Higher Performance at Work Doesn’t have to Come at the Expense of Personal Wellbeing

I am reading the book, The Performance Curve by Laura Watkins and Venessa Dietzel. I'm a fan of those who write, but more so, those who lead from the beliefs that maximizing one’s potential at work and being in a positive state of wellbeing can go hand in hand.

 In a nutshell: When we feel good, we work better.

Wellbeing is a core theme of this book, but the authors don’t come at it in a touchy-feely sort of way. They take a fact-based approach and draw on examples from neuroscience, psychology, and their own experience dealing with corporate high-flyers to add weight to their argument for a more holistic approach to performance.

My practice allows me a front-row seat of watching system leaders grapple with the complexities of the modern organizational environment that juxtaposes good humans between driving higher performance and personal wellbeing. When battling between these choices, the unfortunate trade-off is often exhaustion and an underlying dissatisfaction with life.

Constant, full-on work pressure drives people into a situation where they are constantly pushing beyond their natural reserves. While this hyperactivity might look like the epitome of productivity, it slowly erodes their ability to allocate attention and energy effectively.

So how does one effectively calibrate being both productive and present? Here are a couple of strategies to get you started.

Check-In: Chronic stress weakens the functioning and the structure of our brains, particularly in the areas that are important for memory, emotional regulation, and self-control.

How can leaders who pride themselves as the Duracell Bunny effectively step off the hamster wheel? One suggestion is to stop seeing performance as a narrow sense of achieving linear and lagging results. Broaden the definition of your system’s outcomes, and consider the lead measures of sustainability (healthy team synergy, communication, work/life effectiveness, etc.)

In my experience, the highest outputs don’t come from surface ‘hacks’ – for example, writing better to-do lists or ‘eating the frog first thing in the morning’ (doing the most challenging task of the day first). They come from things that help evolve our inner operating system or that deep wiring in our brain that guides how we function and affects our mindset, emotions, and habits.

In food terms, it’s the difference between a crash diet and making sustainable changes to what we eat.

Taking regular time-outs to reboot the inner operating system includes making better choices about interpreting and interacting with the world, being able to deal with more complexity with less effort, better outcomes, and improved life satisfaction.

I have experienced the simple fact that investing just 15 minutes going down new routes of inquiry can lead to different insights and avenues for action. Naturally, the forces of time and demands push against this idea of recalibrating, but leaders often know (deep down) that something needs to change.

What has helped leaders break free in this space of tension reminds them of their brains, like a high-performance vehicle. You can redline it for a short burst, but constant driving in the red zone will cause the engine to break down. Having brain-performance conversations makes people aware of what’s happening when their intelligence is constantly in fight-or-flight mode and how this can affect the quality of the singularity of their responsibility - Making Great Decisions.  

Make Small Changes: Small changes can make a big difference in how we show up in the grind. For example, before going into a potentially stressful situation, pause and focus momentarily on the breath. Inhale for a count of three and exhale for six. Even something as simple as this can shift the balance towards a more restful state and create a bit of space.

Daily journaling of feelings and thoughts can also be hugely beneficial, even if it’s only done for five or ten minutes a few times a week. It may not sound significant, but there is a solid evidence base to support its positive impact on mental and physical wellbeing.

The challenges leaders and teams have faced during the pandemic have been universal and have pushed all of us to realize the benefits of balance, self-awareness, and the power of managing ourselves. Covid has created an appetite for a better work-life equilibrium at all levels and pushed wellbeing in its broadest sense right up to the executive office.

 It’s simple, but not simplistic: When we feel good, we work better.

Remember … leaders go first. If you are the leader of your organization, you set the tone and the table for the health of your system's culture.

Here are a few questions that might be helpful to mesh into your next 1:1’s with your team to keep your people on target (to quarterly objectives) while calibrating self-care in the balance.

Here are my five suggestions:

• Working from home has been such an upheaval for a lot of us – how are you going with the changes you’ve needed to make?
• What are you working on now that I could help you with?
• Do you feel you have the support you need to do your job right now? If not, what can I do to help?
• I could be wrong … to me, you seem a little different lately. How are you coping with work and home life right now, and how can I help?
• Our weekends even seem to be a bit different lately. How was yours?

I hope you found this article valuable. Pick up The Performance Curve and let's compare notes over a virtual coffee. These daily exchanges are the best part of my every day!

You can schedule yours with two clicks RIGHT HERE.

For you!