The Human Enterprise Blog

I just love the time between Xmas and the start of the New Year. And one of the pleasures I indulge in is even more reading. A book that caught my eye was Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice by Matthew Syed. Brilliant!

In case you don’t get the chance to read it, I’ve summarised it for you and linked the ideas to being the best leader you can be.

The Myth of Talent

The book very persuasively, with lots of anecdotal research, debunks the myth of talent, and raises, in my mind, the power of “bloody hard work and determination”.

To me it’s also a warning to all those who push the power of “talent”, to take heed, to really question whether “the talent” programme is where your next “superstars” will come from.

Many, and I mean many, of the successful senior leaders I deal with would probably have never made the cut in their own Internal Talent Programme.

They either don’t have degrees, or didn’t do all that well at Uni, or had fathers, particularly the blokes, who were not all that supportive when it came to building the “self-esteem” of their kids.

So guess what? If you’re not that talented, or don’t believe you are and you have to prove yourself, what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do; you work your bloody arse off. You focus, you put in the hours, you leave yourself open to learning and you practise, practise, practise!

(Incidentally this is exactly what Goffee and Jones found in their research for “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?”. We will be telling you more about this programme from these two London Business School Professors later this year.)

Your Hard Worker Programme

Let me ask you this, do you have a “Hard Worker’ programme (as a Sister Act to your Talent Programme), that identifies those that put in the hours, that dedicate themselves to continually learning, to continuous and never ending improvement?

They’re not mutually exclusive, but you owe it to the people you’ve selected on your “talent” programme, to not let it go to their head. Don’t indulge them; make them earn the right to promotions. If not, you’ll kill their spirit.

My philosophy is talent is nothing to be proud of; you got that from your Mum and Dad. Be proud of them, or if you’re cosmically inclined, thank the universe for selecting your parents. For me, it’s what you do with that talent, how hard you use and develop it for your own good and that of the world’s, that counts.

The 7 P's of Powerful Performance

So here are the keys. Learn them, use them, and teach them to your kids, your team. Ignore them at your peril.

1. Practise
2. Pointers
3. Pain
4. Personal
5. Possible
6. Pathways
7. Pressure

1. Practise

The Overview

You’re probably aware of the “10,000 hours concept” of what makes for excellence, which first came to popular light in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers.

It was based on the 1991 work of Dr Anders Ericsson, a psychologist from Florida State University who studied violinists at the renowned Music Academy Of West Berlin in Germany.

Through his study he found the biographical history of violinists were the same, but the difference between average, good and world class violinists was not talent, or teachers or intelligence. It was the number of hours they spent practising.

“By the age of twenty, the best violinists had practised on average of ten thousand hours, more than two thousand more than good violinists and more than six thousand more than the (average violinists).”

This pattern seems to be repeated over and over again.

Top performers have devoted literally thousands of additional hours to becoming master performers. Golf, tennis, dancing, ping pong, music, chess, running, athletics, you name it.

Leadership

You only get better at leadership through practise. I make a living by teaching ideas, concepts and skills, but it’s nothing compared to real life “practise” and experience.

Do more of what you are already doing. Make more decisions, make more calls, take more risks, ask for more projects where you’ll grow.

Rehearse your major presentations, practise giving feedback, delegating, coaching, and your skills development with your coach. (What a great way to start your year. Give us a call to discuss your coaching needs.)

Mentally rehearse your meetings, go over your affirmations again and again. Get more disciplined in your daily rituals and routines. DO stuff. As David Penglase, Sales Trainer states

“If you want more stuff, do more stuff”.

In other words, practise, practise, practise! And give your team the chance to take a leadership stand as well. Make them responsible for a piece of the business and hold them to account.

2. Pointers

The Overview

All the practise in the world won’t help if you don’t have a goal and constantly adjust your performance to meet that goal. And that feedback has to be outside yourself. Like our own psychological “baggage”, we never see our own stuff.

It would be crazy for me to go to the golf range and hit balls for 10,000 hours, with no external feedback.

We need what I call “pointers”. People who will:

1. “Point” out where you’re on and off track.
2. Give you “pointers” to adjust your behaviour.

Leadership

So as a leader get yourself a coach or a mentor, someone to give you honest feedback and point you in the right direction. Someone who’ll challenge you and not be “awed” or too “wooed” by your talent. Someone who will challenge you not to just set Big Hairy Audacious Goals for your organisation, but also for you. (At the human enterprise we have some brilliant coaches just waiting to take you to the next level. We have a specific coaching offer coming out in the next few weeks. So watch this space.)

3. Pain

The Overview

“Nobody said it was easy” - Cold Play

There will be pain. You know that. No pain, no gain!

Whether you believe in multiculturalism or not, I don’t know. But what many immigrants have achieved in this country is outstanding.

Like the owners of a deli in the western suburbs of Sydney (they were fields then) who bought the shopping centre and then other centres in the Western Fields of Sydney and then the world. “Westfield” Shopping Centres!

Go back and track the hours these people put in, the pain they suffered. Look at their lifestyle now and it looks amazing, but we both know it wasn’t always that way.

There will be sacrifices, there will be hardships. And from my experience if a family culture has a value around “hard work”, that the joy of “earn a ship” is more important than the right of “ownership”, then the sacrifice is worth it.

Leadership

No I’m not calling the kettle black. You may know I pride myself on taking off around 12 weeks a year throughout the year. I know I’m tooting my own trumpet, but during the other 40 weeks, there are often 14 to 18 hour days.

The Australian Financial Review published an article this January about the main issues facing CEO’s in Australia.

Everyone to a “tee” mentioned productivity. I love this country. Do not lose what we have created together here. If all of us put the hours in this year (with pointers), our productivity will go through the roof. It’s not “un” employment that’s the issue, it’s “under” employment.

4. Personal

The Overview

“You really have to wanna!”

There’s no way you’ll push yourself to the next level, or keep up the pace unless it’s personal. Deeply personal.

You have to get in touch with that part of you that wants success and wants it real bad.

I’m a Farnham fan. Yeah I realise he’s not cool, not hip and reflects my age. But it’s not just his music I love; it’s his courage.

His career was over for him in some ways until Glenn Wheatley (and yeah, we all know he went to gaol) asked him how badly he “wanted it”. How badly did he want to make a comeback, to be a star?

Glenn bet on John. The story goes he mortgaged his house to support the production of “Whispering Jack”. What great Aussie story. Now doesn’t let us know that we can make a difference by speaking out about what we believe in? “You’re the voice”.

Leadership

Are you the voice of leadership in your business, your family, your community?

Do you have something you believe in, to make it all worthwhile, or are you just going through the motions to “make ends meet”? What a terrible waste of a life. Don’t die with the music in you.

Martin Luther King really captured the heart of personal commitment when he prolifically declared:

“I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

At our leadership workshops we constantly inspire leaders to set out to achieve something of greatness, rather than setting out to be just a great leader. What’s that greatness for you, for your team, your business?

This is why determining a “higher” or “noble” purpose for a business is essential. Without it, what’s the point? It’s just about the money.

For crystal clear clarity on your higher purpose we’ll be giving you a coaching offer in the coming weeks.

5. Possible

The Overview

No matter how much you practise, no matter how many purposeful pointers you get, no matter how personal it is, you won’t keep at it, unless you think it’s possible.

The work of Dr Carol Dweck here is fascinating. Her studies (they’re in the book) look at the difference in performance of someone with a “fixed” versus a “growth” mindset.

A fixed mindset is like a “talent” mindset. It assumes a fixed “mental” capacity, either good, bad or indifferent. A “growth” mindset assumes no such thing. Everyone has the capacity to grow, to learn, to get better.

Let me give you one of the most important lessons you’ll ever get for your kids (it applies to your team and associates as well)

Don’t just recognise performance.

“You did a good job”

“That was a good mark”

“That’s a great report””

The underlying assumption here is that it emphasises the performance , which is fixed, and this can construed as the person’s ability also being fixed. Instead, or at least as well as, also emphasise effort, growth, approach (see our v-blog on The Power Of Crediting Through U.S.S.R. for a specific way to do this.)

“That was a lot of effort you put in”

“You really thought that through”

“That showed great initiative”

All of the above can be improved. They are not fixed.

Leadership

This is what I love about entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship, as Gifford Pinchot termed it (an entrepreneurial spirit within a larger corporation).

Many people think entrepreneurs are risk takers as they think possibilities. That’s both true and a myth. From an external perspective it looks like its risk, but entrepreneurs are so sure of themselves, their belief is so strong they put everything on the line, sometimes even the family home. Let me assure you if you actually started thinking, I could lose the family home, you wouldn’t take the risk. What they have is a “growth” mindset.

What are the possibilities in your business, yet to be untapped, the products, the markets, the channels? Who are the people you know can grow, you know have so much more to offer, or do you have a “fixed” mindset about them? I never cease to marvel at the untapped people potential in every business we deal with.

“Grow your people, grow your business”

That’s something we constantly tell our clients.

6. Pathways

The Overview

I loved the Australian Open tennis this year. Did you see Lleyton? What a gutsy effort. Have you seen how fast those balls come at you? Andy Roddick serves at between 209 to 242 km/h. That gives the receiver no time to think. That’s right, because at that level you are not thinking about returning a serve, you are doing it on auto pilot.

You see the Neo Cortex, the thinking part of the brain is focussing on the movement of the server’s hips or their eyes on the ball toss, to anticipate where the serve will go and leaving their returning of the ball up to muscle memory. How can you do this? Re read point one: Practise, practise, practise! Look at Agassi in his book Open. Try hitting 2,500 balls a day, 17,500 balls a weeks. Even if you have “zero” ability, with enough pointers you’re going to get pretty good.

In other words it becomes unconscious competence (according to Maslow’s Model). You don’t think about it. Because of literally years of practise, these neural pathways are carved deeply into the brain.

Leadership

Such pathways also exist in leadership. It’s called experience. But remember it’s not just years on the job. So many leaders have been leading for over 20 years, but in reality it’s just one year, twenty times over, without a “growth mindset”.

What’s the equivalent in business? What do you do over and over again that you don’t have to think about? Business systems. Don’t keep reinventing the wheel. Every year I see it, new competencies, new skills sets, and we were just coming to grips on the old ones.

Stabilise as much as you can. Get into a rhythm, a candour with your “ideal” day, week or month, as my dear mentor and friend Dr Fred Grosse advises. Don’t make any adjustments to new systems for a set period. Capture data by all means, but no changes.

Without set rituals, and routines for your business, you’ll never give yourself enough time for your Neo Cortex, to think possibilities, think different, think future.

“Systematise the routine to allow time to personalise the exception.”

And finally what if you do all this and you just can’t handle the….

7. Pressure

The Overview

Ever seen someone “choke”? In sport or in business? They’ve done it a thousand times, but they just appear like amateurs. You see it in golf, in tennis and also in business.

What happens? Well to use terms we spoke of earlier, you move from the Automatic Implicit System (the flow, the groove) to the Conscious Explicit System. You don’t respond as your natural self, you begin to think too much. And notice how this is normally on the big games or the last few rounds of golf, or the big presentations.

Because before when you could win, when you could claim victory, something you’ve been working for all your life, it was only a “could”. Now you’re in front it’s not just a possibility. You can win, and you can also lose. And with it literally years of your life that you’ve put in.

So how do you cope with this pressure? You have to override your brain; you have to trick it with self-talk. You have to rewrite your own mental software, with comments such as:

“It’s only a game”

“There’s always next time”

“I’ve done so well just to get here”

Leadership

Does this personal reaction of pressure apply in business? You bet. I speak for a living. I still feel the pressure to give value (and so I should). But I have a “life time” of “ups and downs” to put that one hour keynote or two day leadership programme into perspective.

“It’s one workshop”

“It’s one client”

“It’s one part of an entire program”

Don’t get me wrong. We do good work. But I think part of the reason for this, is we go into an event as ourselves, relaxed and confident and knowing who we are and what we stand for. Because, as I previously mentioned, as soon as your business or leadership identity is tied too strongly to your self-esteem, you’re stuffed.

The saddest examples of this are the suicides happening in Australia right now, particularly with business “men” who equate “Nett Worth” with “Self Worth”.

Years ago a chairman at Unilever (think Streets Ice Cream, and many iconic brands) said to me, when sales were down for the summer. “Paul, it’s not world peace here. It’s only ice cream.”

It didn’t mean he didn’t care. It just gave him a broader perspective in which to see his current results. And Unilever continues to be one of the most amazing FMCG companies on the planet. (And yes, they are a client).

When I help leaders to expand their identities beyond their business roles, not only do they become happier, they inevitably become better leaders.

So go easy on yourself. Put your business performance in perspective of your total life or the issues our world now faces, or you’ll choke, and then your performance really will begin to suffer.

In Summary

Talent is not enough. Never has been. Never will be. But talent and hard work are a lethal combination.

So there we have it, the 7 P’s of Powerful Performance

1. Practise
2. Pointers
3. Pain
4. Personal
5. Possible
6. Pathways
7. Pressure

I hope it’s inspired you to be the best you can be in 2012. Please share this newsletter with your family, your friends, your team. It’s always the best endorsement we can get.

As always your feedback is truly appreciated. I hope we get to work together this year. With over 48,000 hours in the leadership development space (40 hours a week x 40 weeks x 30 years) I’m beginning to get a feel for it. But I promise you, this year, I’ll be doing even more practise.

And remember to keep a lookout for the Transformational Leadership Coaching offer coming your way soon.

Paul "Mitch" Mitchell
the shadow bloke



Managing Director
the human enterprise

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