You’ve heard the adage about some people having ten years of experience, whereas others have the same year repeated ten times. Regular growth is easier to do as an individual contributor, but how do you maximize your growth as a leader? How can you accelerate your “seniorification”? Let’s consider deliberate practice for leaders.

Experience Basics

The science appears to be pretty clear about gathering experience. Deliberate practice is something we all should aim for. It boils down to doing things with the intention and focus of noticing how we are performing and not absentmindedly repeating the same things. This requires being exposed to different types of work and learning how to learn from those experiences.

Think back to how you progressed as an IC, whether it was a decade ago or recently. Often, improvement was tangible. Feedback was everywhere. That’s why I fell in love with TDD initially: you immediately got a sense of how well you progress. Feedback (in the form of red/green tests results) shows up every few minutes. You churn out features every day and see whether those work or not. In addition, people who want it usually can get a lot of variety at work in startups. There were weeks when I routinely used more than five different programming languages.

All that seems to be gone when we transition to leadership. When any change to culture or processes, for example, takes days, weeks, or even months, how can you get your deliberate practice?

Exposure to Opportunities

So, deliberate practice has two parts to it. The first is getting enough opportunities to practice and learn, so we are not in a Groundhog Day-like career. Here are some examples to ensure you expose yourself enough:

• Set goals. Without some stretch goals, work very easily becomes routine and mindless—the exact opposite of deliberate practice. Set objectives for your organization. Help people have goals for improvement as part of your coaching. Perhaps most important of all, have personal goals.
• Have intermissions routinely. These are sometimes also called ‘innovation weeks’ or ‘sabbaticals.’ They make ample room for creativity to flourish even in high-paced startups. You can read more about them in the free sample chapter of The Tech Executive Operating System.
• Get out there. Quite literally, you should be attending meetings that aren’t in your comfort zone. Take part, even a small one, in projects and processes you don’t have to. Volunteer to take responsibility for different initiatives. Those can become a fertile ground for experimentation. See next.
• Experiment. You should almost always have something you’re in the process of implementing or tweaking. It could be having a specific team that’s doing planning differently, someone checking out a new tool, or even having a week when you purposely change your calendar regime (no-meeting Mondays, only meeting on Mondays, etc.)
  

Think

The second part of deliberate practice is to pay enough attention to what you do so that you learn from it much faster. Doing the work doesn’t get you all the experience boost. It’s processing and gaining insight from those experiences that help you mature. This is like aging wine: if it weren’t for the exposure to oxygen one gets (in barrels or the cork), wine would age much more slowly. Wine that absorbs that oxygen improves and ages. Are you absorbing all you can from your work?

Take a second and consider how aware you are really in your day-to-day. For example, when I ask my clients what surprised them recently, they rarely know. We are so busy being busy. When you’re wrapping up a project, think about its execution, what went well, what didn’t, and what you should do differently next time. Regularly take stock of the various projects ongoing and emergencies on your plate, and think about how urgent and critical things seem now. Then consider your notes from a month ago, and how many of the emergencies from then you even still remember.

Further, all the goals we discussed in the previous part provide ample opportunities for insights. Why is something worthy of being an objective? What would be improved by achieving it? How would you know you’re done?

Actively gaining insight on a regular basis propels your experience-gathering remarkably. Life’s too short to waste.