moment—and it was just that, a moment—when she started down the road of becoming an expert. It happened on the day she decided to fall. She was getting on the lift at the base of a steep, sunlit ski bowl. She had just come down a twisted, mogul-ridden trail in top form, earning the admiration of a teenager who’d been trailing behind her. At the bottom, amidst words like “stoked” and “killer,” the teenager asked, “Do you ever fall?” Getting on the lift, she realized that (1) the answer was no, and that (2) if the teenager had been a nephew or a cousin whom she felt invested in developing as a skier, she wouldn’t have wanted to admit that to him. Instead she would have pointed out that if you never fall, you aren’t pushing yourself and you aren’t improving as fast as you could be. Midway up the mountain she realized that she hardly ever fell, perhaps once every eight or ten days on skis, and even then it was usually at tangled moments when she wasn’t actually skiing that hard. She realized that if she wasn’t falling she probably wasn’t pushing herself to learn as hard as she could be. She had gotten lazy because she was so good.

When she got to the top of the mountain and skied off the chairlift, she knew what she needed to do. She set out to ski hard enough to fall, but she was intentional about how. She knew that there was one thing that she had been working on: pointing her shoulders face down the mountain, no matter how steep. She then set out to execute this skill even if that meant falling. She fell three times that first day. “I could feel myself trying to do exactly the things I was afraid of. I knew if I stuck with it I would conquer my fears.” She began skiing without fearing falling. Within a few weeks she was a different skier entirely.

In that single moment, she was able to embrace two important truths: first, failure is normal and not the indicator of a lack of skill; second, skiing right at the edge of mastery would make her better. She had to trust that exposing her weaknesses—risking ridicule and embarrassment—rather than trying to cover them up would be the driver of excellence. Compare our friend to a skier who just tries to ski the hardest runs as fast as he can. If he pushes himself to fall without encoding success, then he will fail miserably, likely leaning back too much on his skis and risking injury.

How do you build an organizational culture of fearless skiers willing to take thoughtful risks in order to improve—especially when the goal is to encode success? An organization has to help its people realize that failure rate and level of skill are independent variables; it has to help them feel comfortable exposing their weaknesses to their peers so they can help them improve; it has to make them feel trust and faith and even joy, not only to practice but to do so with others. The first step on that journey is to normalize error.

What does research tell us about error? Moonwalking with Einstein author Joshua Foer (Rule 23) found out. When Foer set out on a yearlong journey to improve his memory, he called on the “world’s leading expert on expertise,”3 Anders Ericsson, and “struck a deal.” Foer gave Ericsson all of the records on his training for the United States Memory Championship. In exchange, Ericsson and his graduate students would share the data back with Foer in order to find ways to continue to improve his performance. This deal was extremely useful when Foer hit a plateau in his memory performance. Several months into his work of intense practice, his memory ceased getting better. Ericsson encouraged Foer to learn from other experts who, while engaging in “very directed, highly-focused” routines of deliberate practice, reach a performance plateau—which Foer calls the “OK Plateau.” The key is to then practice failing.

To illustrate the OK Plateau, Foer discusses learning how to type. When first learning, we initially improve and improve until we ultimately reach a peak of accuracy and speed. Even though many of us spend countless hours typing in our professional and personal lives, however, we don’t continue to improve. Researchers discovered that when subjects were challenged to their limits by trying to type 10–20 percent faster and were allowed to make mistakes, their speed improved. They made mistakes, fixed them, then encountered success. If Foer wanted to overcome his own performance plateau, he had to practice failing.

Applying this lesson to organizations is often easier said than done. Most organizations have a difficult relationship with error, and with good reason. Sometimes the results of error can be devastating, causing everything from a lost client, to debilitating press coverage, to massive product recalls. Even when the results would be minimal, it is common for many people in the workplace to be scared of making mistakes and even more terrified of anyone finding out. The challenge for organizations is to find appropriate ways to normalize error in the context of learning and practicing.

Here is what normalizing error looks like: first, challenge people and allow them to make mistakes, as we saw with the skier and the typist; second, respond to errors in a way that supports growth and improvement. You do this not by minimizing or ignoring mistakes, but by supporting people in fixing errors before they become too ingrained (Rule 8). This is a delicate balance, and for each organization and learning challenge it will look a bit different. To see how this balance can be achieved, let’s consider the classroom, a place where learning is front and center.

Something we have learned from watching great teachers is that they are very good at creating a classroom culture where error is accepted as a normal part of learning; but these teachers don’t allow errors to go uncorrected. Great teachers do not downplay the importance of an error, as in “That’s OK, sweetheart, that was a hard problem. It’s OK you got it wrong,” and do not allow mistakes to go unaddressed. When a third-grader reads a passage aloud with a few errors, her teacher will ask her to reread the sentence or phrase that was troubling: “Try reading that sentence again.” If the mistake persists, the teacher may prompt her with a decoding rule like “That sound is a short i.” Champion teachers will be relentless in ensuring that errors don’t go unaddressed and become more inscribed. They correct warmly and firmly. They prefer the rigor that self-corrections provide (as by having a student reread a challenging passage and fix her own mistake) but are direct when necessary (“That word is pronounced ‘diagram’”).

As in any culture, workplace, classroom, or other group, it is the accumulation of exchanges about mistakes that will determine how everyone approaches error. When a student is encouraged both to fail and to try again, it has a profound effect on all students—how they view their work individually and how they support each other in their learning efforts. The classroom becomes a safe place to fail and a place where error is always corrected but not condemned; a place where success matters.

In this effort, it’s important that teachers, coaches, and managers “get past nice.” Often our initial impulse when addressing error is to come at it apologetically: “That’s OK, Sarah. That was a really hard one; you did your best.” Or, “I’m sorry to call you out on this.” This approach has a number of negative effects. It communicates lower expectations, that errors (and feedback!) are something you should apologize for, and finally that error is something to be avoided. When you do too much tap dancing around something that needs to be improved, people will think that it is a bigger deal than it really is. Be warm, be direct, get past nice, and make errors a normal part of practice.

Failing, too, responds to practice. We practice failure in our schools with our students. At the beginning of the year, we practice what happens when students make errors in judgment and get a consequence for misbehavior. We explicitly tell them how to respond; we model how students should respond to a consequence (for example, by keeping their head up and focusing on fixing their behavior); and then we have students practice how they will respond when they get a consequence. What does practicing failure look like in other settings? If you work in customer service, you could practice having a phone call with a customer in which the customer service representative has tried everything but the issue can’t be resolved. The only thing for the rep to do is practice apologizing and responding immediately when the customer asks to speak to a supervisor. What is the rule that we always learned when falling off a bike or a horse? Get back on. Practice how to respond to failure.

In this book we began our discussion on practice with the importance of encoding success. What is the relationship between the need to practice success and the need to normalize error? What you do in practice is practice succeeding. But when practice is well designed, you can also use it to isolate failure. This allows people to take calculated risks in order to improve at a particular skill. When failure happens in your organization, you want to have built a culture that embraces it. When you effectively normalize error, what starts with failure reliably ends in success. The process of encoding success is what makes failure safe.

Normalize Error

• Encourage people to challenge themselves and push beyond their performance plateaus by taking calculated risks in practice.
• Don’t minimize or ignore errors, or they will become too ingrained and people won’t learn from them.
• Help performers identify their own errors so that they can improve them independently.
• Practice responding to errors in an effort to prepare for and normalize mistakes.

RULE 32 BREAK DOWN THE BARRIERS TO PRACTICE

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

– DAN AND CHIP HEATH, SWITCH

Practice, especially when done in front of others, can be physiologically challenging. For many of us it can actually bring on negative physical reactions (racing heart, sweaty palms) and psychological reactions (fear, nervousness, angst). But a fear of failing in front of our colleagues can prevent a level of success that can only be realized through practicing in front of others. While practicing privately is important, unless you also practice in front of others you miss out on the valuable feedback necessary to making improvements. As musical great Itzhak Perlman told Atul Gawande in a 2012 article for the New Yorker, practicing in front of others gives you an “extra ear.”4 We mustn’t be afraid of the critical lens brought by extra pairs of eyes and ears as we work to improve.

Because people would rather work on what’s easy to work on than on what is psychologically difficult, you need to be prepared for the clever ways that people will find to “work around the work.” These are the barriers to entry you’ll need to help people overcome if they are to engage in the kind of practice that can build a culture of learning and improvement. These barriers may come in the form of embarrassment, fear of failure, or lack of trust in the process. After the initial resistance is overcome, adults can then engage deeply in practice, but some force has to propel them over that initial barrier. In our own work, when we started to infuse practice into our workshops for teachers and school leaders, we found that the time to begin practice coincided with the sudden need for participants to take bathroom breaks. If participants weren’t sprinting off to the bathroom, then they were averting their eyes or urgently searching for something in their bags. While not entirely surprising, these escape tactics are a large part of the barriers to entry. Here are a few ways participants have used barriers to avoid practice:

• “Hey, we’re working hard here.” Putting on a display of hard work and active engagement can be a tactic for avoiding practice (Rule 24). In a recent workshop, during what was supposed to be a role play in which teachers work on their nonverbal directions to students, we noticed a group engaged in active debate on the topic. Upon noticing a facilitator nearby, one of the group members piped up, “We got into a really deep discussion of this.” Most people would think that’s good: they were on task, deeply engaged in the content. At first we did too, and we left them alone to reflect. But then we realized that these participants were on topic, not on task. They were (creatively) avoiding practice.
• “I don’t believe in . . .” One of our practice activities asks teachers to teach students the Pledge of Allegiance so that they can practice giving nonverbal redirections to students who are off task (Rule 10). We intentionally use the pledge because most people can recite it without having to think, thus freeing up their brains for practicing the skill we want to work on. One skeptical teacher took this opportunity to say that he didn’t want to teach the Pledge of Allegiance because he didn’t believe in it. We saw immediately that he was objecting to an extraneous piece of the activity in order to avoid the actual practice. We had him teach a nursery rhyme instead, and once we pushed him over his initial barrier to practice, he successfully engaged in the practice activity. It was important that we didn’t allow his discomfort with an ancillary aspect of the activity to prevent him from practicing, and we discovered our own ability to push past discomfort in the name of creating a culture of practice.
• “This doesn’t seem very realistic.” Others may resist practice by claiming that a scenario doesn’t “feel very realistic,” without realizing that we are intentionally distorting reality in order to be able to practice. Dr. Yoon Kang has witnessed this in her program with medical students. “Initially,” she says, “the hardest thing about practice is that they [the students] know it’s ‘practice.’ Before they walk in the room, students have challenges suspending reality. Once they walk in the room you see it melt away.” In our work, we see participants resist activities because of the level of scripting that we do for them. For example, in the Lay-Up Drill, when we ask teachers to give the direction “I need you to sit up” in order to focus on nonverbal body language (like planting your feet or using a signal), participants sometimes resist by saying that they wouldn’t actually use the exact words “I need you to sit up.” They are tripped up by the words we ask them to use, even though the words aren’t the point of the exercise.

Here are some steps leaders and coaches can take to address barriers to entry:

Some of us have learned not to believe in practice because of the pervasive ineffective use of practice. Maybe we have been embarrassed by practice that was unintentionally not set up to help us succeed, and we remain self-conscious. Or perhaps we have never had opportunities for micropractice (Rule 7) and therefore haven’t effectively built the smaller skills required to master larger ones. We are the nonbelievers because we haven’t experienced effective practice. The skeptics also don’t believe, but not because of negative experiences. Usually they don’t believe because being skeptical has proven to be an effective defense mechanism against practice, which may expose weaknesses. Regardless of the barriers, once you effectively address them, the benefits of practice can be realized. When people don’t want to volunteer or they resist practice in other ways, meet their coping mechanisms head-on by describing them and then overcoming them through practice. Only by proactively addressing these barriers to entry will you be able to create an organizational culture rooted in practice. The next rule on practicing joyfully can also help.

Break Down the Barriers to Practice

• Anticipate that some people in your organization will resist practice.
• Identify and name the barriers to entry that you observe.
• Overcome the barriers by diving into practice.

RULE 33 MAKE IT FUN TO PRACTICE

Work without joy is drudgery. Drudgery does not produce champions, nor does it produce great organizations.

– JOHN WOODEN

Some aspects of practice are just naturally fun, but what do we do when the fun parts aren’t the ones that help us get better? Many amateur golfers have had the experience of feeling like a pro at the range, hitting countless balls long and straight—only to go onto the course the next day and be disappointed to see their success on the range not translate to their scorecard. In a New York Times blog, Laird Small, the 2003 PGA teacher of the year, asserts that this is “because at the driving range, people hit golf balls” but “on the course, we have to hit golf shots.”5 On the range, recreational golfers may fire off a bucket of 25 balls in a half hour or so and then pack up their clubs, often feeling accomplished. When the pros go to the range, however, they simulate the speed of a real golf game by hitting half that many balls over the same amount of time. Phil Mickelson’s coach Butch Harmon, who also coached Tiger Woods, points out how much the average golfer could learn from watching how a pro approaches the range. He asks, “Who plays golf by raking one ball after another into the same place while hitting the same club? Nobody, right? So why do people practice like that?”6

Any recreational golfer will agree, though, that it is much more fun and rewarding to launch a driver high and far in the air, with the immediate positive feedback—“ping!”—than it is to spend time chipping out of the sand or practicing an approach shot. But it’s those shots that have the greatest impact on your success on the course. Mike Bender and Laird Small, both among the top-ten golf coaches in the nation, suggest a simple change in your approach. If you make practicing the short game fun, you will want to practice and your scores will go down (in golf, the desired direction). Make it a competition, either with yourself or a friend. See how many consecutive four-foot putts you can sink; who can get closer to the hole on two shots from the bunker; or how many chips it takes you to hit a nickel on the green. Make it fun to practice the skills you need to actually get better.

Practice should not be a punishment. When you invest the time and creativity to make practice fun, people will be motivated to participate, not only out of sheer enjoyment but also because you are communicating an important message: this is something positive that is worth our time.

Many tasks that we need to master in order to improve and develop are, like the short game in golf, just plain hard. But other tasks we may resist because they are tedious. The program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing made learning to type (an incredibly tedious task when first undertaken) fun by making it into a game. Mavis Beacon Teaches consists of different speed and accuracy tests, which constantly track the typist’s speed in words per minute, and several competitive games. Simply typing different sentences over and over to improve speed and accuracy would not motivate a beginning typist to practice. But if that same typist is typing to race a cartoon car against another car or competing against a fictional person typing the same sentences, then practicing becomes more fun and more motivating. The student wants to practice and therefore does it longer and more often. The typist gets better.

We have tried to apply the following ideas in our own workshops, having often seen great teachers take a similar approach to infusing joy into their classrooms:

• Leverage the Camaraderie of Practice. Being a part of a team is a welcome change for people who work in isolation. If you are a doctor or a teacher, for example, you gain camaraderie from working with your peers through practice. At our two-day workshops we frequently see teachers and leaders who have worked in silos all year coming together as they take risks and have fun through practice. Having the opportunity to share stories and strategies and to solve problems through practicing with your colleagues, when you normally work by yourself, can offer fresh perspectives, new ideas, and most of all, fun.
• Find the Fun in the Objective. Though incorporating joy is important, you should still have a clear objective and purpose to your practice (Rule 5). Incorporating fun is most effective when it is intricately connected to the objective. If a soccer coach’s players love to play dodgeball, he may be tempted to have them play as part of warm-up, rationalizing that it’s a way to warm up muscles before stretching. Instead, he could make the objective a particular skill (like dribbling) and create a drill which is fun but also focuses on the skill. So he might have his players all dribble their ball simultaneously as he or another player tries to kick their balls away from them; when he is able to kick a ball away, the player is eliminated. Get the most out of the practice by making joy serve the objective.
• Make It a Competition. Children aren’t the only ones who enjoy a good competition. Turning something into a competition often requires only a small tweak in the activity. For example, during a training in which reading teachers were learning how to use a nonfiction reading strategy, we came up with a way to take what was a lackluster activity and transform it into a competition. Initially, we asked teachers to read a passage from a fiction text and underline the sections that mention topics that would serve as an opportunity to have students read a nonfiction article to get more background information. Though centered on a clear objective, it was not very fun. So we turned it into a “parlor game” in which teachers found promising passages from fiction, wrote them on small pieces of paper, and put them into a hat. Teachers then drew the passages out of the hat and tried to come up with as many ways to increase students’ background knowledge for a particular passage. A simple activity became fun, and teachers better remembered the skill they were practicing. Simple prizes and rewards like small gift cards or homemade trophies are a good way to sweeten the pot.
• Three Cheers! Throughout our workshops, we incorporate quick cheers (that we have learned from great teachers) to give to participants following practice. They are admittedly goofy, but they can effectively lighten the mood while recognizing participants for their hard work. Following a role play in which teachers teach a mini-lesson using “Wait Time” (the time they wait after asking a question until they call on a student), we may then give participants the “roller-coaster cheer” by quickly modeling it and then having them do it (pushing your hands in the air six times to mimic a roller coaster going up a hill, and then three times going down, saying, “wooo! wooo! wooo!”). You may have to take our word for it, but it’s fun.
• Suspense and Surprise. In order to ensure that all participants eventually get a chance to practice (instead of only those most likely to volunteer), you can randomly assign roles by hiding Post-its under their chairs (“You’re the first surgeon to practice today”), or by whose birthday is coming up next or who commutes the longest to work each day. This type of framing prevents the rally-killing plea, “Any volunteers?” It is especially useful when you are training large groups and ultimately saves valuable time for the actual practice and feedback components (Rule 15). It keeps the practice fresh, fun, and engaging. It is no longer if someone will volunteer to practice, but who. The element of surprise has another key benefit. By keeping the practice role unknown in these ways, all participants approach role plays and practice as though they may be the one who will be chosen next to practice. This results in people authentically doing the work to prepare, which is practice in itself.

The more your team members enjoy doing something, the more they will practice. The more they practice, the more they will improve. In our trainings we tout that one of the results of our workshops will be happy teachers, because effective teachers are happy teachers. But when you or your team need a little added incentive to practice, keep the above ideas in mind. Remember first and foremost not to use practice as a punishment or only when performance has been poor. The power of practice, and the joy of fulfillment it can bring, will be undermined if it is only prompted by failure. People won’t be invested, because they will be distracted by the implications of what it means to be asked to practice. The next rule addresses this: how to make practice the norm for yourself or your organization.

Make It Fun to Practice

• Utilize friendly and positive competition (for individuals or between individuals).
• While striving to make practice fun, always maintain the objective of the practice.
• Encourage your players to cheer for each other in practice (not just in the game).
• Incorporate elements of surprise. Keep people on their toes by asking all participants to plan and by surprising the next person to be called to practice. (It’s also a useful accountability tool!)

RULE 34 EVERYBODY DOES IT

Frequently in our workshops, we encounter senior-level leaders who really like the material that we are presenting and believe in using it in their organizations. We initially were surprised when we noticed that these leaders often weren’t practicing. We approached one executive director who was standing on the sidelines while the other participants engaged in a role play who said, “I don’t really do this in my job.” It is much easier to sit in the back of the room with a laptop, observing others taking risks, and think how powerful the practice is, without having to take those risks ourselves.

But we have also witnessed the opposite reaction from senior leaders, and the impact on others has been tremendous. One afternoon during a training with 60 teacher leaders at the Houston Independent School District (HISD), we were practicing a technique we call “No Opt Out,” which has teachers hold individual students accountable for the right answer. At one point, teachers were practicing how to respond if a student refuses to answer a question by saying “I don’t know” in a sarcastic tone. Anastasia Lindo Anderson, a school improvement officer for HISD Middle Schools (no small role, as she is responsible for helping principals across Houston improve their instructional programs), and her colleagues from the district were practicing along with their teachers. When asked if she would share her practice, she gladly accepted. We all watched as she and the teacher role-playing the sarcastic student went back and forth. It wasn’t easy. The “student” continued to resist despite her warm persistence. What she ultimately was able to model was respectful but insistent language and a tone that served as an excellent example. Her willingness to expose herself and share her expertise not only helped teachers see a great way to leverage the technique, but showed her openness to engaging in practice. She wasn’t just modeling a technique. She was modeling risk-taking, engagement, and a commitment to improving.

At our workshops we now model all of our practice activities in advance of having participants practice, and we sometimes call our shot saying that we will model a B+ version. We then intentionally make a few small errors and ask for feedback (this allows us to model the structure of our practice activities with feedback and then the incorporation of the feedback). If you are nervous about modeling as a leader, framing your modeling as a B+ version gives you permission to try it because you are being transparent with your staff that you are not going to be perfect. This serves several purposes: (1) it takes the pressure off of you if you are new to modeling; (2) it models the feedback process; and (3) it helps your team see you as someone who is willing to engage in practice. It shows that just because you’re the leader doesn’t mean that you’re perfect. This goes a long way in building trust and a culture of practice.

When you are ready, you can take this up a level: don’t frame it as a B+ version; just jump into the modeling (after you have planned it). Say, “I’m just going to try this.” This framing shows the level of risk that you are willing to take for the purposes of practicing and improving. Always ask for feedback when you model. This shows that everybody practices, and that everybody gets feedback in practice. In our workshops, after modeling practice activities, we always ask, “What is something I could have done better?” This is usually met with silence. People are trying to be nice, and they are reluctant to give us feedback. But we always push them on this in the spirit of creating a culture of practice. People assume that as leaders we shouldn’t be corrected. They are socialized to believe that we aren’t really asking for feedback. We have to persist: “I know there were at least three things I could have improved. What’s one of them?” When we set this expectation in the beginning as we establish a culture of practice, by the end of our workshops participants are more than willing to share their feedback.

As we saw earlier, we all may experience our own barriers to entry. When you are intentional and inviting in your language, everybody in your organization will be more willing to try. When you are intentional with your language and you engage in practice as the leader, you have the necessary ingredients for creating a culture where everybody practices. As we saw in the chapter on modeling, it is vital that we provide an effective model if we want practice to be effective; it’s also vital if we want to build a culture of practice. If you don’t personally embrace practice as the leader—and practice yourself—then a culture of practice will never thrive in your organization.

Everybody Does It

• As the leader, be willing to model and engage in practice yourself.
• Ask for feedback on your practice in order to model getting past nice.
• Use language that is inviting and assumes everybody will practice.

RULE 35 LEVERAGE PEER-TO-PEER ACCOUNTABILITY

While rebuilding houses destroyed by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua in 1998, a Peace Corps volunteer started a credit union requiring people receiving a new home to put down community references in lieu of collateral. These references were friends, family members, or neighbors who could vouch that the applicants would pay the loan. The decision to create these arrangements was based on microfinance—the idea that people would be more likely to default on their own possessions than to compromise their reputation in the community and let their community down—and it proved to be effective. With microfinance, the rate at which people in developing nations pay back their loans exceeds any predictive algorithm that bankers may use. One of the biggest factors that reduces the number of people defaulting is that microloans are issued to a group whose members jointly commit to repayment. According to a 2006 study on microfinance by Suresh Sundaresan, professor of finance and economics at Columbia University, and PhD candidate Sam Cheung, joint liability helps “keep the default rates of members low” and “active peer monitoring reduces defaults and delinquencies.” It also “prevents any member of the group from taking on risky projects because others in the group, who are jointly liable will attempt to prevent that from happening.”7 When individuals owe people close to them instead of an anonymous big bank, they are more motivated by their loyalties and relationships than they are by having their credit threatened.

How can we apply these principles in creating a culture of practice? Consider the idea that people are at least as accountable to their peers as they are to authority. Leveraging that commitment in training can be a valuable tool in promoting an effective culture of practice. A powerful way to create a culture of peer accountability (and therefore practice) is through the self-identification of areas of growth and mutual accountability.

At one of our best schools, North Star Academy’s Vailsburg Elementary, principal Julie Jackson focuses on three things: systems and routines, positive framing, and strong voice. She trains in these areas over and over, choosing to practice fewer things better and never wavering from those top three (following Rule 2). She also recognizes the power in having her team exercise a degree of choice in what they work on and how. She asks her teachers to identify the techniques they want to improve. This gives them constrained choices for the areas of improvement, but it also gives them the freedom to decide what they are going to focus on, both individually and as a team. Teachers are more invested in the practice of each technique because they identify their areas of growth themselves. They then work together in small teams, making commitments to each other about how they are going to practice and achieve their goals. As a result, they hold each other accountable by practicing the techniques together and then observing each other in the classroom for the specific techniques. Ask your team to set goals and to hold each other accountable, and you will reap the benefits of a culture of practice.

At many of our schools we often start the year with a brief discussion on a concept we learned from Ronald Morrish’s With All Due Respect. In the book, Morrish introduces the idea that at successful schools—schools where teachers, students, and families are working together towards a common goal—teachers see themselves as “school teachers,” not “classroom teachers.” That means that teachers are invested in each other’s success and that all teachers are responsible for the teaching and learning of all children in their school, not just those students in their classroom. When they see another teacher in trouble, school teachers seek to help them instead of judge or ridicule them. The sad reality today is that many of our schools are full of classroom teachers, teachers who walk by unsuccessful classrooms and roll their eyes, thinking, “Those students behave with me.” Classroom teachers subscribe to a “shut my door and teach” mentality. They believe that they have one responsibility: to teach their kids. This type of culture is poisonous. It’s poisonous to the development of teachers, and it’s poisonous to children. According to Morrish, “For discipline to work in a school, you must adopt the following belief: ‘Together, we are the teachers of all the students at our school.’ . . . Unless each teacher ascribes to this bigger picture, school-wide discipline cannot be implemented.”8 In a culture of practice where people are invested in each other’s success and development, teachers improve and students learn, schools are better, and so is our society.

No matter what sector you work in, you can apply the “school teacher” mentality. Invite your team to work together to identify and set their own goals. Allow them to determine what they should be practicing, and make them accountable to each other. When individuals are invested in each other’s success, your team will be inherently stronger. Members of your team will support each other in practicing to achieve their goals, and a culture of practice will flourish. When your team members are invested in each other, their successes become inextricably linked and getting better as a team becomes much more achievable.

Leverage Peer-to-Peer Accountability

• Allow your team to self-identify particular skills and areas of growth they want to focus on (based on consistent feedback).
• Encourage team members to make mutual commitments to each other.

RULE 36 HIRE FOR PRACTICE

In our work in schools, we learned very early in our process that we needed to see people teach a sample lesson before we hired them to teach in our schools. It may sound absurd that this was a revelation, but the majority of schools in our country don’t ask prospective teachers to actually teach a lesson before hiring them. On his “School Reform” blog, Whitney Tilson cites that only 13 percent of teachers hired in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2010 were required to teach a sample lesson before they were hired.9 This is the equivalent of hiring 100 surgeons when you had seen only 13 of them perform surgery. We soon realized though that it wasn’t just about candidates demonstrating that they could teach a sample lesson in our schools. What we became most interested in was their ability to respond to feedback—how candidates take it and how they are able to incorporate it into their instruction. In the feedback session, we often ask candidates to repeat a particular part of the lesson, practicing with school leaders. What teachers do in the sample lesson is important, but it’s more important to see how they do in the feedback session.

Katie and another teacher leader at her school recently conducted a feedback session with a teacher candidate after her sample lesson. To practice, Katie used the teacher leader to act as the student with her head down on the desk and had the candidate ask her to sit up straight. Katie had her do it three or four times, each time asking her to incorporate a different piece of feedback. The candidate remained positive and open to feedback throughout the process, which gave Katie a good understanding of how she might perform within her culture of practice.

Whatever the practice task is for your candidates, focus mostly on how they respond to the feedback process. Are they resilient or resistant to the process? Do they see it as an unwelcome challenge, or are they excited about the level of feedback they are getting? This process not only informs hiring decisions but also better serves your potential hires. If candidates don’t enjoy the process, then they likely won’t enjoy working in an environment in which practice and improvement are the focus.

The more we have come to understand that we have to grow our teachers and that the way to grow them is through practice, the more we focus on how we use practice in our selection process. It has caused us to realize that we don’t always need to hire the very best teacher but a teacher who is most susceptible to practice. We would rather have a level-six teacher (on a scale of ten) who has the potential to skyrocket than a level-eight teacher who will have a slower learning curve and potentially be resistant to practice and feedback. Though we hire for being coachable, we can also coach people to be more coachable, so we look for that too.

Assume that you are hiring people who will stay with your organization for at least five years. In that case, it’s more important to think about where they will be in their second year, after one year of practicing and coaching, versus where they enter in year one. If you have someone practice and he is a six out of ten, but is open to practice and feedback, then he could be a valuable contribution to your culture of practice. On his way to becoming a level eight, he may make other eights into nines through his relentless spirit of improvement. You may be better served to hire an employee with a lot of potential through practice than someone who is fantastic but could potentially be a drain on a culture of relentless improvement.

Building an organization around practice means hiring people who are responsive to it: people who like and use feedback, who enjoy working with a team, who are comfortable talking about their mistakes, and who are eager to improve. In short, incorporating practice into your hiring changes your selection process because it changes the attributes you are looking for.

Set candidates up to have an informal interaction with someone who would be their subordinate. Are they respectful and polite or dismissive? Are they receptive to feedback from colleagues, regardless of their positional authority? For a candidate applying for a position in advertising, ask her to create a mini-campaign for a new product line. Is it innovative? When you give her feedback on her innovation, is she excited to incorporate it? For a candidate in corporate real estate, ask him to prepare a pitch for one of the buildings you are trying to sell. Does he have a sense of the market? Is he aware of what clients want? How does he respond to a simulated situation in which a client doesn’t like what he has prepared? Is he receptive to feedback? You probably see a theme here. Though candidates’ performance on these tasks is important, it is of equal importance to see how they respond to the experience of practicing and getting feedback. As part of the interview process, ask candidates to try out different approaches based on feedback, and see if they can improve through practice, or if they are resistant to it.

When Erica first interviewed to work at an Uncommon school as a dean, she prepared intensively for her “sample lesson.” Despite hours of preparation and practice, Erica’s lesson was a disaster. Several students were talking when she was talking; a student who was distracting others on the carpet had to be sent to his desk; and she didn’t effectively transition students from their desks back to the carpet for the lesson wrap-up. Yet she still got the job. Why? Because they were hiring not only for Erica’s skills in the classroom but also for her ability to take honest feedback, reflect on her own instruction, and identify action steps she could have taken to improve her lesson. In the lesson debrief, Erica identified about 15 ways she would have taught the lesson differently. (“I should have observed in the classroom beforehand to understand more of the classroom’s routines and procedures.” “I should have circulated more when students were on the carpet.”) She was eager for input and feedback from her interviewers. Afterwards, thinking that she had completely bombed the interview, she called her husband and told him that it had been a good experience but there was no way she was getting the position. Little did she know at the time that her reaction to feedback and her willingness to try again would actually get her the job.

When school leaders give feedback to potential candidates, they often say, “If you were my teacher, this is what I would say to you about your lesson. . . .” You can immediately tell how willing candidates are to practice and respond to constructive criticism by how they react to the feedback that follows. Are they writing it down? Are they nodding their head? Are they pushing back on suggestions or making excuses for their actions? These are all incredibly useful data points; more useful than an answer on their beliefs about pedagogy or theory. Ask them to practice their instruction, practice reflecting on the lesson, and then practice getting feedback on its strengths and areas for improvement. Finally, have them teach a portion of the lesson again to you, incorporating the feedback. In short, ask them to do what they would have to do on the job.

Consider the skills that are required for your profession but that are not susceptible to improvement through practice. Hire for these skills. If reasonable practice won’t improve required skills (like basic people skills and social graces), then hire people who already possess them. Identify those skills that are prerequisites and interview (or do a phone screen) to determine if candidates possess them. Then, identify those skills that can be practiced and have candidates simulate a practice activity to determine if they can develop and improve these skills. Incorporate practice into your lens for hiring new employees and you will have a greater chance of creating a strong team rooted in a culture of practice.

Hire for Practice

• Before hiring your team, thoughtfully consider the practice task you want potential employees to demonstrate.
• When potential hires practice, use the opportunity to gauge their openness to practice and feedback.
• Ask them to repeat a portion of the practice task. Evaluate their ability to actively incorporate your feedback.

RULE 37 PRAISE THE WORK

We have discussed how to develop skills through the use of praise in single interactions, working one-on-one (Rule 26). It’s important to also think about positive feedback at scale across an organization. In developing a culture of practice, organizations can support the effective use of praise in two vital ways: first, through normalizing effective praise that encourages good practice; and second, through creating strong systems of recognition. Whether it is your middle school soccer team or Six Sigma Black Belts at General Electric, people respond to praise. But it is all too easy for recognition to become a meaningless exercise. When awards are given away to everyone, when praise is distributed freely and disingenuously, or when praise focuses on traits rather than actions, it can be useless at best and at worst can be destructive.

Often-cited Stanford social psychologist Carol Dweck has studied the impact of praise on student achievement. Her work has demonstrated that when you praise children for a particular trait (for example, being smart) instead of a replicable action (for example, working diligently on a challenging set of math problems), students may actually underperform because they don’t see their achievement as being within their control. Praising traits leads students to believe either “I’m smart” or “I’m not,” whereas praising actions leads them to believe they can change their behavior to influence outcomes. We should learn from Dweck’s work when working with both children and adults in practice. Praise the actions that you want to see from your players, your children, or your employees, and these actions will multiply.

Watching stellar teachers use precise praise to motivate and inspire students has taught us a lot about how we can do the same with adults. We’ve learned that it’s important to differentiate acknowledgment from praise, setting a higher standard for when praise is used. As Doug describes in Teach Like a Champion, “In a case where expectations have been met an acknowledgement is fitting, a simple description of what the student did or even a thank-you usually suffices.”10 Acknowledging your students, your children, your players, or your employees is important. “Thanks for helping out your teammate.” “Thanks for clearing the dishes.” “Thanks for your comments in today’s meeting.” These statements recognize when expectations have been met. You expect your players to help their teammates, your kids to clear their plates, and your employees to actively participate in meetings. Praise, however, should be reserved for when people go above and beyond the call of duty or when they truly demonstrate excellence. “That was fantastic of you to clear and clean all of our dishes tonight!” “It was great of you to collect all of the balls and jerseys after practice today.” “You were outstanding in how you delivered that really difficult message today in the staff meeting. I’m proud of you for tackling such a difficult issue because it will make a difference in our performance and communication.” Acknowledge (by saying “thank you”) behavior that meets expectations; praise behavior that exceeds it.

Using precise praise in the classroom, we have learned the importance of giving it genuinely and earnestly. Adults and kids alike can immediately perceive when praise is not genuine. When praise is delivered insincerely, it can be cloying and can undermine what you are trying to recognize. Balance sincere praise with candor and constructive criticism, and your praise will be valued.

Use genuine praise in practice and in performance, and use it publicly. Praise is often most powerful when it is made publicly because it gives the recipient the attention that she deserves and, further, it informs others of the actions that your team or organization values. One way to bring important positive feedback to everyone’s attention is through systems of recognition that support effective practice. Make sure that these systems extend not only to performance (for example, writing a weekly e-mail to your sales team in which you praise one of your employees: “Anthony knocked it out of the park in today’s presentation to our client!”) but to practice as well (“Jen incorporated a new strategy today when we practiced our closing arguments”). Having a system of recognition that extends to practice is especially important because the positive feedback can inform people on what to do during performance. It also ensures that you won’t just praise success (“Sheila was promoted!”) but that you will praise the habits that lead to success.

With one of our practice activities in which every teacher gets individual feedback from a coach, we found that teachers weren’t listening to the feedback that other teachers were getting because they wanted to give each other privacy. We encouraged them to fight that instinct, because the feedback and praise that individual teachers were getting also benefited the entire group. When others could hear the praise, they could identify actions that they could strive to replicate. When people know how to make praise specific and applicable, making it publicly contributes powerfully to a culture of practice and improvement.

In creating systems of recognition, Uncommon Schools has set up a bulletin board in its central office in which employees post public praise that recognizes how their colleagues may be demonstrating the core values of the organization. A recent post made by the director of marketing celebrated the chief information officer for “making time to listen and provide feedback on a presentation my interns prepped. They felt professional and respected to have time with and be engaging with the CIO.” This praise fulfilled all of the ideal tenets of using precise praise: it praised actions, not traits; it went beyond acknowledgment because the action warranted praise; it was done publicly; and it was genuine. And the two most powerful components? It was about practice, and it was delivered by someone other than the CEO.

Praise the Work

• Normalize praise that supports good practice:
  • Praise actions, not traits
  • Differentiate acknowledgment from praise
  • Be genuine
• Create systems of recognition.

Creating a culture of practice is not simple work. The rules in this chapter can help you begin to master the challenges that lie ahead. One of the benefits of a robust culture—an organization that loves to improve and that thinks about mistakes as a normal part of improving—is the sense of camaraderie that develops among peers who take time to build each other up, mutually expose their weaknesses, praise one another’s strengths, and demonstrate the humility implied in the decision to risk falling. Practice together, then, and make your profession a team sport. These rules will push you to intentionally plan for strong, safe practice that will help you get better at making your people better.

Notes

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1002465/pdf/westjmed00107–0046.pdf

2. http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture

3. Moonwalking with Einstein, p. 53.

4. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande

5. http://onpar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/at-the-range-drive-less-and-practice-more/?scp=17&sq=practice&st=Search

6. http://onpar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/at-the-range-drive-less-and-practice-more/?scp=17&sq=practice&st=Search

7. http://www.hec.fr/var/fre/storage/original/application/35794449631be0c15c6a36e055ab10d2.pdf

8. Ronald Morrish, Keys to Effective Discipline, p. 148.

9. http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html

10. Teach Like a Champion, p. 211.