The High Performance Model

The high performance model

Perhaps not the most cheerful way to start, but you are aware that you’re going to die right? As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet in his “To be, or not to be…” speech; at some point, we are all going to “…shuffle off this mortal coil.” If we’re lucky enough to live a long life, we want to be able enjoy it twice – when we live it and when we look back in reflection.

Compelling purpose

This means we want our lives to have meaning, for them to have of purpose. This is the basis of all human existential angst – what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? This is not a new idea. Over 2,000 years ago Aristotle talked about achieving Eudaimonia, the highest human good.

There are different ways we can fulfil this need and create meaning for ourselves – doing charity work, being a good parent and acts of community service to name a few. Another way is through our work, by connecting what we do in our jobs on a day-to-day basis with how it serves the community. Rather than focusing on the detail of the daily grind, look up from your spinning hamster wheel and see how the organisation you’re working for adds value to society. How do people benefit from the products and services you offer? What is the compelling purpose?

We all need a compelling purpose; to serve something greater than ourselves and to find meaning in what we do. My work with executives and senior leaders around storytelling is to help them craft the stories that help connect their people to the organisation’s purpose and to bring that to life. It is so important. We have too many corporate zombies in business, disconnected from any really meaningful work and you don’t want your organisation contributing to low engagement scores and depression statistics.

Courage & vulnerability

In many models, high trust is taught as the foundation of high performance. However there’s actually a precursor to high trust and that is courage and vulnerability. We need more courageous leaders, those who are brave enough to bring their humanity into the workplace, to be open and vulnerable with their people. Vulnerability in this sense isn’t about weakness but rather acknowledging we’re all human, doing the best we can with what we know and have. Leaders will make mistakes and get things wrong. You won’t have all the answers and that’s okay. But if you’re courageous and vulnerable that creates space for others to be human. This is the breeding ground for connection. Once we connect then we can truly get to know each other at a deeper level. It sounds counter-intuitive as it’s not how we’ve been brought up, but self-revelation actually breeds intimacy. When someone reveals their underbelly to us (metaphorically speaking) then we start to feel safe.

Psychological safety & high trust  

Now we come to the trust component of high performance. We’re a funny lot human beings. With our negativity bias (i.e. assuming the worst) we don’t trust easily. We have been socially conditioned to protect ourselves from hurt both physically and emotionally so we walk around with the barriers up. We can’t get hurt if we don’t let people in. If someone new comes into our team, we may not necessarily distrust them but there may be an absence of trust. This shows up in work environments as patch protection, withholding information, office politics and all the negative and destructive below the line behaviours. When we feel we know someone then we lower the barriers and let them in.

 There’s also more good will in a trusting environment. If you send me a terse email or snap at me in a meeting, when there is trust between us I’m more inclined to think ‘that’s not like you’ or I might even ask you if things are okay? I am more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. In a low trust environment, I’ll walk away from that exchange assuming the worst of you and that will most likely adversely impact our relationship. It’s called the fundamental attribution error. I’ll judge you by your character (you snapped at me because you’re a bully) rather than the situation (you’re scratchy because you’ve been up all night with a sick child and haven’t slept).     

Open & honest communication

When we feel safe then we can be open and honest in our communication. I’ll share something with you because I feel I know you well enough. I don’t fear that something I say to you will come back and bite me in the butt two weeks later. I will say what I think you really need to hear without fear of recrimination. As a leader you spend more time communicating than any other task you do, so it’s important you do it well and that you help cultivate the right environment for effective communication. In a low trust environment, people will agree with you publicly but discredit you privately. The behaviour of anyone who is disengaged in your organisation is to delay, withhold, sabotage, be apathetic, lay blame and make excuses – all of which destroys any chance of a high performance culture. When we communicate effectively we are building together.

Collaborative creativity

Because we don’t live in a vacuum, when we communicate openly and honestly with each other we build on, explore, discover, and create together. ‘Collaborative creativity’ is actually tautologous in a way because all creativity is a collaborative activity. We bring our own life experience and imagination to bear when we create and we ultimately create things we could never have created by ourselves. In a high trust environment failure is genuinely accepted and is seen as a necessary part of learning. Many organisations say they accept failure but those who do in practise are rare. This is one of the reasons why there is little innovation in workplaces; people are afraid to make mistakes and to question the status quo. There is too much pressure on having a ‘good’ idea rather than understanding that creativity is a numbers game and you only get to the good idea by having lots of ideas.    

You have to build the right culture for creativity to thrive. The team that plays together stays together. There’s a lightness of energy within a creative team, you can enter the flow state more easily, people love their team and they enjoy the process as much as the results.     

Relevant & value-add innovation

Creativity leads to innovation that serves a purpose. Innovation need to be relevant and to add value, not just for its own sake. We are living in a time where there is rapid disruption, where we are seeing the rise and fall of entire products and industries in a lifetime (DVDs anyone?). If you’re not innovating and adding value then you will die out. You only have to look at nature to see what happens to things that don’t evolve with the times – they become extinct. This can be personally - if you don’t add value in your role, you’ll become extinct. If organisations don’t add value, then they will become extinct. The cover of Forbes business magazine in November 2007 was Nokia, 1 billion customers. Can anyone catch the cellphone king? The answer is yes. Because they stood still. In my lifetime I can remember Wang computers, Atari video games, Blockbuster video, Yahoo, Kodak – all giants within their time that aren’t with us today. You don’t want to be a taxi driver raging against ride share apps saying it’s not fair – you need to evolve.

 Commercial success and compelling purpose

Despite management guru Peter Drucker’s insight in 1954 that the purpose of business is to create a customer, a different thought emerged in business schools in the 1970’s. This was that the only purpose of business was to make money and maximise shareholder return. It is still alive in many organisations today. These same organisations haven’t understood there has been a shift and that making money is just the ticket to be able to play the game of business. If you don’t make money; you’re out of the game.  

Now, the secret to making money and becoming a commercial success is actually to add value as money always follows value. This works both at an individual level and a company-wide level. If you want to make more money, then add more value. If you want to win more customers, then add more value for your current customers. Making money is the outcome of adding value, not the purpose of business. Obviously commercial success is a necessity for your organisation, but it’s not the reason your organisation exist. So, what then is the purpose of business? This leads us back to the beginning where every organisation needs to identify and clarify their compelling purpose, their reason for being. 

Beyond high performance

I started this with acknowledging our mortality so let me end on the same note but with a different resonance. It is highly desirable for us to be able to sustain our high performance over time. We achieve incredible things when we do, just as our top athletes achieve glory and success in their chosen fields and why we often use athletes (or race cars) to conceptualise what we mean by ‘high performance’. In business however there is a key difference – an athlete always has a down period after the peak of their event. They can taper off and refresh and rejuvenate before going again. In business there is no such period – you are on all year round with constant and usually ever increasing demands. A high performance race car that gets pushed past its maximum can blow an engine. They can replace that engine, but for people a blown engine is a heart attack – you’d be very lucky to get a second chance.

So, we need to ensure that our high performance is sustainable – that we look after ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally and that we can continue to give our time and energy in a way that keeps us energised rather than depletes us. A high performance culture doesn’t happen by chance. It needs to be cultivated and curated and while it can exist in pockets in an organisation, if you want a high performance culture to permeate the entire business then it has to start at the top.