How You Can Build Sustained Performance
“You only have to understand this basic point: Beauty nurtures the soul. Expose yourself to the beautiful, and let it do its work. It will accomplish what you could never dream of. All you have to do is trust it and be open to it” (Thomas Moore).
Conversations is an exhibition currently on at Everard Read Cape Town. Gallery artists invited another artist to produce a work that would be ‘in conversation’ with theirs. I love the idea. Dialogue, connection, creativity, discovery are the foundations of excellence. These two pieces by Nigel Mullins and JM Meterlekamp demonstrate the magic that can result from ‘Conversation’. A few kilometres away Nabeeha Mohamed’s first show at What If The World is on its way to being sold out, and if you like your beauty to have a functional edge then you’ll love knifesmith Bruce Wright’s cleaver.
Building effective organisations that allow people to thrive, that meet needs and create possibilities is its own act of creativity, it has its own beauty.
/ STRATEGY
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote their book Nine Lies about Work for the “leader who embraces a world in which the weird uniqueness of each individual is seen not as a flaw to be ground down but as a mess worth engaging with, the raw material for all healthy, ethical, thriving organizations”, for people who want to create beautiful businesses.
They identify eight items that predict sustained performance (reliably and validly in the statistical sense thereof):
1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company
2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
5. My teammates have my back.
6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
7. I have great confidence in my company’s future.
8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
You have already realised that this means that the majority of your work experience is influenced by your team context.
They write, “When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work.”
Items 1 and 7 are the two that are about the company. These company factors together with the team factors (the other 6) determine engagement and high engagement gives you good performance.
As a CEO, or an executive leader, the most powerful lever you have in building a great organisation is to identify your best teams and then systematically build more and more teams like them.
Many of us don’t hold a C-Suite role, but Buckingham and Goodall’s work shows that your individual leadership can make a remarkable difference in people’s work lives.
By clearly expressing expectations, by recognising excellent work, by helping colleagues to identify their strengths, by giving people opportunities to grow, you can enrich others’ work experiences and help them to be both happier and more effective.
You can make a difference in your sphere of influence.
As a manager, you can start by asking about your team members’ experiences of each of the above eight items. Believe them when they tell you. It is their experience after all and then work systematically to improve it. It will improve overall business results.
Meet with your team members weekly.
Buckingham and Goodall note that “the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 per cent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 per cent decrease in engagement.”
Julie Zhuo, in The Making of A Manager, provides good advice for those meetings, she says, “One-on-ones should be focused on your report and what would help him be more successful, not on you and what you need”, and “Remember that your job is to be a multiplier for your people. If you can remove a barrier, provide a valuable new perspective, or increase their confidence, then you’re enabling them to be more successful.”
Underpinning successful team dynamics is psychological safety. You won’t get useful information if your people don’t trust you. You can read more about that in How Fear Causes Failure. And Buckingham and Goodall tell us that teams that trust their team leader, are TWELVE times more engaged than those that don’t.
/ SELF
Of the 8 items, the single most powerful predictor of a team’s performance is each team member’s sense that “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work”.
What is a strength?
Buckingham and Goodall describe it in this way, “A strength… is an ‘activity that makes you feel strong.’ This sort of activity possesses for you certain definable qualities. Before you do it, you find yourself actively looking forward to doing it. While you are doing it, time seems to speed up, one moment blurring into the next. And after you’ve done it, while you may be tired and not quite ready to suit up and tackle it again, you nonetheless feel filled up, proud. It is this combination of three distinct feelings—positive anticipation beforehand, flow during, and fulfilment afterward—that makes a certain activity a strength. And it is this combination of feelings that produces in you the yearning to do the activity again and again, to practice it over and over, to thrill to the chance to do it just one more time. A strength is far more appetite than ability, and indeed it is the appetite ingredient that feeds the desire to keep working on it and that, in the end, produces the skill improvement necessary for excellent performance.”
Knowing your own strengths can help you be clear about the types of roles you take on. It can help you communicate where and how you can best contribute. Being willing to help is a wonderful attribute, but if it consistently takes you out of where you feel strong, you will ultimately disengage.