How to Grow & Perform but not Burn Out

In the 1980’s C.C.L. did research on how leaders develop. This led to the 70/20/10 model which explained that leaders learned roughly:

·       70 percent from tough experiences

·       20 percent from people (mostly their boss)

·       10 percent from courses and reading

The numbers were never meant to be prescriptive, just helpful. The power of the model was that it confirmed what a lot of people intuitively felt, we mainly learn from life experiences.

It's been 40 years since that research was done and the 2020’s - pandemics, virtual work, social media, never meeting your colleagues - feel a little different from the 80’s. Therefore, it feels like a good time to take a fresh look at the question – how do people best develop in the modern context?

Myself, along with 3 partners, Ryan Bricker from Uber, Mitch Stallard from Netflix and Michael Campbell from Workday are researching what it takes to be effective in the modern world of work. While we love C.C.L.’s research, we also discovered that modern workers need more than just to learn from experience. People have 3 needs which they must meet simultaneously:

·       The need to Grow: the world is changing fast, we have to continuously grow to keep up

·       The need to Perform: growth is nice, but our boss and customers want us to deliver results now

·       The need to not Burn Out: we need to do the above without sacrificing our health and personal lives

 As we’ve all seen in the last two years, meeting all three of the above is not easy. In our research we found that most people are way out of balance. To share one finding – most people are sacrificing the 3rd bullet, in order to meet the 2nd bullet. It’s rampant.

To find a better way, we interviewed people who must meet all 3 needs at the same time. These included: surgeons, professional athletes, Navy Seals, FBI agents, priests, musicians and businesspeople. It’s been fascinating. Now we’d like to share what we learned. 

 We are going to run 3 webinar discussions where we’ll share our findings and then invite attendees to brainstorm implications and applications as a group. We are looking for about 5 - 7 people for each session. If you are interested in learning about and discussing what the future of the workplace might look like, we’d love you to join. Register below to secure a spot.

 Discussion 1 (5 July, 1pm PST) - Register here