
From the context of sports, arts and mu-sic,
we see that anyone who wants to learn
and improve needs to commit time and ef-fort
to practice, to notice what works and
doesn’t, to keep training until a routine is
improved and perfected.
How can organizations learn from these
other high performance contexts? Training
exists, of course, but in most organiza-tions,
there is not much focus on practice
or learning from that practice. Practice and
reflection are the missing links between the
concept, the theory, the idea and skilled
execution.
THE RESULT OF ALL
THIS PRACTICE?
Purposeful or dedicated practice is the pri-mary
contributing factor (above natural
talent) to excellence in sport and life. The
focus and attention to learning from that
practice is fundamental.
Practising something new takes you into
a four-stage learning and performance cycle
that is familiar to many people:
■■ Unconscious incompetence – you don’t
know that you don’t know
■■ Conscious incompetence – you know
that you don’t know
■■ Conscious competence – you know
that you know how to perform the new
skill, but it requires attention, focus and
energy
■■ Unconscious competence – you don’t
know that you know; you perform the
skill without conscious effort
A fifth stage to this model has been de-scribed
as developing reflection – in-action,
or reflective competence – avoiding the on-set
of complacency leading to mistakes and
a degradation of the skills that have been
learned.
Paradoxically, framing failure as an op-portunity
to learn is key to building success.
PLANNING FOR PRACTICE
Organizational values need to be put into
active practice every day. With as many em-ployees
as possible, identify and discuss
values specifically to flesh them out and
bring them to life. Listen and take notice of
what the team collectively puts emphasis on
as being important. When your organiza-tional
core values are more concrete, distill
those into practicable actions, one for each
day of the following month. Each practice
should explicitly link back to the core val-ues
and organizational purpose.
Over the next month, everyone in the
organization should focus on the same
practice on any day to find a way to hon-our
that value in how they accomplish their
work.
For example, an organization with the
core value “relationships” might set the
practice, “Invest time with stakeholders to
build long-lasting relationships.” This prac-tice
gives a direct action to reinforce the
core value. On the day of this practice, ev-ery
employee should consciously look for
opportunities to build strong relationships
with colleagues, customers, suppliers and
communities.
That simple action can have great
rewards, and when employees see that ac-tively
focusing on the organization’s values
contributes to their success, they will con-tinue
to integrate those values throughout
their work each day.
Continuing on the “relationships” exam-ple,
one employee was tasked with sending
organization
THERE IS ALMOST A RIDICULOUS SENSE
OF HOPE AND OPTIMISM THAT THE
VALUES WILL MAKE THINGS BETTER
IN SOME UNSPECIFIED WAY ONCE THE
LEADERSHIP TEAM HAS DEFINED THEM.
project updates to her team. Instead of
sending an email update, as was usually
the protocol, she picked up the phone to
call the project sponsor to ask for feedback.
The sponsor informed her over the phone
that a key team member was in the process
of resigning, and that information allowed
the employee to make plans and be pre-pared
before the information went public.
The call took five minutes – it would have
taken longer to send the email, and that in-formation
would not have otherwise been
conveyed.
Over time and with repetition, organi-zational
core values become habitual and
automatic with active practice. Committing
to that practice allows those values to be
truly lived. ■
Alan Williams and Dr. Alison Whybrow are
co-authors of The 31Practices: Release the
power of your organization’s VALUES ev-ery
day.
44 ❚ MARCH/APRIL 2014 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL