The Reinforcement Imperative
If you’ve ever tried to master a skill in any sport—such as doing a speed turn in swimming, serving a tennis ball, hitting a golf ball out of a sand trap or throwing a football, you know that a lot of practice is involved. Not just to get it right, but to make the skill feel like second nature, so you can do it that way every time without having to concentrate on all the elements of the skill.
Say you’re learning how to serve a tennis ball for the first time. No matter how good your instructor is, even if it’s Andre Agassi himself, learning how to hit a serve will feel awkward at first. Even if Andre gives you a three-hour lesson followed by three hours of practice, where you hit say a hundred serves, this won’t be nearly enough repetition to ingrain the skill. Even practicing your serve several times a week may not be enough repetition to establish the neural pathway. But if you persist, if you hit thousands of serves in practice, along with some interim coaching to keep you on track, you can eventually get to the point where hitting an effective serve feels as natural as walking.
Andre Agassi can introduce you to the most effective behavior pattern, but working with a world-class trainer only accounts for about 5% of the learning process. The other 95% involves reinforcing the pattern through practice—many, many repetitions of the behavior. The more complex the behavior, the more repetitions you’ll need to connect the neural pathway. That much practice may sound like a big commitment, but without this 95%, you’ll never actually acquire the skill, and you won’t be able to perform effectively when you need to.
All of which goes a long way to explain why leader and team development programs may not produce the hoped for results. Even if a celebrity guru presents the program, even if the program lasts as long as a week, these programs will fall short if they don't include enough practice to ingrain the skills. After the trainers are finished and gone, if the training isn’t followed by a long-term, structured program of reinforcement, most participants won’t master the skills.
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