Good Managers Take Time: The Innovators

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The One Minute Manager? Who's ever heard of The One Minute Surgeon or The One Minute Trial Lawyer? Can you become a company-certified manager after reading a book or "graduating" from a three-day class? Is it really that easy, or are we kidding ourselves?

It's no surprise that hard research confirms that today's management development approaches are largely ineffective at improving leadership. A Corporate Leadership Council study of 19,000 employees across 29 countries found that "leadership training" courses improved performance by less than 1%.

Accenture's(ACN Quote) High Performance Workforce study found, that despite an explosion in management development innovations, only 36% of companies report their leadership capabilities to execute strategies as good or excellent. This is down from 50% a few years earlier. When it comes to leadership performance, it's getting worse.

Maybe that's why management development gets cut at the first sign of an economic downturn -- executives don't believe it works. But employ correct principles, and management development can work and add real value to your business.

Leadership: a Complex Skill

Mastering leadership requires the same approach as mastering other complex skills such as playing the piano. Can a person become a certified pianist by reading The One Minute Pianist and attend a three-day class on piano theory? Certainly not. Playing the piano requires years of dedicated practice.

New pianists draw from the collective experiences of others to learn how specific activities should be performed. They practice, get feedback, adjust and practice again. In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that world-class expertise in almost any complex skill requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.