If people are so important and practice makes perfect, then why do we spend so little time rigorously practising management skills?
For most organisations, management training is a few offsite workshops a year, where executives can gather together, bond, learn something new and then leave.
The problem is that improving performance is more than just learning new things. It is about learning how to do new things or learning how to do things better. It is about deliberately practising specific, relevant skills.
Take, for example, my 14-year old daughter Victoria's interest in swimming. Last month, she participated in the Connecticut State Championship swim meet. Her event, the 100-metre breaststroke, was over in less than a minute and a half. Yet for her to even qualify for this meet, she had to practice for literally hundreds of hours for months on end.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the "10,000-hour rule". He cites a study conducted in the early 1990s by psychologist K Anders Ericsson on violinists at Berlin's Elite Academy of Music.
What Ericsson discovered was that by the age of 20a, the most elite performers had practised a total of 10,000 hours. The next-best performers had practised about 8,000 hours and the next level had practised 4,000 hours. What Ericsson concluded was that given a minimum threshold of ability, hard practice is what separates good from great.
Not only is the time invested in practice important, so is the quality of how you practice.
I noticed that when Victoria was at swim practice, the coaches would constantly give her feedback on her technique.
It was a very simple formula of perform-feedback-perform repeated over and over again until the technique was mastered.
If you were to apply this formula to developing management skills, then you would expect leaders to practise repeatedly what they need to do and how they need to behave differently to be better managers. They would also invite feedback to improve.
Some skill examples include: What would you do differently to make better decisions? How do you coach and empower your subordinates to get more work done? How do you present and persuade more effectively? Practice shifts the focus of training from "what" to "how".
The problem today is that most learning is passive. It is more about knowing and less about doing. It is as if my daughter wanted to learn how to swim competitively by only watching a videotape and taking a few strokes in the pool.
That might teach her how to float, but it would never teach her how to be a champion swimmer.
Management is a verb. If organisations want to bring out the best in people, they need to embrace the idea of improving skills through rigorous practice.
Larry Chao is managing director of Chao Group, an organisation-change consultancy based in New York and Bangkok. Follow his articles every first Monday of the month.