Leaders Practice

If I need brain surgery, I don’t want a doctor who just read about it. I don’t want someone who simply sat through lectures, nodded along to professors, and aced the exams. I want someone who has done the work—practiced, failed, learned, refined, and mastered the craft. Why should leadership be any different?

Interestingly enough, I’ve done consulting for major healthcare professional associations over the years. For one project, I researched the efficacy of continuing education for various healthcare workers and discovered something startling. Some health professionals reach their peak performance about 10–15 years into their careers and then slowly decline afterward. Yet, there were exceptions. Healthcare workers who engaged in activities where they received immediate feedback on their work tended to continue improving year after year throughout their careers. Practice is important, but for it to lead to improvement, it must be specific and deliberate…with specific and immediate feedback.

You can’t master leadership by reading case studies, attending seminars, or scrolling through inspirational quotes on social media. Leadership is a craft. It is a practice. It is forged in the fire of real-world experience.

Don’t get me wrong. Knowledge and theory are important too. As Kurt Lewin famously said, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” It provides a helpful framework for use to use. Yet theory, no matter how true and good, is not enough. It must be coupled with practice in the same way that nobody because a Major League Baseball player simple by reading books about it.

The Gap

Jesus pointed to this gap between knowing and practice. In Matthew 9:13 and 12:7, Jesus told His followers, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” He wasn’t just giving information. He was calling them to a deeper understanding through experience and reflection. We see a similar call in Luke 10:37 when Jesus tells the expert in the law to “go and do likewise” after recounting the parable of the Good Samaritan. In John 13:15, after washing His disciples’ feet, Jesus said, “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” He didn’t just teach about the idea of servanthood. He modeled it and invited His followers imitate him.

In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul writes, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Then, in Philippians 4:9, he writes, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice.” Leadership as a lived, practiced experience.

Martin Luther also wrote about the role of practice. In, On the Making of a Theologian, h identified three elements essential to the life of a theologian: meditatio (meditation), oratio (prayer), and tentatio (struggle). With regard to tentatio, he explained that we learn a great deal about God’s Word amid the thistles and thorns of life. In these moments of struggle, we come to a deeper understanding of what God teaches in His Word.

In C.F.W. Walther’s Law and Gospel, he pointed to the same truth. He explained that a child can understand the distinction between Law and Gospel. Yet, applying Law and Gospel in the complexities of life can only be taught by the Holy Spirit in “the school of experience.”

Back to Baseball

Let’s revisit that previously mentioned baseball comparison. Major League Baseball teams don’t recruit players based on written exams or their knowledge of baseball trivia. They recruit PLAYers who have spent years actually paying the game, practicing, failing, getting feedback, adjusting, practicing more, and growing over time.

All this to say that there is a rich biblical and theological history of learning by doing and practicing. While I’ve met some Christian leaders, especially those in education who worry that any talk about learning by doing, practice, and experience is falling into the problematic philosophy of people like Dewey, I disagree. The merit of practcie and learning by experience precedes Dewey by millennia, and there is no reason to abandon such a central aspect of learning just because it also happens to be mentioned by people with whom we disagree.

Don’t Give Up Too Soon

How about this analogy? Pat wanted to play the piano. He sat on the stool passionately pounded a few notes, and declared that pianos don’t work. It might sound a little silly, but we apply the same like of thinking on our lives and leadership all the time. Skill takes time to develop, and includes leadership skills.

I’ve convinced that great leaders are forged through what I sometimes call “revelatory repetition.” This is a term from literary studies used to describe how a writer can use repetition of certain elements in story to add depth and meaning for the reader. In leadership, I use the phrase to describe how we grow through intentional repetition. We build into our leaderhsip intentional repetitions, intentionally using each one to help us grow and develop our skills in communicating, running an effective meeting, casting and clear and compelling vision, navigating challenges, building a strong team, and all sorts of other things. Yet, we do this by coming up with certain habits and practices that we repeat and refine over time.

When I think about the leaders I admire most, they all make practice a part of what they do on a regular basis. They show up day after day, not only ready to lead, but ready to practice and learn. I’m a proud bookworm and bibliophile. Books are a treasure, but they are not treasures meant to be place in a museum. We take what we learn in the books and create habits that help us put the ideas into practice. We learn from that practice over time, and we gradually find that some of the best ideas have turned into leadership traits that allow us to be a blessing to others in new ways.

Disclaimer: Do you use AI to write the articles on Substack? The words and ideas come from me, but I often use AI for Substack articles. I regularly use Grammarly, which is a form of AI, to aid in proofreading and editing my work. I also regularly use DALL-E to generate the images for most posts. In addition, I continue to evolve in my experimentation with the use of ChatGPT, Grok, CoPilot (and possibly other ChatBots in the future) to serve as an editor for my Substack publications.

What does this mean? There are three common scenarios, though I hope to experiment with others in the future:

1. I write a full first draft and then submit it to the ChatBot, asking it to serve as an editor, akin to how I have one or more people edit almost anything that is published in my formal capacity, or how editors review my manuscripts when they are submitted to a journal, newspaper, or book publisher.

2. I audio record myself speaking on a topic and then place the recording in a ChatBot to transcribe, remove disfluencies, and use this rough draft transcript to further refine the writing before publishing it.

3. I ask the ChatBot for examples, illustrations, or statistics relevant to a topic that I’m exploring in the article, research and review some of the content provided, and sometimes weave those into the writing.

I don’t use all of these methods in every article, but in a spirit of transparency, I offer this disclaimer/clarification.

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