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RANJAY GULATI: The second T, at surface level, is very obvious.
It's training.
Now, you might say, training?
Come on, Ranjay.
Give me a break.
And a lot of coaches say what happens
in training is more important than what happens on the field,
but I think there's a lot more to that.
You will see some of these coaches obsessed with training.
The legendary coach, Bill Walsh, from the San Francisco 49ers,
called it "standards of performance"--
very high standards of performance.
Coach Nick Saban of Alabama calls it "the process."
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The word "deliberate practice" comes
from a gentleman named Anders, who
developed this idea that there is practice,
which is rote repetition, and then there
is deliberate practice.
And deliberate practice is the idea
that you are very intentional about your practice.
You're not just mindlessly saying, OK,
I got to go in there and just do my 10,000 reps.
No.
It's very intentional about asking yourself,
what am I doing?
How am I doing it?
What is working?
What's not working?
Looking at feedback, looking at possibilities.
So you're much more deliberate or
intentional in your practice.
This is training that is not just about rote repetition,
but it's with a Kaizen learning mindset.
Kaizen and deliberate practice are closely connected ideas,
but I would say Kaizen goes a little further even
because Kaizen is the idea of continuous improvement.
It's an obsession with getting better.
So it's a never-ending process of glass is half empty.
In the case of Nick Saban, they win a tournament,
and he comes in and says, get ready for practice.
There's something in psychology called the post-pellet pause.
If you give mice a task to do and they do the task,
you give them a pellet, and as a reward,
they take it easy for a while.
Then they come back and want to do it again.
For a lot of great coaches, there's no post-pellet pause.
You win a game?
That's OK.
What did you do?
What could you have done better?
You lose a game-- what could you have done better?
A mindset of continuous improvement.
Individualized attention becomes very important.
Going back to Bill Walsh, you know,
how he coached two quarterbacks, Joe Montana and Steve Young--
very different.
Joe Montana was very structured, and he
needed to loosen up and allow himself
to use his instincts more.
Steve Young was very instinctive--
needed to be reined in and said, you
need to bring in some structure into your game.
So there's a lot of deliberate practice
setting high expectations.
If you look at modern-day coaches,
there's a huge emphasis on physical and mental training.
There's the physical conditioning component
of training, and there's the mental development
and resilience and the ability to stay focused in the zone,
in the moment--
tune out everything else.
Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks and his psychologist,
Michael Jarvis, bringing in mindfulness training
to the players, saying we want you to do mindfulness training.
Phil Jackson did that also with the Chicago Bulls.
So you see a lot of them leaning in to ways to still
and calm the mind.
Let's think about training in the business context.
How intentional are we in the way
we develop and train our people?
Training becomes this kind of one-off thing,
where you put somebody in a room when they arrive,
for about a week, and they learn about their benefits and about
their ID card, about the security requirements
and the dos and don'ts of expenses and so forth.
To what degree are we helping them train to do their job?
Or are we presuming they were trained
for that before they arrived?
To what degree can we engage in intentional training,
and to what degree do we engage in after action
reviews as the army they call it, right?
How intentional are we?
My own sense is that sometimes in some organizations,
training becomes a checkbox, as opposed
to really drilling in to saying, how
do I help develop this person for the job they will do next?
If I'm promoting you, how am I helping
you get ready for the job you're about to do?
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