Today it’s been stated that testing your DNA to assess your potential and how you should train to excel in sports is where sports nutrition used to be a couple of decades ago. On the plane the other night I read this article from Bicycling magazine and it’s really becoming mainstream practice to see where your athletic potential lies. Not so much for absolute levels but to find it relatively if you have fast or slow twitch muscles so you’d know better in what disciplines you could get really good and where you just genetically are already capped.
In business as a manager you do whatever you can to hire and develop your folks to grow into roles that you see a great fit for and have a real business need in. I think it’s safe to say that it would be a while before we figure out how to and allow ourselves to DNA test our colleagues and contractors to help assess their potential (pretty scary and far fetching thought right?!) to drive people performance.
But what is really at your hands as a manager though is to drive as much performance from your people as you possibly can no matter their genetic capability. No one wants to leave work feeling completely underwhelmed or go celebrate some work done if you don’t feel that you did your best. You are a coach and a manager that can and should set up for ultimate performance for your team members. Get your people to feel that they left all they had on the field that day. People want to perform and you as a manager no matter at what level – even when you manage and coach yourself – should set up for this.
A while ago I learned about some of the best research into how you actually drive real people performance. Learnings from high pressure organizations, sports, art and other high performance environments. Elkiem who has studied thousands of high performers and SF Research then recently partnered up to help accelerate their research findings into the hands of people that are accountable for driving people performance in their organizations – and who isn’t?
Look at this paper – Leaders Drive Productivity - and get some insight on how you could drive better people performance from creating high performance environments in your organization.
The article you reference presents a structure for evaluating whether a manager is fostering a high performance organization. The structure presented is a template for assessing the state of the outer boundaries of performance – between achievement and failure and between emotional pleasure and discomfort. But, there is no guidance offered on how to actually move an individual employee along the range.
The article also asserts that “the key to implementing high performance in organizations is clarity & effectiveness. Not only does an environment need concepts defining direction, performance status and motivation, those concepts must be clear & effective if a performance outcome is desired. It is the Leaders job to provide this clarity and ensure effective implementation throughout an organization.” But the article does not provide any guidance on the actual interpersonal mechanics of how to achieve clarity; effectiveness is asked for, but it is not defined.
In my view, we need to shift the focus from models to the softer stuff. The next area to focus on is the nature and quality of the one-on-one conversations between managers and their staff. It is in these moments when employees can be motivated to move beyond their comfort zone and really stretch their marginal performance to new heights. And this is true for all members of the group – the top, middle, and weaker performers. Goal setting is the start of this conversation, but only the start, and performance reviews tend to be at the end of this conversation. What’s missing is tools that help guide managers and employees toward how to collaborate in effective, ongoing conversations for action. The next generation of performance management systems will offer guidance on how to establish and maintain such conversations.
At the heart of improving people performance is understanding the factors that need to be present in order for “performance” to occur.
People adapt or change based on their environment – so what is the environment that produces the change called “high performance”? Said another way – what are the circumstances that are most conducive to improved execution!
Leaders can fast track performance by providing and improving the circumstances within which we can perform our best.
This is the secret to the success of performance environments from all over the globe – from the Juilliard School to Special Forces Units in the military. Exceptional execution and performance is fostered by the right circumstances.
I hope people enjoy the whitepaper. Warm Regards
David – Thanks for your comments.
The nature and quality of one-on-one conversations between managers and staff are super critical. Our research has uncovered 74 possible management levers available to leaders to stimulate improved performance and deliver heightened execution. In the corporate landscape we have also found a lack of attention and focus on knowing what is the right lever given the circumstances within an organizations. By understanding the dynamics of their own performance environment managers become better equipped to have these crucial conversations.
For example: Corporates often have too many goals which could be interfering with the ability of the organization to execute what is truly important. Equally the performance review process might not be measuring the real indicators of great performance for an employee.
Regardless, the magic is in how the performance environment is implemented as you correctly attest. So if you want to improve business execution an important question to ask is does your staff have clarity of its High Performance Environment?
Yes absolutely agree. As we discuss in the joint paper goals are the starting point.
We wanted to find the optimal number of goals an individual should focus on. There is a trade off between lack of focus and under utilization of individual capacity.
Our research hypothesis was that every individual should have a handful of goals so 5 goals is the sweet spot. Long story short we leveraged tons of anonymous data and worked with a UCLA econometrics professor and his student to see if there was a connection. The answer we found was a standard distribution function centered around 8.
We’ll share more of this and tons of other research in our forthcoming book Return on Execution(c). http://www.successfactors.com/download/getresource/?doc=/docs/Return_on_Execution.pdf
Good dialog here… I’ll continue. Whether its reaching a sales quota, delivering a major project, or completing a report, the kernel of all execution is fundamentally a request from one person to a performer. Achieving top performance then rests on the quality of the ensuing conversation between the two people. In my experience, these conversations are very often fractured and incomplete. Managers don’t make clear requests. Performers don’t make explicit agreements and commitments. Deliveries are made haphazardly, and there is no immediate acknowledgment and assessment. We’ve been working on a performance management application that would facilitate a virtuous, closed loop conversation that aims to instantiate best practices and support the needs of both the requester and the performer. As Paul points out, tools like this then become part of an environment that drives exceptional execution.