Child’s Play: Practice Makes Perfect

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

It’s an old joke, but one that maybe should be told in business more often.

Have you ever come across someone in business who expected perfection—from you—in a new skill without wanting to give you a chance to practice first?

Have you ever not gotten a job because you weren’t the “perfect candidate?”

Frustrating, isn’t it!

Now, I have to ask, have you ever demanded perfection from someone else—a candidate, coworker, or boss, let’s say—without giving that person a chance to practice first?

No, of course not. I knew that… silly question. Let’s move on.

You need to find a work environment where leaders are focused on providing a place where it is safe to fail.

Theater companies provide an excellent example of how to institutionalize safe failure. When producing a play, producers spend gobs of money on making failure safe. They call the process “rehearsal,” and there is a whole lexicon to describe how they do it. Most people know the phrase “dress rehearsal,” but that’s merely the tip of the iceberg—before that, there’s the tech rehearsal, the run through, the walk through… and more.

In theater, leadership even goes so far as to enmesh the practice and planning processes: for instance, “blocking”—figuring out where actors should be positioned in a scene—is done with the director and actors, so that the director’s vision is matched up to actors’ interpretations of that vision in real time. Gaps are closed immediately and sometimes, the director discovers that a change to the vision would be the best course of action. This happens early in the process, when changes are relatively cheap.

Now tell me: at your company, are process redesigns—the corporate equivalent of blocking—done with live input from workers, or do managers sit with consultants behind closed doors to figure out what other peoples’ jobs should be?

In business, every day is “show time.” It therefore strikes me as odd when a company doesn’t invest in the onboarding process needed to bring someone up to performance level… or doesn’t create opportunities for players currently performing to rotate out and practice new lines, new moves, or just get coaching on aspects of the job that may be throwing them for a loop.

If you, your coworkers, and your organization are going to reach the top, you’re going to need to practice, practice, practice.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.