What Organisations Practise Becomes What They Are Good At
As a young teenager I worked weekends in the kitchen of a local restaurant. Most of my time was spent washing pots, but one job I enjoyed was peeling potatoes.
Feeling rather pleased with myself, I carried a bucket of freshly peeled potatoes to the chef.
He looked at them briefly and handed them back.
"Now peel the peel."
I had removed far more potato than was necessary. In a business operating on tight margins, that waste mattered.
The next bucket was better. So was the one after that.
Nobody explained efficiency in a classroom or handed me a checklist.
The standard became clear through doing the job again, paying attention and improving each time.
I've often thought about that experience since. Organisations develop capability in much the same way. They become good at whatever they repeatedly do.
Capability grows through everyday work
When organisations describe their culture, they often talk about values, purpose and expected behaviours.
People experience culture differently.
They learn from what happens repeatedly.
A leadership team that begins each meeting with customer feedback soon finds managers paying closer attention to customers.
Teams where coaching conversations happen regularly become more confident at developing people.
Leaders who consistently ask for evidence before making decisions encourage better preparation and stronger thinking.
Repeated behaviour gradually becomes normal behaviour.
The same principle applies to less helpful habits.
If difficult conversations are regularly postponed, people become more comfortable avoiding them.
If development discussions disappear whenever workloads increase, managers gain far more practice solving problems than helping others solve them.
When meetings become dominated by reporting, curiosity and learning slowly give way to routine.
The organisation is always practising something.
Small routines have a cumulative effect
We often look for major initiatives to improve organisational performance.
Many lasting capabilities are built through much smaller routines.
A project review includes time to discuss what the team learned before everyone moves on.
A supervisor protects one coaching conversation each week, even when operations are busy.
A branch meeting finishes by asking what could be improved before discussing next week's workload.
None of these actions is remarkable on its own.
Repeated over months and years, they influence how people think, what they notice and how they approach their work.
Leaders shape the practice
Leaders influence more than priorities.
They influence what people have the opportunity to practise.
The questions leaders ask, the conversations they return to and the activities they continue making time for all shape capability.
A manager who regularly asks, "What have we learned from our customers?" encourages people to look beyond today's task.
Another who asks, "Who needs support this week?" reinforces teamwork before problems become crises.
These behaviours may seem small, yet they gradually become part of the way the team works.
This also explains why leadership development rarely succeeds through occasional training alone.
A course may introduce a new skill.
The workplace decides whether it becomes part of everyday leadership.
Research points in the same direction
Recent research from different fields reaches a remarkably similar conclusion.
McKinsey's work on strategy mobilisation found that stronger organisations carry strategic priorities into operating plans,
resource decisions and management routines. Capability develops because people repeatedly work in ways that support the strategy
rather than simply hearing about it.
Research by Bin Zhao, Fernando Olivera and Amy C. Edmondson highlights another example.
Leaders become more effective at giving feedback by recognising the emotional responses their conversations are
likely to create and learning from repeated experience. Judgement grows through practice, reflection and adjustment.
The subjects are different, but they point towards the same underlying principle. Lasting capability develops through repeated application in everyday work.
Looking beyond intentions
Most organisations regularly review performance, budgets and strategic priorities.
It is also worth asking what people are becoming more capable of doing.
The answer is usually found in ordinary routines rather than formal plans.
Notice the conversations managers protect when workloads increase. Observe which issues leaders return to week after week.
Look at the work that quietly disappears whenever pressure rises.
These patterns reveal the capabilities an organisation is steadily strengthening, whether deliberately or by accident.
Deliberate practice
Changing organisational capability does not always require another initiative.
It often begins by protecting the routines that give people regular opportunities to improve.
That may mean keeping coaching conversations in the diary during busy periods, using project reviews to examine what was learned,
or making customer feedback part of normal discussion.
It can also mean creating enough time for thoughtful decisions instead of expecting every response to be immediate.
Long before I understood anything about leadership, a chef taught me that expertise is built one repetition at a time.
Every organisation teaches in much the same way.
The question is whether people are practising the behaviours that will matter tomorrow.
References
Krell, A., D'Amico, A., West, A., Diedrich, D., Birshan, M., Zimmerman, W. & Montard, A. (2025). How Strategy Champions Win. McKinsey & Company, 14 July 2025.
Zhao, B., Olivera, F. & Edmondson, A. C. (2026). Great Leaders Know Which Emotions Their Feedback Will Trigger. Harvard Business Review, 13 July 2026.