Are Top Performers Born or Made?

Expert performers. Pavarotti hitting the high C. Lance Armstrong vanquishing the Tour de France field. Yo Yo Ma becoming one with the cello. Wayne Gretzky piling up the points. We’ve all seen these stars in action, reaching the penultimate in their fields, doing things that no one else has done in a seemingly effortless manner. But how did they reach their top-echelon skill levels? Were they simply born to be great or was there something more at play?

The work of academic researcher K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues sheds welcome light on the question of what matters most in producing high performance. Is it natural ability or hard work? Both are certainly important but which one matters most? For business and HR executives this is not merely an academic question. There is a great deal at stake in terms of how investments in recruiting and developing people are made and the kinds of payoffs they yield. Should you hire only the best – people at the top of their game or with sterling smarts and credentials? Or should you develop unproven but passionate people?

If you believe innate talent matters more, as many large corporations do, then you will build a talent management system that is geared toward finding the brightest minds, attracting them and keeping them motivated and happy in your organization.

However, if you believe that hard work matters more than natural ability then you will take a different approach, not necessarily looking at people with the best credentials, but rather those who exhibit a passion and a commitment to excel at something. You will create a work environment that helps people discover what they love and enables them to become excellent at it.

Experts Are Made Not Born

Professor Ericsson and his colleagues have spent years studying top performers from many different fields – science, mathematics, sports, the arts, business, etc. The team analyzed reams of performance statistics and biographical data as well as volumes of data produced from years of their own experiments with expert performers.

The verdict - experts and high achievers are made far more often than born and the driver of their performance is deliberate practice. The researchers found that deliberate practice develops expertise when it incorporates specific goal setting, gives immediate feedback and focuses on technique equally with results.

These research findings raise significant questions about how organizations recruit and develop high performers. If expert performers are made, then what is your organization doing to manufacture them? Is this even an explicit goal? Is your learning and development capability up to the task? Is it strategic – focused on the future and on a long term vision of competency and performance or tactical – focused on today’s performance goals and requirements?

Practice, Practice, Then Practice Some More

Practice is something that we all know from personal experience playing sports or a musical instrument, pursuing hobbies, learning a second language, and so on, is critical to developing skills and performing at peak. Yet in the business world, the concept of conditioning and honing of skills and abilities is not viewed in the same way. It is much more common to learn and develop through the actual work – which certainly has some merits. But few organizations structure jobs and work environments to allow people to systematically improve their performance, for example providing staff with opportunities to develop and hone their skills through offline practice and repetition or allowing them to experiment and take risks to move to the next performance level.

Ask yourself these questions about your organization: What are you doing that helps staff to perform at peak when it counts most? Ironically, here’s where play – specifically games - have a valuable role. They promote the critical driver of performance – deliberate practice. Take flight simulators for example – these allow pilots to hone their abilities by confronting extreme conditions and emergency scenarios. In the process, they practice intensively; get immediate feedback on their performance; and master technique.

Help Workers Discover Work They Can Love

One consequence of the finding that people can master anything as long as they have the motivation to work hard at it is that corporate talent management approaches need to support workers in their quest to find things they really want to do. Does your organization have job design and career progression policies that allow workers to discover and develop the skills and the work they love? Do your talent management and development policies encourage changes to jobs and career paths throughout an employee’s tenure with the organization not just in the early years?

It appears that old dogs can indeed be taught new tricks if they have the motivation to learn them. Focusing development and retraining resources on people, even older workers allegedly past their prime will pay off if these individuals are highly motivated to learn new skills.

Deliberate practice drives expert performance and passion provides the motivation necessary to practice rigorously. According to Professor Ericsson, top talents are able to practice long and hard and apply themselves more intensely than also-rans precisely because they are doing something that they love. If you don’t love what you do then chances are goodthat you will never put in the time needed to master it.

According to Ericsson, “..a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it”.

Forging The Passion-Practice-Performance Chain

The link between passion, practice and performance suggests two fundamentally different kinds of talent recruiting and development approaches. One strategy is to focus recruiting efforts on attracting talent that has already discovered and demonstrated what they love and excel at and to provide them with a compelling place to stay at the top of their game. This is analogous to the New York Yankees approach of acquiring the best talent available – but it requires deep pockets to sustain.

The other approach is to create an environment that helps people find work they can love and develop the skills and expertise to become top performers. This is likely to be less costly than the first approach but will require more time to show results.

Regardless of which of these strategies they pursue, leaders seeking performance excellence would be well-advised to create workplaces in which passion for work and the deliberate practice of skills are the defining hallmarks.

Work-Life Imbalance – A Global Problem Getting Worse

“Society is changing but the way we think about work life isn’t. Everyone knows the present organization of work does not work, but nobody is ready to translate this into actual practice, despite this having serious implications for gender equality and life satisfaction.”

This quote by a Dutch man is taken from a paper by Rhonda Rappaport, Suzan Lewis and Richenda Gambles entitled, “Work-Personal Life Harmonization: Visions and Pragmatic Strategies for Change”. It presents a consensus view of multiple organizational and work- life experts on what’s driving and what could potentially solve the imbalance between paid work and personal life. The authors argue that this is a global problem affecting workers in both the developed as well as developing worlds. In their view, the work-life balance movement seems to be sputtering across the globe despite much attention and some progress coming to grips with this issue.

Things are bad all over

According to the authors, the main culprit for the growing gap between work and life is globalization and the “productivity” pressures it’s causing that are undermining progressive policies and a focus on equity in the workplace. “The global economic climate perpetuates and exacerbates notions of efficiency that involve fewer people doing more work as well as myths and assumptions that characterize 'ideal' workers as those who can work as though they have few or no outside responsibilities outside of paid work.” As a result, there seems to be a pervasive underlying belief in business that harmonizing personal life and work requires a tradeoff between profits and people and the profits are more important.

The authors argue that individuals, employers and societies around the world feel generally powerless to do much about this situation because the changes that would improve things seem to go against global economic trends. They go on to describe the situation in several countries. In Norway for example, the problem of work-life imbalance still largely exists despite all the support for work- personal life harmonization offered by the Norwegian state and companies.

In the Netherlands innovative government measures have also been implemented but global pressures seem to be undermining them because of the perception that competitiveness rests on ‘commitment’ through working long hours and the general intensification of work.

In Japan, the workplace is still heavily dominated by males and long hours are the norm. In India, work-life balance is seen as a luxury issue for a growing middle class of professional workers and economic development is perceived as more urgent than social well being and people issues. In industries like IT and business process outsourcing, the pressures and work intensity rivals anything in the US and UK.

In the UK, systematic change has been slow despite a slew of initiatives aimed at this problem. Long working hours and intensification of work seem to be getting more acute. Flexible working arrangements are often associated with more work not less. “For all the debate about work-life balance there is the feeling that the debate is feminized and stuck”.

In the US, there has been a “hands off” government policy toward this issue, leaving it completely up to the private sector to handle. So called “flexible working” practices are widespread but in the cases where policies and initiatives exist within companies, the intent is to increase the amount of work. And in many cases, even these limited policies get undermined by the intensive working conditions and high pressure cultures.

What’s holding back change?

The consensus of the experts is that an overemphasis on economics has led to an overall decline in well being when viewed in terms of social and human capital. Excess individualism and consumerism is eroding community and social well being across the world. The rise of new forms of globalization and technology add a super boost to work-personal life tensions.

Compounding these problems is the limited thinking currently about:

• Alternatives to current implementations of market economies that also value people
• Changing men-women relationships at all levels of society
• Valuing those who ‘want a life’ outside the workplace
• Thinking beyond quick fixes and the actual processes of change

With so many factors driving this problem one is compelled to ask whether work-personal life harmonization is even possible in a world of relentless global pressures to keep down costs and raise productivity at an ever increasing rate. The authors believe it is, but that it can only be achieved through the development of new ways of working that are both socially and economically sustainable. This means breaking the iron grip of dogmatic economic thinking regarding the ways market economies are implemented. Vexing gender equality issues must be sorted out. Experiments in workplace cultures, organizational structures and working practices will need to be creatively implemented. Quick fix mentalities must be abandoned. And lastly, all stakeholders must face up to the complex reality of change processes.

Toward a solution

The paper suggests changes at several levels. To create the right ethos government must set the proper tone both through policies and legislation that addresses the broader issues related to the needs and equity of society such as care giver support, the minimum wage and working conditions and terms of employment. While basic principles must be articulated, freedom to experiment and innovate must be encouraged rather than constrained.

In the workplace, persistent myths and outdated assumptions about ideal employees need to be tackled head on. Right now those seen as the most committed and effective workers are also the most dysfunctional, obsessively ambitious or willing to sacrifice their personal life. The workplace talks balance but acts workaholic. This must change or nothing will happen. It must also be recognized that workers and employers have separate agendas but these need not be mutually exclusive. Tradeoffs are possible that can satisfy both sides. Serious attempts must be made to find them. Policies that respect both personal life and workplace effectiveness are possible, but we must do more to discover and implement them.

All together now

In the end, the paper’s authors provide a good discussion of the problem but fail to provide any detailed solutions. This is to be expected - there are no easy or quick answers to these complex issues. But building awareness of the problem and recognition of its significant societal costs – burnout, health problems and social discord in the developed world and inequity and poverty in the developing one - is an essential first step in the right direction. But more must be done. It will be slow to happen however until businesses, governments, communities and individuals join efforts to make paid work and personal life harmonization a top priority for all.