The most consequential finding in the leadership development literature is also the most uncomfortable for the experienced leader: time in role does not produce leadership capability improvement without the specific conditions that deliberate practice research identifies as necessary. The leader who has been leading for a decade and has plateaued is not facing a talent problem. They are facing a practice structure problem — and the distinction is commercially important because one is fixed and the other is not.

Ericsson’s deliberate practice and the plateau prediction

Ericsson’s deliberate practice research establishes the foundational mechanism. Across domains of expertise — surgery, chess, sport, music — professionals plateau in performance after a few years of experience despite decades of additional practice. The plateau is not a function of talent ceiling; it is a function of practice structure. The conditions that produce expertise are specific: targeted focus on identified weaknesses rather than general performance, immediate and accurate feedback, high levels of repetition, and progressive difficulty that continuously extends beyond the current comfort zone.

When these conditions are absent — when the practitioner repeats the same competent performance without targeting specific weaknesses or receiving corrective feedback — the performance stabilises at the competent level and does not progress. The behaviour becomes automatic and efficient; it stops developing. The surgeon who has performed the same procedure ten thousand times without systematic feedback on specific technical elements is not ten thousand times better than after the first hundred; they are marginally better than they were after the first hundred, with the remainder of the repetitions having consolidated the habit without improving the capability.

The leadership application is direct. The leader who spends thirty years in leadership roles, receiving no systematic feedback on specific behaviours, and not deliberately targeting identified developmental weaknesses will show approximately the same leadership capability at year thirty as at year five. The additional twenty-five years of experience will have produced confidence, pattern recognition in familiar contexts, and faster habitual responses — but not genuine capability improvement on the dimensions that the deliberate practice conditions would have developed.

The feedback and learning orientation interaction: the same experience, different outcomes

The ResearchGate leader development review documented a finding that makes the deliberate practice conditions even more specific: the relationship between developmental challenge and skill development from that experience is curvilinear. Moderate challenge produces development; overwhelming challenge produces cognitive overload without development; insufficient challenge produces comfort without growth. But two factors moderate this relationship: the strength of the leader’s learning orientation and their access to honest feedback. Individuals with higher learning orientation extracted substantially more development from the same experience.

The learning orientation variable is the growth mindset applied to leadership capability: the belief that leadership effectiveness is developable through practice and feedback, rather than a fixed trait that one either has or does not. The leader with an entity theory of leadership — who believes their capability is largely fixed — experiences the same leadership challenge as a self-evaluation context. Did I perform well, or not? The leader with a growth orientation experiences the same challenge as a learning context. What can I extract from this about what to develop? The experience is identical; the development it produces is substantially different.

The feedback access variable is the structural complement: the most learning-oriented leader will develop at the rate that their feedback access permits. The leader who genuinely wants to improve but has no honest feedback mechanism — no 360-degree assessment, no trusted advisor who will deliver uncomfortable observations, no structured after-action review — has the motivation to develop without the information that development requires.

The plateau mechanism: how authority protects blind spots

The plateau is not typically experienced as a plateau. It is experienced as stable, effective leadership — because the social dynamics of authority progressively remove the disconfirmatory feedback that would reveal the gap between the leader’s self-perception and their actual impact.

The mechanism is straightforward: as authority accumulates, fewer people risk the social cost of honest feedback. The team accommodates the leader’s blind spots rather than surfacing them — adjusting how they communicate with the leader, which topics they raise, and which concerns they share. The accommodation appears as smooth functioning; it is actually the gradual removal of the developmental feedback that would interrupt the plateau.

The leader who has not received meaningful critical feedback in two years is not leading an organisation without problems — they are leading one in which the social dynamics have made honest feedback too costly for most people to provide. The absence of feedback is itself diagnostic; it is not evidence of performance excellence.

The Eurich (2018) research established the specific self-awareness dimension that this mechanism most severely impairs: external self-awareness — accurately understanding how one’s behaviour lands with others — cannot be developed through introspection alone. The leader who relies entirely on self-reflection will improve on the dimensions they can already perceive and leave entirely unchanged the dimensions they cannot perceive. External calibration is not a supplement to self-awareness development; it is the mechanism of it.

The after-action review as the structural development practice

The military after-action review discipline is the most directly transferable structural deliberate practice element for entrepreneurial leadership development: the structured, honest examination of what happened versus what was intended after every significant leadership event. What was the intended outcome? What actually happened? What accounts for the difference? What will be done differently?

The after-action review operationalises the intention-impact gap as the primary development input. The leader who believes they communicated clarity and confidence in a difficult team meeting and discovers through the after-action review that the team experienced the same meeting as dismissive and rigid has encountered the specific calibration information that their subsequent communication behaviour can be developed against. Without the review, the gap is invisible; the leader’s self-perception remains intact and unchanged, and the behaviour that produced the unintended impact continues.

The review must be genuinely honest to function as a development tool — which requires a relationship or structure in which the people with direct observation of the impact can provide accurate feedback without the social cost that hierarchy typically assigns to honest upward communication.

Books worth reading on this

The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel. Charan, Drotter, and Noel’s account of the specific capability transitions that leadership development requires at each organisational level — from managing oneself to managing others, from managing others to managing managers, from functional leader to business leader — provides the most practically structured available complement to the Ericsson deliberate practice framework. Their specific account of what stops developing at each transition, and what the deliberate practice conditions that restart development look like at each stage, maps directly onto the plateau mechanism and feedback-learning orientation interaction this article describes.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T. & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993), The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. Ericsson, K.A. & Pool, R. (2016), Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dweck, C.S. (2006), Mindset, Random House. Atwater, L.E. & Yammarino, F.J. (1992), Does Self-Other Agreement on Leadership Perceptions Moderate the Validity of Leadership and Performance Predictions?, Personnel Psychology, 45(1), 141–164. Eurich, T. (2018), What Self-Awareness Really Is, Harvard Business Review. Charan, R., Drotter, S. & Noel, J. (2001), The Leadership Pipeline, Jossey-Bass.