When most people practice, they unwittingly repeat what they are already good at.

Performance improvement requires addressing the areas where you have most room to improve.

Experience does not equal expertise. Experience accrues automatically; expertise must be made deliberately.

As a professor of leadership, I work with postgraduate business students and executive clients to make real improvements in their influence, leadership, and communication skills. When I start discussing how workplace performance improves, the audience tends to offer up “Practice makes perfect.” It’s a nice, simple statement, but it’s far from true. Doing something over and over again doesn’t necessarily make you any better at it.

Experience and Expertise Are Not the Same Thing

We routinely use the term "experience" as if it means "expertise." At work, someone with years of experience meeting customers, leading a team, or presenting ideas has had plenty of practice doing these things. We assume this means they are an expert because we conflate the terms involved. Instead, when experience and expertise are defined independently, experience is a relatively poor predictor of expertise.[1,2,3]

Neither Experience nor Practice Automatically Leads to Improvement

Experience does not automatically lead to improvement beyond a certain level because once we have the skills needed to achieve average performance in our jobs, we switch our focus from developing skills (methodology) to getting the job done (outcome).[4} Years of experience might make you feel as if you are learning new skills, but statistically significantly, you become more and more likely to rely on the same skills that have worked for you in the past.[5]

Dr. Anders Ericsson, a leading expert on expertise, offers a useful analogy.[6] A new tennis player practices all elements of play,........

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