Clever Geek Handbook
1 November 2025

Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline

Recommendation

Developing leaders means finding people with the skills, knowledge and personality to steer your company. Dan Tobin’s straightforward, if sometimes plodding, guide spells out the basics of creating and managing “leadership development programs” (LDPs). These employee-training efforts are not difficult to implement, and they offer organizations huge benefits. Discovering future leaders in-house means you can nurture and train your own best people to understand your goals, values, and vision. BooksInShort found Tobin’s use of checklists and forms practical and useful, and recommends this guidebook to HR professionals at small and medium-sized firms and to all those who want to best leverage their employees’ talents to serve their organization’s future.

Take-Aways

  • As the workforce ages, firms must develop new leaders to replace retiring managers.
  • “Leadership development programs” (LDPs) use education, “action learning,” individual development, mentoring, coaching and reinforcement to train new executives.
  • Company priorities, values and likely future strategies form the core of LDP training.
  • Self-knowledge – that is, emotional intelligence, self-confidence, critical thinking and creativity – is a prerequisite for valued team contributors.
  • Experiential and action learning help participants become more self-aware.
  • Mentors and coaches reinforce what LDP participants learn.
  • Action learning converts information into workplace methods or new products.
  • Future leaders should adhere to “learning contracts” that link program performance to specific goals.
  • Outsourcing educational sessions costs 200% to 300% more than hiring consultants.
  • The cost of LDPs is low compared to the cost of losing experienced executives.

Summary

“Leadership Development Programs”

As Americans get older and retire, the nation faces a shortage of skilled, experienced workers. Over the next two decades, 78 million baby boomers will become older than 65. In 2005, workers aged 55 and older made up 16% of the US workforce. By 2020, this should rise to almost 25%.

“The question is not ‘Should the company invest in an LDP?’ but rather, ‘Can the company afford not to invest in developing its next generation of leaders?’”

Many companies send young leadership candidates to external development programs. Larger firms sometimes pursue another alternative: in-house leadership development programs (LDPs). Internal programs can be just as expensive as external setups, which may be one reason that small firms (fewer than 5,000 employees) rarely design and operate their own, tailored LDPs. Yet, like big corporations, small and mid-sized companies also need to identify, teach, and coach a base of future leaders who know their industries – and their values – and commit to sustain them.

“The reason that companies invest in leadership development is to ensure that the company will have the talent it needs to do business and grow both today and tomorrow.”

Since most small to mid-sized firms lack structured LDPs, they rely on their human resources (HR) departments to create leadership development and succession plans. HR must understand each unit’s various leadership requirements and identify employees who have appropriate talents.

Core Competencies

Leadership core competencies fall into three areas: “knowing and managing yourself,” leading others, and understanding the business. To make a valuable contribution, team members must develop individual self-knowledge. This includes emotional intelligence, self-confidence, trustworthiness, creativity and critical thinking, among other aptitudes. To lead others, you need to communicate well, and to be good at motivating people and forming relationships. Crucial business skills include problem-solving and decision-making capabilities, as well as know-how in customer service, strategic planning and time management. A company needs visionary leaders who share its values. Firms also need people who can handle less tangible leadership competencies, such as being likable or even inspiring, that don’t appear on checklists.

“Building a successful leadership program for your company involves many organizational players with specific roles and responsibilities.”

Executives trying to spot people with potential should consider what skills leaders will need in the business environment of the future. Their candidates should include current employees who have shown an interest in all components of the business, served as team members and leaders, acted as independent problem solvers, earned positive feedback from other members of cross-functional teams, or helped make operations faster, less expensive, or more efficient.

“Adult learners want and need the opportunity to use what they have learned, and that is the goal of action-learning projects.”

Once current leaders identify candidates, HR should examine their résumés, review recent job evaluations, check progress from job to job and gather anecdotal information from co-workers. HR reps and group leaders should meet to decide which applicants belong in the “high-potential pool.” These discussions can affect an employee’s promotion, dismissal, reassignment or transfer within the company, so they should remain confidential.

Elements of Leadership Development Programs

The goal of an LDP is to form leaders who understand your business and its processes, think strategically, foster creativity, understand marketing, know the role leaders must play, and exemplify your company’s values.

“Just learning about various topics isn’t enough.”

Encourage your employees to acquire the appropriate knowledge and skills. Many leaders ascend the company ladder by advancing in their areas of specialization – for example, engineering, marketing or finance – but lack working knowledge of the organization’s other essential disciplines. Leaders need to learn cross-functional processes to avoid career myopia. To that end, your “leadership development program model” needs to cover the “four stages of learning”:

  1. “Data” – This includes anything “relevant and purposeful” processed by the senses. Some of this is helpful and utilitarian, and some of it is clutter. People must learn “how to separate the useful from the vast majority of data for which they have no use.”
  2. “Information” – Data with “relevance and purpose” is information, and that is what you want to offer in your LDP: the facts future executives need to build their “core leadership competencies” and “leader priorities.” Some skills, such as public speaking, call for specific training such as coaching, forums, books, webcasts and demonstrations that build presentation skills. Teach your firm’s future leaders various other capabilities depending on the company’s priorities and their own needs.
  3. “Knowledge” – The program should translate information to make it directly applicable and useful at work. Have current leaders share their experiences of developing leadership qualities by talking about how they helped to build the company’s values and culture. Their goal and yours is “to get participants to immediately apply what they have learned to help them turn the information from education sessions into personal knowledge.”
  4. “Wisdom” – Since no one can teach someone how to be wise, new leaders must extract and amass wisdom by thinking through their experiences in as well as out of the classroom.
“Wisdom cannot be taught, but it can be developed through dialogue, demonstration and reflection on experience.”

The LDP model covers those stages of learning across “four levels”:

1. “Education Sessions”

Use formal classroom sessions to broaden your employees’ horizons. Choose topics based on your company’s priorities. Hold LDP teaching sessions at least once every three months. Each session should last between 2.5 and 3.5 days. The faculty can consist of experts from business schools, authors, vendors or consultants. The presence of HR representatives and company executives reminds participants of top management’s interest in the LDP. Conclude each segment with a dinner where the speaker is an executive from the firm who tells the group about his or her leadership and career path, and then answers questions. Leadership candidates should know that their leaders are present to observe and encourage them, not to critique them.

“Everyone is inundated by data – every email and website...every conversation, everything they see and hear is data, and people are drowning in it.”

Some organizations contract with local business schools to manage and conduct their LDPs. An advantage of this approach is that participants get to study with educators from a professional faculty. The school also facilitates planning, administration and logistics.

One disadvantage is that these programs can be so intense that the workload might overwhelm your people. Another drawback is that most colleges do not offer follow-up programs to reinforce the key goals of company-specific LDPs. Representatives from an outside school aren’t on hand to encourage your team members to meet again or to establish ongoing meetings. To fill this gap, your organization must develop networks and team efforts. Use ongoing sessions – whether in classrooms or by videoconferencing – to reinforce learning.

“Ensure that...the LDP provides...information, rather than data.”

Using an outside business school will cost two or three times more than hiring in-house faculty and consultants. Special guest speakers might command $20,000 to $50,000 for a single presentation, while faculty members from business schools or consultancy-based executive development programs cost $2,000 to $5,000 per day.

“The role of the mentor is to provide education and career guidance to the mentoring client.”

Negotiate with presenters, training vendors and academics to reduce fees. Save by licensing a training class for your in-house staff. In one example, using a licensed training program to instruct a class of 200 cost $34,000. If a local university had held the same class, company costs would have run up to $159,000.

2. “Experiential and Action Learning”

Experiential and action learning emerges from team projects or specific individual assignments in which LDP participants convert information into personal knowledge. They apply information gleaned in the classroom to the workplace. Participants become more self-aware, so they reflect on what they learned, how they applied it and how they might utilize their newly acquired knowledge to cope with difficult work situations.

“Action-learning projects enable participants to work with people from different business units, functional areas and geographies and to learn from them about their work methods, their area of expertise and the challenges they are facing.”

Experiential learning includes changes in job assignments that help participants develop greater skills and knowledge. Examples might include filling in at another department, working on an overseas assignment, leading a task force or training with a mentor. LDP managers must ensure that participants follow through on what they learned and apply it.

“If you want to develop your organization’s next generation of leaders, enable your employees to gain the required knowledge and skills to become leaders.”

After the first LDP session, participants often say the meeting itself created new relationships and streamlined operations by opening fresh communications channels within the organization. They particularly prize new contacts that enable cross-business and cross-functional interactions among different management and staff levels. To test the effectiveness of these relationships and to use lessons from action-learning sessions, LDP participants should undertake new work to evaluate their team-building abilities, creative thinking and process re-engineering skills. Managers should suggest challenging projects within realistic parameters.

3. “Individual Development Plans and Guidance”

Leadership development programs must recognize each individual’s unique attributes, accomplishments and backgrounds. LDPs need to address individual development agendas. One way a manager can guide a leadership trainee is to conduct a 360-degree assessment after his or her second or third formal LDP educational session.

“Very often, at the conclusion of an LDP education session, participants will comment that ‘my manager could really use this,’ or ‘all of the company’s executives should learn this’.”

This survey evaluates how well people manage themselves and others, and assesses their business acumen. A 360-degree survey is not a performance evaluation, but it does identify an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. Outside vendors sell these assessment tools as standard instruments or in customized versions. The benefit of a standard assessment is that the vendor offers statistically validated results, comparing your employee’s answers against a database and interpreting them from a historical perspective. However, the vendor’s results may be complex and not easy to apply. If your HR department can take responsibility for 360-degree testing, all the better.

“What does it cost the company to promote someone to a senior position who fails in that position?”

When the results are available, the vendor, or an HR employee or senior staff member, presents the findings to the employee and his or her manager or mentor. Employees are sometimes unaware of the strengths or weaknesses the survey might illuminate. View the results in the context of the employee’s past performance reviews, vision statement and managers’ personal assessments. Supplement survey results with other HR tools, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or DiSC assessments, to formulate an individual development plan (IDP).

One effective way to implement an IDP is by creating a “learning contract” that links an individual’s education to a specific company goal. Specify what the person will learn and how he or she will apply this new knowledge. The IDP should spell out what business changes managers expect. Sign the contract before the person begins the LDP – that is, before any new studying commences. Participants can reinforce this process by keeping a “personal learning journal” to track what they learn, as well as their insights and observations from the 360-degree assessment.

4. “Mentoring, Coaching and Reinforcement”

Both mentors and coaches strengthen and clarify what LDP participants learn on their own. Mentors should be well-regarded managers who work in a different department from, and who hold positions at least two levels above, the participant. Mentors should provide career and educational guidance, and should have sufficient access and political clout to advance the career of the participant. Coaches function as tutors who provide personalized skills and knowledge. They can offer critical assessments, and help participants build confidence and rethink their ideas. Coaches also address participants’ individual learning styles.

While an LDP incurs significant costs and management responsibilities, the cost of doing nothing is far greater. Consider how many of your company’s top executives will retire within the next five to 10 years. Think about the issues and expenses involved in replacing them without incurring business delays, continuity disruptions or executive recruiting costs. And then, plan your LDP.

About the Author

Daniel R. Tobin founded the Digital Equipment Corporation’s Network University and Wang/Getrionics Virtual University; he devoted more than 15 years to creating and honing the “leadership development program model.”

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Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline

Book Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline

How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders in Small to Mid-Sized Companies

ASTD Publications,
 


1 November 2025

Obama's Wars

Recommendation

Hours after his election as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama learned details of the top-secret circumstances that defined the Afghanistan conflict, a war characterized by inadequate resources, incomplete planning, inchoate strategy and ongoing bloodshed. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post applied his legendary reporting skills to reams of meeting notes, classified reports and interviews to recreate the often tempestuous policy making on Afghanistan that marked Obama’s first 18 months in office. Woodward’s trip to Afghanistan and his unfettered access to top officials in more than 100 interviews, including more than an hour with the president, put you at the center of marathon meetings, disputes and discussions peopled by contrasting personalities and their shifting allegiances. BooksInShort recommends this masterful work of reporting, an engrossing book on how the US is managing a war “with no good options.”

Take-Aways

  • Barack Obama inherited severe challenges upon his election as US president.
  • The most intractable was the Afghanistan war, which had been waged for years with insufficient resources.
  • Pakistan, with its porous borders and irresolute leaders, is essential to resolving the war.
  • George W. Bush’s administration did not formulate viable contingency plans for hotspots such as Yemen, Somalia and Iran.
  • Increasing tension with the Afghan government, led by a politically and mentally unstable president, Hamid Karzai, is an additional obstacle to US disengagement.
  • The US military fashioned its Afghanistan proposal on counterinsurgency tactics, calling for up to 85,000 more troops.
  • Vice President Joseph Biden advocated “counterterrorism lite” with fewer soldiers.
  • Rifts developed between and among the White House and Pentagon teams.
  • Obama called for options and “an exit strategy.”
  • His final decision added 30,000 more troops to “degrade” the Taliban and train Afghan security forces.

Summary

Mr. President-elect...

Two days after winning the November 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama met with Mike McConnell, his predecessor’s director of national intelligence (DNI), for a briefing on the “highly classified intelligence operations and capabilities of the vast US espionage establishment.” In a closed, secure room, Obama learned more about the challenges he was inheriting as president.

“The tough-talking, saber-rattling Bush administration had not prepared for some of the worst-case scenarios the country might face.”

With 161,000 US troops deployed in Iraq and another 38,000 in Afghanistan, Obama learned that a larger threat to his military now came from nuclear-equipped Pakistan, whose 1,500-mile, porous border with Afghanistan provided easy, safe passage to al Qaeda, the Taliban and their affiliates. Tribal chiefs working with the Taliban ruled Pakistan’s “Federally Administered Tribal Areas.” In 2006 the Pakistani government gave up authority over the North Waziristan border region, which quickly became “kind of a Wild West” for extremists and a staging ground for moving people and arms in the war against US forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military espionage unit, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), played both sides, ostensibly supporting US interests while arming and funding the Taliban. Why? Pakistan needed to ensure that, whatever happened in Afghanistan, its greatest enemy – India – would not gain a foothold in the country.

“In his [inaugural] address, Obama devoted one sentence to the wars: ‘We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan’.”

Angered by the ISI’s duplicity, George W. Bush’s administration authorized Predator drone attacks in Pakistan, alerting the Pakistanis only during or after the sorties. But drones need sources on the ground to identify targets, so the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had gone to great lengths to groom and protect these spies, keeping their identities secret from everyone except the president and “designated cabinet officials.” Augmenting this intelligence capability were the top-secret Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, “the CIA’s 3,000-man covert army,” which worked to win tribal support and to fight against the Taliban. In September 2008, these troops conducted a botched raid into Pakistan to seize a house al Qaeda was using. The raid ended with civilian casualties, and the Pakistani government excoriated the US for breaching its border.

But There’s More...

Bush’s DNI continued briefing Obama: Yemen housed the group “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Iran would probably develop and set off a “gun-type nuclear weapon” by 2015. And “loony” North Korea already possessed the “nuclear material for six bombs.” The threat of cyber terrorism also loomed. During the summer of 2008, the Chinese had hacked into both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaign computers, so Obama knew the danger’s broad outlines. He now learned about offensive US strategies, including Computer Network Attack (CNA), “the most sophisticated stealthy computer hacking,” which can enter foreign computer systems, and the Computer Network Defense (CND), which seeks to protect the US’s banking, electrical, air traffic control and telecommunications systems from enemy infiltration.

“A six-to-eight year war at $50 billion a year is not in the national interest of the United States.”

Calling the information “sobering, but not surprising,” Obama realized, “I’m inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in half a dozen ways.” While he wanted to focus on the “under-resourced...poor man’s war” in Afghanistan, Obama quickly learned that America was ill equipped to respond to the world’s other hotspots. No up-to-date plans existed for dealing with Iran, Yemen or Somalia – another al Qaeda redoubt. The US had not prepared adequate responses for frightening but plausible scenarios, like Pakistan becoming a radical Islamic state with nuclear weapons. The US remained unsure of the nukes’ locations. The Obama team needed to spend time and resources analyzing and planning solid contingency plans.

“McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory.”

The terrorist attacks on Mumbai beginning on November 26 crystallized the US’s greatest fears and presented the incumbent Bush administration with a potentially deadly conundrum. Intelligence showed that the ISI had trained the Mumbai terrorists, and nuke-equipped India was threatening retaliation. The Bush Doctrine called for military strikes against terrorists and their enablers, regardless of their locations. Likening the Mumbai strikes to the September 11, 2001 attacks, but seeking to avert nuclear war, Bush himself assured India’s prime minister that the Pakistanis were not culpable. Neither India nor the US responded militarily.

Off to a Bad Start

Just before Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Senator Lindsey Graham took a bipartisan trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. They told Pakistan’s president that his nation should root out terrorist support within the ISI. Then they had a troubling dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his ministers. Karzai, a manic-depressive, presided over an openly corrupt government. He often relied on information from Taliban propaganda to criticize the US for civilian casualties. His brother, a paid CIA informant even before 9/11, received rent from the US military for sites “he arguably did not own or control” and allegedly “profited from the opium trade.” Biden and Graham delivered Obama’s message that things had to change. For instance, Karzai could no longer subvert the authority of on-the-ground US officials by citing a “special relationship” with the US president, as he had done with Bush. After sustained criticism, Karzai said, “‘We’re just poor Afghans...no one cares about–’ Biden threw down his napkin. ‘This is beneath you, Mr. President’.” The dinner soon ended.

“In the Context of a Broader Strategy”

President Obama held his first National Security Council session on Afghanistan three days after his inauguration. Though he had campaigned on sending in more troops, he wanted a “coherent” plan on executing and ending the war before he ordered the buildup. The military, which had seen its requests for more troops languish on bureaucrats’ desks during the Bush administration, pressed for an immediate increase of 30,000 soldiers, later revised to 17,000. Obama agreed to authorize 17,000 interim additions to provide security during the upcoming Afghan elections. Yet the US commanders sent 8,000 of these troops into sparsely inhabited areas with few voters.

“This was why counterinsurgency – blanketing the population in safety and winning them over – was necessary.”

Various groups within the White House and the Pentagon researched and revised war plans for the president’s review. All agreed that Pakistan, which harbored Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, held the key to success in Afghanistan and must be the center of US efforts. Yet Pakistan continued to obfuscate, declaring its support of US airstrikes within its borders, but tolerating and supporting extremists. The US military insisted on more troops: from 30,000 to a full 85,000 additional troops, including trainers for the Afghan security forces. They wanted years to accomplish the mission of bolstering Afghan security sufficiently to replace US troops.

“‘We have no good options here,’ the president said, making it clear he would not automatically accept the general’s [McChrystal’s], or anyone’s, solution.”

The military counted on a counterinsurgency plan, or COIN, to embed troops in villages to protect and win over the Afghan people. As had happened during the surge in Iraq, military commanders – including General Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and General David A. Petraeus, Commander of the US Central Command – believed tribal heads would forsake the Taliban in favor of security provided by a strong central Afghan government and military. But it might take a generation to fashion an Afghan government stable enough to protect its own people. A group led by Biden argued for “counterterrorism lite,” a plan to continue flushing out Taliban fighters while fostering the development of Afghan security forces. The Biden plan would require fewer soldiers, some 20,000, and would get the US out of “nation-building.” Obama’s team understood that continued investment in Afghanistan meant abandoning critical domestic needs amid an economic crisis and high unemployment.

“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”

The president’s national security adviser, General James L. Jones, a former Marine commander, met with US commanders in Afghanistan in June 2009 to explain the administration’s desired outcomes: “1) Security, 2) Economic development and reconstruction, and 3) Governance by the Afghans under the rule of law.” While the military leaders preferred a counterinsurgency strategy, they had little appetite for building Afghanistan’s economy and government. Jones had to counter the military brass’s repeated demands for more troops, even after 21,000 more soldiers had been sent to the field. He’d ask the “expressionless” colonels, “How do you think President Obama might look at this?” Having already granted so many troops, the president would be apt to have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (“W.T.F.”) reaction, “the universal outburst of astonishment and anger” from the normally unflappable Obama.

“Biden told the Pakistani president about Obama’s thinking, ‘Afghanistan is going to be his war’.”

A rift was growing between the White House and the Pentagon: The military seemed to be “trying to box in the president” by leaking stories to newspapers on the need for more troops in order to “win” the war. Even within the White House, an us-versus-them attitude led to distrust between the Obama political staff – including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel – and Jones’s national security team. As insider policy groups hurried to finalize proposals for the president’s review, disputes broke out over semantics: the need to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taliban meant different levels of commitment and troop strength. Disrupting and dismantling the Taliban would keep it from ever overtaking the Afghan state again; defeating the Taliban would entail annihilating it with an extended war effort and many more troops.

“Right in front of the commander in chief, two four-star officers had openly exhibited their internal tension.”

The August 2009 Afghan elections, reputedly fixed, left the reelected Karzai increasingly unstable, by his own staff’s accounts. The Afghan police force, seen by the US military as critical to enforcing national security, was 80% illiterate, riddled with drug abuse and depleted by 25% annual attrition. Years of US investment and training had made little impact and created little hope for change. When Gen. McChrystal wrote the account of his first 60 days in Afghanistan, he predicted dire outcomes unless the US deployed more troops, but his reaction helped solidify the US’s “core objectives.” Penetrating terrorist strongholds in Pakistan became increasingly crucial in terms of saving Afghanistan and ensuring US security. Without that, more US military support and aid could not change Afghanistan’s entrenched governance and economic problems.

“[Secretary of State] Clinton said, ‘The only way to get governance changes is to add troops, but there’s still no guarantee that it will work’.”

However, leaving Afghanistan with insufficient numbers of US troops would endanger the entire region, and the only way to strengthen Pakistan would be to work with India to improve Indian-Pakistani relations. Thus, the policy-making emphasis now shifted to finding ways to “degrade” the Taliban in hopes of its eventual reintegration into Afghan society. A rehabilitated Taliban would be less of a draw for al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan, particularly in the face of a massive US and NATO deployment. America’s national security also required fighting al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia, but the needed US military resources were diverted to Afghanistan.

Dover Air Force Base

President Obama, whose nature is to mull over all options, began to chafe at the prolonged, often conflicting, discussions. He wanted options and “an exit strategy.” His team began to fear that the process “was veering out of control in a way that would make it difficult ever to get consensus.”

“Drone strikes are similar to going after a beehive one bee at a time. They would not destroy the hive.”

On Thursday, October 29, just after midnight, Obama took a helicopter to Dover Air Force Base, where the remains of fallen American soldiers return to the US before interment. After comforting the soldiers’ families, he stood in the cold for two hours to salute 18 flag-covered caskets as a precisely trained squad unloaded them. He flew back to Washington in silence.

“The president was in a desperate search for another option.”

The president met the next day with the joint chiefs, commanders of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. A month later, on November 29, Obama himself wrote his “final orders for Afghanistan Pakistan strategy.” The military would focus on six goals: turning around the Taliban’s thrust, keeping them out of – and out of control of – pivotal cities, “disrupting” Taliban operations while blocking al Qaeda from finding safe haven within Afghanistan, “degrading” the Taliban so much that Afghani security forces can manage them, and increasing the Afghan administration’s ability to govern, with special attention to “the ministries of defense and interior.”

“If President Bush told Petraeus yes, Obama was prepared to say no.”

The orders authorized an additional 30,000 US troops and provided for a strategic review in December 2010, with the goal of “transferring lead security responsibility” to the Afghans in order to “begin reducing US forces” by July 2011.

About the Author

Bob Woodward, associate editor at The Washington Post, is a co-winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his reporting of the Watergate scandal.

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Obama's Wars

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Simon & Schuster,
 


1 November 2025

Choke

Recommendation

Psychology professor Sian Beilock answers many compelling questions, among them: Why do people choke, and what can you do to avoid choking under pressure? Beilock points out steps you can follow to hold up better in a pinch. Some are small and easy, others more complex and systemic. Though the author makes the same points – or the same sort of points, in different ways – her ideas apply to many fields. BooksInShort recommends her book to athletes, salespeople, leaders, speakers, teachers and anyone who wants to perform well in the clutch.

Take-Aways

  • Choking is failing in a situation when you have a lot on the line.
  • You get in your own way by thinking about your goals the wrong way.
  • You choke when you think too much about skills that should function below the surface of your consciousness.
  • You’re more likely to choke if you focus on the possible downsides of a situation.
  • You’re more likely to choke if you think about your negative attributes, or the negative stereotypes attributed to any group to which you may belong.
  • You can avoid choking by changing your thinking about your circumstances.
  • To succeed under pressure, practice under pressure.
  • Achieve more by framing your performance appropriately. Focusing on major goals rather than small details helps you start well and finish strong.
  • Retrain your mind to increase your “working-memory” and make you better able to handle pressure.
  • Meditation can help you let go of negative or troubling thoughts.

Summary

What Is Choking, and Why Does It Happen?

Like everyone else, you want to succeed, especially when the stakes are high. Whether you’re trying to score the winning run in the last game of the World Series or giving a presentation to potential investors who can make or break your start-up company, you want to perform at the top of your ability. However, too often, people who should deliver superior performances – people who have the talent, the preparation and the experience to do well – choke. That is the definition of choking: not doing badly when you’re new to a field or unskilled, but fumbling when you have all the skills and talent you need to do well. Why do you choke?

“Choking can occur when people think too much about activities that are usually automatic. This is called ‘paralysis by analysis’.”

Understand what causes choking, and you can avoid it and ensure higher levels of personal performance in high-stakes situations. Your “working-memory” allows you to hold information in your mind while doing other things, such as reasoning about that information to solve a problem. Stress and worry disrupt your working-memory, causing your intellectual performance to suffer. An experiment studying how physics experts solved problems compared to physics novices showed fundamental differences in their approaches. The newcomers plunged right in, trying to solve the problems; the experts took time to examine the problems and to decide which concepts to apply and how. The difficulty is that you need considerable working-memory to take this approach. If something disrupts that memory, your performance falls apart. If you “overthink” your performance, you can shift function out of tacit memory and into working-memory, and thus disrupt your own performance by overloading yourself.

“Despite innate differences, our eventual level of success is markedly affected by training and practice.”

Expertise is part of it. When people become experts in a field, they’re particularly bad at predicting how others will do the things they know how to do well. You learn a skill by engaging your conscious mind. Once you get good at a skill, it moves into “procedural memory,” an area of the mind that “is implicit or unconscious.” This aspect of memory is distinct from “explicit memory,” which provides conscious recall of specific events. These two areas of the brain can operate independently. You can learn a skill and repeat it well without necessarily being able to remember how or where you learned it. In fact, the better you get at doing something, the less able you might be to communicate your understanding of it to others or to predict where new users might stumble. If you’re the expert in a certain area in your workplace, you might dodge this barrier by asking less-experienced people how they might attempt to do your job.

Gender Differences

Throughout history, society has made negative assumptions about women’s intellectual capabilities. As recently as 2005, the president of Harvard gave a speech arguing that, intellectually, men vary more than women, and therefore the population of people with higher intelligence will include more men than women. If you studied students’ performance on the US Scholastic Aptitude (or Assessment) Test (SAT) in the 1980s, you’d conclude that this view was right, because boys scoring in the 95th percentile outnumbered girls 13 to 1. However, by 2005, the gap between boys and girls dropped to 2.8 to 1. What happened? American colleges implemented Title IX, the Equal Opportunity in Education Act, which gave women the same access to education as men.

“Experienced people benefit from hearing the thoughts of those who are less skilled.”

If intrinsic differences between the genders caused the gap in math performance, education would not have been so significant a factor, and certainly not so quickly. The performance gap derives from factors such as socialization. Much of the remaining gap comes from which toys kids receive or which activities they are exposed to in their homes. The complication is that people are vulnerable to the effects of negative thought. If you’re part of a group that suffers under a stereotype of poor performance in a certain area, just acknowledging this expectation is enough to drive your anxiety up and produce the bad results about which you’re worrying. You can see this “stereotype threat” clearly in those with the most to lose: women or minorities who are academically gifted and want to succeed. People are so affected by external expectations that even a traditionally feminine name can affect a woman’s academic career. “Merely being aware of a stereotype can bring down your performance.”

Are High-Pressure Situations the Best Choice?

Some high-pressure settings are unavoidable: A doctor performing emergency surgery or a firefighter battling a blaze can’t choose not to engage. Some systems contain high-pressure situations by design and you might ask if these optional pressures produce the best results. An example of optional, systemic stress would be the ubiquitous standardized tests of American education. Your performance on these tests determines much of your academic future. You might earn or miss scholarships, or gain or lose access to superior schools. Intelligence tests can shape how you think of yourself. But these tests may not be the best judge of your ability to learn or think; they can be skewed because of social contexts and they may produce biased results simply from the way they are presented.

“If you are not in a position to practice making the catch when the pressure is on, it may be better to avoid the game to begin with.”

Methods of offering information affect how people process data. For example, equations written horizontally take more working-memory to solve than equations written vertically. So, the design of some tests amplifies the pressures involved. Coaching can improve some exam performances, and many test-prep courses are available. These classes can be expensive, and so provide an advantage to those who can afford them. This means that tests intended to reveal innate ability end up reinforcing existing social structures.

How Can You Beat Choking?

Given all the factors that contribute to choking in high-pressure circumstances, what can you do to improve your performance? Steps you can take range from brief and immediately applicable solutions for any situation to more advanced techniques that require considerable practice. Going from the most broadly applicable methods to the more complicated, try these methods:

  • Step away from the situation – If you’re too close to a situation, you may not see all your options. Step away, even for a minute, to allow your subconscious to process your circumstances. Approach the situation with a new perspective.
  • Speed up – If you have a tendency to overanalyze a condition, the worst thing you can do is give yourself time. Act right away. Trust your instincts, and remember that you have the skills to perform the task. Leaping into the breach prevents your conscious mind from interfering.
  • Stop and write – Stress negatively affects performance, so take a break and write out everything that worries you. This releases tension. Writing down your concerns parallels the “flooding therapy” that experts use to treat phobias by exposing people to the object of their fears. Putting emotions into words changes how your “brain deals with stressful information.”
  • Think differently – Change how you consider yourself. Focus on the positive aspects of your life. Thinking about the details of a skill you know well, like making a putt or swinging a bat, get in the way. Think instead about strategic goals, or holistic objectives. Distracting yourself by singing, whistling, repeating a one-word mantra or visualizing an unrelated action also helps.
  • Focus on the goal, not the obstacle – This is a specific version of thinking differently. In high-pressure situations, much can go wrong, and you can get stuck thinking about every negative possibility. Focus instead on what you want to do. Don’t think about potential errors; think about executing the play, the speech or the pitch.
  • Put on some music – Overfocusing on one specific mental activity can make your mind work more clumsily. Try listening to music, making a game of your task or even taking your work to a place with a low level of background noise.
  • Educate your anxieties – False beliefs about a situation can rule your performance. If you don’t know the setting – if it is unfamiliar or disorienting – you’re likely to spend too much mental energy figuring out what’s going on around you. The more you know about the context of your situation, the better you will perform.
  • Practice (under pressure) – You are more likely to perform well under pressure if you prepare in stressful situations. For example, police officers who practiced shooting while being shot at with paintball guns scored higher than cops who practiced with stationary targets. Up the stakes: Bet on the outcome of putts, speeches and the like so you have something on the line. To make your performance even stronger, rehearse areas you’re most likely to be required to do well in or skills that have the most consequences riding on them. For example, pilots might practice their planes suffering an engine malfunction.
  • Practice embarrassing yourself – Speaking in public often causes people to choke. Being asked to think creatively on the spot also produces choking. Since both apply performance pressure, practice both together. Take an improv or acting class, try stand-up comedy or ballroom dancing, or any exercise that familiarizes you with similar pressures and skill sets.
  • Find a model – People often perform according to self-limitations they perceive as pre-existing. If you haven’t seen someone you regard as similar to you achieve in a specific area, you’re more likely to regard success as unattainable. Find a model or a mentor, and focus on how they succeeded and how you can succeed.
  • Imitate your interviewer – It is easy to choke in an interview situation where much is on the line and you don’t know the other person. Reshape the situation by mirroring your interviewer’s gestures and facial expressions. This puts him or her at ease, and your interview can become a conversation. “Subtle mimicry can help create positive affect and liking...by putting your and your interviewers’ brain on the same page.”
  • Change your relationship with the past – Dwelling on past mistakes is an all-too-easy way to ensure choking. Think about the past and let yourself feel all the stress and disappointment you felt at that time. Consciously shift to drawing lessons from that experience and transform it into a stepping-stone to success.
  • Frame the future – New situations can be difficult to make sense of or to comprehend. Feeling lost can spike your anxiety and make choking more likely. Ensure success by framing the future in specific, positive ways. In the business world, this may be as simple as making a strong first impression; in other circumstances, think through how you want to define a situation before it begins.
  • Make small changes in your process – If the way you’ve been doing things no longer works and you feel tension building, make a small change in your process, as a golfer does when shifting his or her grip on the club. This “reprograms the circuits” in your brain and offers you a new course of action.
  • Practice broadly – Studies have shown an odd thing about sports stars: They are more likely to come from small towns than from large cities. This is because in smaller locales, kids can try several different activities instead of specializing early in life. This reduces burnout and provides more diverse experiences. Playing music also facilitates “the two hemispheres of the brain” working together and operating more smoothly.
  • Develop organizational models – The best waiters have their own patterns or tricks for remembering orders. They develop mnemonic devices like images or words. They reuse established tools of which they know they can trust so they can free up mental energy for other tasks. The simplest of these models is to group or cluster individual “pieces of information into bundles,” such as meaningful patterns, rather than remembering them individually. Develop your own tools and apply them in high-pressure situations.
  • Reduce the demands on your mind – If a computer is running too many programs, it slows down and may even crash. Reduce the demands on your mind. Write your “chronic stressors” down, or repeat a key speech until you know it so well that you don’t have to think about what you’re saying.
  • Train your working-memory – Overwhelming your working-memory contributes markedly to choking. But you can train it to be stronger. Practice memory drills; play video games such as Medal of Honor, Space Fortress, or Halo that require you to hold multiple complex tasks in your working-memory and act quickly under pressure. “So, parents, before you take your kid’s Nintendo DS away for good, you might want to think about the potential benefits of some video game play.”
  • Practice meditation – When you choke, your mind gets stuck on the wrong thing. You repeat negative images or focus on mechanics when you should focus on strategy. Not thinking of something once you’ve started to focus on it is hard, but people who have studied meditation, for even a short time, are better at letting go.

About the Author

Sian Beilock is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

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Choke

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The Secret to Performing Under Pressure

Constable & Robinson,
 



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