The Impact of Management in Personal Performance

In a recent article by Harvard Business Review on Advancing Your Career it was proposed that top-level promotions to the C-suite are often governed by unwritten rules and a few charactistics that every leader needs to make it to possess. These include:

Strong performance - a long track record of consistent performance and clear results
Ethics - honor and character, making decisions with integrity
Drive – the desire and ability to assume ever higher levels of responsibility

It got me thinking about personal performance in large organizations. There is typically great emphasis on team profiling, training on how to work as part of a team and communication training. These are all naturally focused around how to perform better as part of an organization.

So often, performance coaching in business is just like golf coaching – an enormous amount of time, energy and money is spent on trying to overcome symptoms that are purely there as an indicator that individuals are not able to operate freely to performance as well as they naturally can. It just becomes layer upon layer of adding new methodologies to overcome unnecessary constraints.

Why I draw on the golfing analogy is that the same applies – golfing coaches work on fixing problems that wouldn’t be there if the golfer just focused on getting their bodies in good shape so that they rotate freely, use their muscles in a co-ordinated way and avoid injuries that have to then be ‘worked around’. If the body dynamics are correct – the swing dynamics is natural, and performance improvement is natural.

Rather than focusing on the lack of business performance – why not focus on the individual – work with them to find out how they work best and then enable them to work in their natural flow. Make optimal performance easy for them. Give them the tasks, with targets and timelines and let them work in their natural flow to achieve them. Give them the tools to track their own performance so they can self-correct. Do you really believe that every person wants to go home at the end of the day feeling dissatisfied with their day? Even generation Y with their unrealistic expectation that the world owes them everything, for nothing, want to feel good about themselves – after all, everything else is about them. Just because someone works in a different way, doesn’t mean they are broken – that their way is wrong. It might be wrong for you, but you are not being asked to do their job. You want them to do it, but you want them to do it your way – the way that you found YOU worked best. Isn’t the real goal to get the tasks done, to a level of quality and within a time period that fits in with the work being completed by others. We are not battery hens, purpose bred in identical conditions. We grow as individuals and work best in synch with our personal mojo.

This article also lead me an amusing account by organizational health consultant Patrick Lencioni about his encounter with a recent airline. After feeling like he was being treated like a child, he approach the cabin crew in attempt to understand their attitude. The response staggered him - “You know, we just get so tired of being treated like children by this company.” There has to be a universal lesson here. We tend to treat others the way we ourselves are treated. It transpired that the crew were so “disillusioned by their leadership that they found it hard to care”.

Mastering simple concepts seems to be the most difficult to achieve – for instance:

The way we manage other people impacts their world in ways you often don't realise - we have the opportunity to influence their lives, and they way they treat their family and friends.
We all need to know we matter; that what we do matters – if managers can't constantly reinforce their staff with how they are contributing, let the technology do the talking. Personal performance dashboards are a powerful way for individuals to self manage and lead their own performance improvement. Before we can work as a effectively as team, we must be happy working as individuals.
Team work is a strategic choice that has costs and benefits - If the members are not willing to make the sacrifices to get the benefits, they are better off not working as a team.

I am a great fan of Vincent Lomardi's philosophy of 'being brillant at the basics'. I can't say I always succeed, but I prefer it as a philosophy, to keep things simple. If one gains top level performance based on the simple things, one doesn't need all these fashionable complex intervention methodologies. Just look back at the list of characteristics to get to the top job - consistent performance, ethics, honor, integrity and desire. All basic traits, that applied with discipline win through.

To discover a new perspective to helping sales individuals and sales teams improve performance, then you need to read Sell More And Have Your Customers Love You For It