.

Art Turock

Elite Performance Provocateur

HELPING CLIENTS PRACTICE A

HEALTHY DISREGARD FOR THE UNREASONABLE

Copyright 2010Art Turock & Associates    425-814-3038    Webmaster Haley Ashland

Art's Wake Up Call

For nearly 25 years of serving clients, I saw signs of tolerating competent performance but chose to go along with my clients who evidently assumed nothing could be done to solve these organizational issues.  After all, they understand the idiosyncrasies of their industry better than I did. 

In my seminars and writing, I would describe ideal practices for achieving peak performance while knowing my clients would only make a few changes but not have much chance of reliably implementing the majority of my recommendations. 

By accepting my clients’ perceptions of organizational constraints on talent development, I was a co-conspirator in throttling peak performance.  But my resignation ended abruptly when I experienced an unplanned and unexpected confluence of three wakeup calls.  more

Art's Wake Up Call

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Competent is Not an Option

CONTINUED FROM ABOVE.....

First, I took on a new hobby--- sprinting. Why at age 55 would someone with no prior track background, suddenly start sprinting?   I assure you that I’m not in denial. For any of my fellow Baby Boomer brethren reading along, the jig is up.  After doing the life expectancy math, I can no longer complain “Those folks at AARP have got some nerve sending me premature membership applications!” I fully realize that sprinting is definitely an age-inappropriate exercise.  Flexibility is in decline, fast twitch muscle fibers are shot, and testosterone is in short supply.  

The moment of inspiration came while I was watching TV and was awed by a 94 year-old man who ran 100 meters in 22 seconds.  I was captivated by the sheer intrigue of discovering my own capacity for speed.  So I established my own Olympic training period, allocating 4 years of dedicated effort to find out.

At the outset, I couldn’t run 50 yards and back to the starting line without being bent over hands on hips, huffing and puffing, or in the athlete’s technical term—“sucking wind.”  When my sprint coach, Les Black, would describe my next workout, I was thinking, “Coach, you’re crazy.  This workout sounds like you’re putting me through the Bataan Death March.”  My first attempts at sprinting 200 meters resulted in my body breaking down at the final turn, my legs feeling rubbery and my “finishing kick” resembling a staggering drunk failing a field sobriety test.

Now looking back 3 years later, I am unrecognizable in comparison to my beginning performance capabilities.  The workouts I dreaded now have become confidence-instilling sessions.  My doctor marvels at physiological changes in body fat (7.8%) and blood chemistry.  My time in the 200 meters was fast enough to qualify for the 2009 National Senior Games, the equivalent of an Olympic Trials for 50 plus track athletes.  I’ve begun benchmarking my fitness against professional athletes, attempting to approximate their workouts.  For instance, I ran Walter Payton’s Hill in Arlington Heights, Illinois, about 55 yards up a steep hill 20 times. 

I don’t cite these improvements to make myself look good, but to establish the comparative results which demanded me to ponder a perplexing question, “Where did this hidden reserve of physical capacity come from?”  Then I asked a more vulnerable question, “Where else in my life am I failing to tap into similar hidden reserves of capacity?”  As a speaker, coach, writer, marketer, and husband, I have tricked myself into thinking I was doing my best while I was selling myself short of even approaching my full potential.

As Albert Schweitzer wrote, “The tragedy of life is what dies within a man while he lives.”  I could be the poster boy for that quote.  And if Schweitzer’s right, I’m probably not alone.   Am I?

Awareness is the first step to a cure, and in my case, to personal transformation.  Realizing how I underestimate my potential has become a marvelous lesson that will shape the rest of my life, engaging in the sheer intrigue of redefining personal bests.  

Attempting to discover my coach’s approach that produced such profound results, I hit pay dirt in the form of an article in a 2006 issue of Fortune, “What It Takes to Be Great,” by Geoff Colvin.   Colvin’s article shared insights from a massive body of research on becoming an expert or elite performer in fields like surgery, sports, chess, performing arts, writing, computer programming, firefighting, and aviation.  This loosely organized group of expert performance researchers examines performance statistics, biographical details, practice diaries, and the results of laboratory simulations with high achievers.

Turns out that stars are made, not born.  Certainly, genetics impose limits and offer advantages.  A donkey will never win the Kentucky Derby.  Lance Armstrong is a freak of nature, with aerobic capacity his biking rivals can only dream about.

While superior talent is a wonderful launching point for high achievement, many genetically-gifted individuals adopt short cuts, squander opportunities to improve, accept early onset of plateaus as upper limits to personal growth, and fall behind less naturally-endowed colleagues who engage in “deliberate practice.”  Deliberate practice makes an abrupt departure from the way most business people treat practice--as a warmup, review, or repetition of existing strengths. 

In contrast, deliberate practice focuses on mastering tasks beyond one’s current level of competence and comfort with a relentless intent to improve skill proficiency and expand a repertoire of skills.

How much deliberate practice?  In most professions, 10 years 10,000 hours or more of deliberate practice are required to become an expert, thought leader, or elite performer. Don’t confuse those time demarcations to mean 10 years experience in the same position.  Read the definition again.  Note the 10,000 hours involves encountering tasks where you feel uncomfortable or incompetent.   How many people would be up for that emotional experience day after day?  Not many, which explains why most of your colleagues manning nearby cubicles won’t be identified as elite performers.

Deliberate practice is a daunting endeavor.   The elite performance research makes it clear that achieving greatness requires impeccable practice habits and summoning a level of effort that “wanna-be” great performers consider unreasonable.  As most research findings, there’s good news and bad news.  The good news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained gifted few, blessed with great genetic inheritance.   The bad news is that if your performance isn’t up to your aspirations, you can’t blame your parents. 

As a beginning sprinter, I recognized deliberate practice meant facing plenty of discomfort and incompetence, so with validation from the research, I knew I was on the road to success.  I was amazed how my sprint coach, Les, was adhering to the principles of deliberate practice.   Les never read the elite performance research but deliberate practice principles have been instilled over his rich background of decades as football and track athlete and coach.  I likened myself to a guinea pig in a lab, being administered the deliberate practice protocol, with my body’s response as validation of its effectiveness.

With my eyes wide open to spotting the power of deliberate practice, every experience was filtered through this perspective, even an event designed to be pure play and living out a teenage fantasy called Trojan Flashback Football Camp.  As a football player for Jericho High School in the late 1960’s, I sadly recognized that a 145-pound cornerback, no matter how determined, was not going to make the cut at a major college program.  The opportunity to live out my fantasy came when I spent 3 days with the University of Southern California football coaching staff whose objective is to provide participants (primary age 25-45) with an authentic experience of a Trojan football player preparing for a game-day challenge.

I remember Head Coach Pete Carroll treating us like he would actual players during the camp’s opening session at Heritage Hall when he shouted, “I don’t care if you were a high school All America.  Your past achievements buy you nothing at USC.”   I instantly sat up straight, and felt a surge of adrenalin.

Pete Carroll’s philosophy is captured in the phrase, “win forever.”   “If I was writing down the keys to our success, I would write one line—we’re going to do things better than they have ever been done before,” says Coach Carroll.  “We are going to teach, practice, recruit, counsel, analyze, and do everything better than it has been done before.”

While the notion of winning forever seems absurd, USC won 85% of their games during Pete Carroll’s nine-year tenure, the best ever in NCAA football history.  Nevertheless, my first instinct was to dismiss the relevance of this philosophy to business.  Sure you can get some 20 year-old college kids to drink the Cool-Aid, but never seasoned, sober business people.  But my skepticism reflected how I’d adopted the reasonable considerations about performance management that saturates the business community. 

As a leader in galvanizing a culture designed to live an audacious Win Forever philosophy, the USC coaching staff’s primary job is not teaching football techniques and strategy.  Their unprecedented winning record depends more on imparting a cultural conversation that instills in players a conviction to improve performance every single day.  Consequently, there are no limits to player development or the coaching staff’s professional development.  USC football offers me a vivid experience of an organization where competent performance is not an option.

The USC insights provided the culminating connection from this trio of wakeup calls.  Rather than categorizing and separating dualities like sports and business, I attempted to connect the apparent boundaries.   First, I rejected linear thinking accompanied by the dismissive attitude-- What does a savvy business person have to learn from jocks?  Instead I realize in the arena of talent development, business would be best served to learn practices from sports or any field where competent performance isn’t an option.

In demolishing the apparent boundaries between two fields, I created a new vantage point from which to filter my experience of talent development and performance management.  My new lens is an “intersection”—by associating concepts in one field with concepts in another, my mind was freed up to generate fresh ideas.  I was viewing talent development and performance management from the intersection of two fields, sports and business.  My intersection provided a novel perspective for analyzing current performance and conceiving elevated standards, and is the source of my capacity for disturbance and provocation. 

BACK TO TOP

Click on photos to see largerr  learnings on DELIBERATE

PRACTICE

ART STRETCHING HIS HAMSTRING

ouch!