Benchmarking The Best: Why Great Leaders Learn by Imitation

Observing Excellence, Becoming Excellence

While every highly performing school district, government agency, or organization has achieved success through a variety of methods, each of them has a hidden truth behind their achievements: they have all had leaders that have taken the time to study an individual or organization that is more successful than they are. Before department can make a breakthrough, or an agency can receive national recognition, there is first observation, intentional, deliberate, and at times, humble observation.

When we refer to innovation in the civic world, we typically think that innovations originate from imagination; however, most innovations develop from studying what others are doing. Agencies look at ways other cities decrease wait times, how another state responds to emergencies, how another district communicates with its citizens, etc. Leaders see what is working somewhere else and they attempt to replicate it locally.

Benchmarking is not simply copying others because it represents a realization that leadership develops by recognizing, examining, and replicating the patterns of excellence. Benchmarking is the distinction between speculation and informed development. And it is the most effective leaders that recognize that excellence is rarely accidental. It is consistently produced by patterns that are observable and measurable by any leader who is willing to learn.

The Neurology of Learning by Examining Others

What makes benchmarking so productive is not merely strategic, it is biological. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at UCLA, examined mirror cells, the neural networks that initiate activity in our brain when we execute an action and when we observe someone else executing the same action. Our brains produce identical activation regardless of whether we are performing the action or viewing the action being performed by another person.

Therefore, when a leader views a high-performing organization producing excellent outcomes, the leader's brain is simulating the behavior necessary to produce similar results. When a leader views a high-performing organization, the brain is mentally practicing the behaviors observ