Leadership Systems

By Donna Butchko

For those of you too young to know it, there’s an old joke about a tourist asking someone on the streets of New York “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  The answer is “Practice.”  So maybe it’s not that funny, but it is the answer to virtually every question about learning to be good at something – and that includes leadership.  How do you get to be a good leader?  Practice.

Developing leadership skills presents a special challenge.  The opportunities to practice are not obvious.  You can’t stop in the middle of a discussion with an employee and say “Wait.  I think I can do that better.  Let me try it again.”  So you do your best.  That’s practice in the same way that medicine is called a practice – you try to learn from what you do. 

Learning from your practice – whether leadership or medicine – requires a number of things.  One is trying different things.  If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.  Maybe you know someone who claims to have 10 years of experience, while you suspect that what they actually have is one year of experience that they’ve repeated 10 times.  Repetition alone does not make effective practice.

Another component to effective practice is feedback.  This comes in many forms.  If an employee leaves a performance discussion in tears, that’s feedback that you probably could have handled it better.  Most leadership feedback is not that obvious.  Perhaps you had a hard discussion with an employee in which you believe you clearly spelled out his need to change his behavior.  He agreed and you thought you both understood each other.  In the next few weeks you notice few, in any, changes in the behavior you talked about.  That’s feedback that you probably were not as effective as you had thought.  But it’s also feedback that you will only get if you look specifically for it.  It’s easy to overlook when things stay the way they have been. 

Both these feedback examples showed you where you need to improve, but neither of them give you any guidance on how to make that improvement.   I know I want to hit the golf ball straight, and countless hours on the driving range hitting my slice will not help.  I need someone knowledgeable to suggest ways to do it better.  In most businesses, this is the hardest part of practice – finding someone that can help you identify ways to do it better.

A coach is a great addition to any practice program.  This is just as true for golf as it is for leadership.  If you can find a coach within your organization, who can observe you in action and provide improvement suggestions, that’s great.  The other option is an outside coach.  This can be a formal, paid relationship, or it can be a less formal relationship with someone you may have worked with in the past, for example.  In any event, be sure your coach is someone that will give you honest feedback.  That’s the only way you can improve.

So you have to make opportunities to practice your leadership, with feedback and reflection for improvement.  A coach can be a critical addition to your development.  Remember, practice makes perfect, but bad practice just makes bad habits.