Mastering High Performance
High Performance is Leading Yourself Well
As a leadership coach, a big part of my job is helping leaders perform at their best. However, while leadership is often top of mind for many organizations, it can also be a very vague and ambiguous term. What exactly do we mean when we say “leadership?” Thus, I often get asked what I am equipped to work on with clients. One framework I use to illustrate this is called my 3 Spheres of Leadership. You can see a graphic of this below:
We could break each of these down as follows:
Oneself: Leading others starts with leading yourself. Here we work on your level of self-awareness and efficacy. These skills could include goal-setting, time management, and resiliency.
One to One: This encompasses your ability to influence and develop people on an individual level. Here we help you build a toolbox for powerful conversations by focusing on communication, conflict resolution, delegation, and mentoring.
One to Many: How can leaders take an idea and turn it into tangible results across a group of people? This is where you will learn to rally and mobilize your team using skills such as vision casting, public speaking, gaining buy-in, and achieving alignment.
I show this to make an important point. Many people tend to view leadership as a skill set that is solely externally referenced. It’s all about what I can influence and motivate others to do. While this is incredibly important, we need to approach leadership more holistically and remember that leading others starts with leading yourself. This TED Talk offers some valuable insights on this topic.
The founder of VISA, Dee Hock, once said:
“If you want to lead, invest at least 40% of your time in leading yourself.”
The idea of leading yourself may sound strange because we tend to view ourselves as being fully in control of our actions. However, we see evidence to the contrary every day. You may have failed to influence yourself to wake up at the time you wanted to this morning. You may be struggling to motivate yourself to follow that new diet so you can hit your weight loss goals. You might have great ideas to grow your business that somehow never make it off your To-Do list.
Every day life invites us to develop clarity around what we want or need, and then influence and equip ourselves to reach those goals. This is what I believe the essence of high performance truly is. Leading yourself well. The self-awareness and efficacy to chart a course for your life, and execute on it. Not only is this crucial to achieving our own goals, but it is also incredibly important for leading others. Let me explain.
A New Perspective on High Performance
Consider the following example. Sandra works in the marketing department at her company and just got promoted to manage her own team. Before this, she was one of the highest performing members in the department, which is why leadership promoted her. (A quick side note is that this is typically how most organizations hire and promote. Based on individual performance. However, this recent article I wrote illustrates why this may not be a good strategy.)
Sandra carries her past work habits into this new role. From a pure hours-to-work standpoint, she still appears to be highly productive. Yet she struggles in her new management role nonetheless. She realizes that her individual contributions have a limit. She does not know how to effectively prioritize all her different responsibilities, and frequently gets lost in details while missing the big picture. As a result, she does not have time for crucial parts of the role, such as developing her team, strategic direction, and establishing good communication habits.
This in turn, leads to frustration and overwhelm on the team. People stop collaborating and instead focus on their individual objectives to keep their heads above water. Trust and empathy breakdown, conflicts rise, and good employees start leaving the company. Sandra is in no way a toxic leader, and on the contrary, cares very much about her team. She simply could not lead herself well.
This is a great illustration of how leadership gaps can have large ripple effects in organizations. I see this exact problem quite often in companies I have worked with. What makes the problem even more challenging is that it is not something that more training will solve, because it is usually rooted in the beliefs and habits of the leader. That is why I love 1:1 coaching. It provides a space where a leader can get a third-party perspective and reflect on these limiting beliefs and habits. Then we have an opportunity to reprogram them into something productive. To learn more about how coaching accomplishes this, check out this article.
So, in order to master high-performance, we need to peel a few layers back and examine the underlying beliefs and habits of the individual. Often, I have found that the problem is not a lack of skills or effort; it’s that leaders get in their own way. So, for this article, I thought I would unpack some common beliefs and habits that hinder high performance, along with some strategies to address them.
Performance Pitfalls
1. Focusing on Output over Quality – There is a reason we have the adage, “less is more.” However, it bears saying again that more is not always better. In our metric and KPI obsessed environments, it can be easy to forget this truth and fall in love with checking items off a list. Or we feel we must milk every second for all it’s worth. Yet the more we slip into this mindset, the less we approach our work in an intentional way. Deliberate planning, reflection, and care for our team may not always feel as productive because it is hard to draw a straight line between those things and bottom-line revenue. Yet they are crucial to profitability because they ensure that the company is focusing on objectives that will create the most momentum to advance the business, rather than maintaining the status quo. I have often seen a fear that devoting time to these things will limit how much one can work on revenue-producing activities. However, constraints are a good thing because they force us to become more creative. That is why, often, start-up companies are much more innovative than bigger corporations.
Furthermore, this allows us to operate closer to our full cognitive capacity. Think of it like an athlete. If you train every day, eventually you will overtrain and injure yourself. You need short, focused bouts of intense effort, then rest in order to operate at your peak capacity and master high performance. The same is true with knowledge work. A simple way to practice this mindset is to be intentional with taking more short breaks throughout the day, and also paying attention to what times you are at your most alert and productive. Then dedicate that time to your most demanding task of the day.
2. Undervaluing Creativity – Creativity is not a word you hear very often in organizations. Instead, we like to use the word “innovate.” Regardless, they mean the same thing. Here’s the problem, though. We like the fruits of innovation, but not the process to get there. We don’t realize that organizations praise the outcome of innovation, but subtly discourage the behaviors that produce it. This is because creativity takes time and space. It works best when we are not trying hard to accomplish anything.
See, our brain has 2 main forms of thinking: Divergent and Convergent. Convergent narrows options down and prioritizes. It happens when we are trying to do a familiar task in a better or faster way. This is our typical focus work, and our workplaces are dominated by this kind of thought. On the other hand, we have Divergent thinking, which is what happens when we are creative. It expands options and finds novel ways to do something. However, this form of thought only happens when we are relaxed and not thinking too hard. That’s why your best ideas happen when you are in the shower or before you go to sleep.
I’m a firm believer that 1 good idea beats 10 average ideas. However, this can only happen when we embrace divergent thinking. All this means that we need to create a conducive space in our work days for creative ideas. Relaxed, uninterrupted time for problem-solving and strategic direction.
3. Not Filling your Glass – By filling your glass, I mean embracing a more optimistic “glass half-full” attitude. This is the one I get the most push-back on. Most people would characterize themselves as a “realist” or even a “pessimist”, and if we are being honest, in our world today, they mean the same thing. This is because many people assume that bad things are more likely to happen in their lives than good things. While there is no evidence to support this, it is mostly because our brains are hardwired for survival and threat detection. So we are more likely to notice bad things.
On the other hand, rarely does anyone take pride in being an optimist. This is because being an optimist is often associated with being naïve, and consequently, also associated with lower performance. If someone is optimistic, the assumption is that they will be a poor planner and make uninformed decisions because they can’t anticipate obstacles. While this can be true, we never ask the question, “What are we missing out on by being pessimistic?” Opportunities, accomplishments, and social signals, to name a few. All are extremely important to leadership and performance.
If we are truly being “realists,” we would realize that optimism and pessimism are equally valuable and need to be engaged. However, the reality is that most human beings have a huge imbalance towards pessimism, and this cautious and critical attitude is costing them performance. That is why I advocate for most people to practice more optimism. One simple practice to help with this is to be intentional with celebrating wins more often. This can be done individually in your journal or times of reflection, or in a group during meetings. Furthermore, when brainstorming or strategizing, make sure you give equal time to talk about what could go right with a project, and not simply focus on the risks.
The High-Level View
As we can see, performance is about far more than individual output. More than anything, it’s about doing the “right” things, and our judgment of what these things are is affected greatly by our beliefs and habits. That’s where coaching is so valuable for a leader. It allows them to step back from the way they normally view and/or do things, and get a different perspective.
From there, we can identify biases or blind spots that may be hindering performance, so you are no longer getting in your own way. If you are looking to improve your performance as a leader, I would love to have a conversation about how I can help.
My High Impact Performance Program is all about helping you regain control of your time, allowing you to work with confidence and drive meaningful results in your organization. Throughout this program, you will be equipped to:
Develop self-awareness to align your habits with professional goals
Optimize your workspace for improved focus and efficiency
Learn proven tools and strategies to master prioritization and time management
Establish boundaries and overcome perfectionism to protect your time
Build sustainable, high-performance habits to maintain long-term productivity
If you are curious to learn more, go ahead and book a free Discovery Call with me!