Dangers for High Performers

Personal leadership for self-directed high performance is what every organization wishes to see in its employees. If you google ‘high performance articles’ you get 375,000,000 results.

High performers. They aren’t born as high performers, they don’t always know how they do it, it’s not just willpower, and there is not one formula with golden ingredients. To achieve a peak performance you don’t have to be a perfectionist nor a control freak, high performers do show weakness, and they can’t make it happen on command. This should take care of some of the myths surrounding high performance, so that we can now focus on some of the dangers lurking for high performers.

I’ll mention five dangers that anyone faces who’s working to achieve high performance, whether we’re talking a business leader, a basketball coach, a gardener, a tennis player, or any person in any role working to secure top performance:

 1. Fear of failure – This fear is fed by the belief that failure is detrimental to your image and your career, that it’s a sign of weakness, and that it will likely lead to a negative performance review and a bad reputation. Of course, depending on your organizational climate and culture and depending on your personal situation, your mistakes can be viewed as depicted above. But more often than not, risk-taking and charting new territories while learning from mistakes is considered valuable and worth the risk of wrong decisions and actions.

2. Selfishness – The “I might do something for you, if you’ll do something for me” attitude. With this attitude you limit yourself to tasks, connections, and deals in which their immediate benefit is at least as great as the benefits for others. This generally doesn’t work well, not in networking nor in teamwork or any other setting. Instead, if you keep your eyes and ears open to advance other people’s interests, if you genuinely want to benefit others and help make them successful, your relationships will likely be authentic, strong, and reciprocal and you will achieve much more.

3.Tool seduction – You can get so hung up on your tool such as a rigorous work schedule, that weekly meeting, a risk-analysis instrument, or your power point presentations that you easily lose sight of the fact that a tool is just that, a tool.  The bigger purpose that the tool is meant to be supportive off gets lost and the idea of different tools possibly contributing to that one purpose can be foreign to tool-addicts. Keep your eyes on the objective, and on the different possible routes to get to that destination without becoming a blindfolded boxed-in tool addict.

4. Lone heroism – If you believe that you have to achieve everything by and through yourself in order to be perceived as strong and successful you not only face a long, lonesome road but you’ll possibly stall half-way to your destination. If you want to grab that one and only gold medal, if you neglect other people’s contributions and accomplishments, if you neglect to give them credit, and if you act upon that need to constantly prove yourself and be in the spotlight, you will likely find yourself alone, mistrusted, and misunderstood even if you are at times successful in reaching a near peak performance.

5. Cowardice and comfort – Being happy being comfortable and safe, with little interest in stepping out of your comfort zone has to this day taken no one to peak performance. Lacking the courage to stand out from the crowd, to be the lone voice of disagreement, to actively seek dissenting views and minds that think radically differently than you do or lacking the courage to use constructive conflict in meetings and decision making processes is counterproductive to achieving high performance. This sixth danger ties into some of the previous ones, such as the importance of teamwork and of a healthy mindset including risk-taking and allowing mistakes to be made. Your comfort zone, that place where you know you won’t fail, is confining you and holding you back, it’s serving you as a jail.

So why would I talk about the dangers rather than about the necessary ingredients for high performance? The answer is straight forward: Awareness. Awareness of yourself and the dangers you face when working hard and hopefully smart towards high performance is key. We’re talking awareness of the effects that your mindset, style, and approach have on yourself and on others. We’re talking awareness of what’s going on with others. And we’re talking awareness of what’s going on between you and your environment while striving for high performance. I trust it you can translate these dangers to their productive counterparts.

Customer Service - Efficiency & Effectiveness Ideas

As a way of providing ‘valuable to receive and easy to give’ extra service to one of my present customers, I send these business owners a personal and organizational efficiency idea every day for thirty consecutive working days.  It’s a self-explanatory one-liner that I put in the subject line of the e-mail. I would, of course, not want them to have to open yet another message. I do not want to add to the already constant stream of information (and non-information). If they wish, however, they can open the message and read a few more sentences with additional information regarding that specific idea.

Some of my business partners and other readers of this blog have told me they especially enjoy the practical posts with lists of ‘how-to’ and ‘remember this-and-that’ lists. I do not write many such posts, so it’s time for one. And what better topic than personal and organizational efficiency and effectiveness, since you likely suffer, like most of us, from the fact that there are always more things to do than time to do them. As we’ve all heard and read so often before, objectives, priorities, planning, and discipline are a few keys to increase your effectiveness. I will not repeat those here.

I have chosen only nine ideas of the many available and I invite you to pick your top four and diligently adhere to these four ideas for the next five working days. I expect you to experience increased focus, efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.
 

1.   Know yourself - which are your distractions? Stay focused and say 'no' to distractions.  Everyone has their own list of distractions that easily keeps them from doing what they should be doing or planned to do. Keep track of your distractions today, and learn to say 'no' to those personal messages, that fun blog, a phone call with a friend etc. Learn to keep your distractions out of your schedule and focus on the tasks at hand. During a break, you can indulge in every distraction you want to if that is a way for you to relax.

 

2.   Know your energy drainers such as unfinished projects, toxic relationships, or fatigue and take decisive action.  Make a list with your top 3 energy drainers and act to minimize and end them. You are not a victim of your drainers. Deal with them the best way you can. Confront the situation openly and respectfully if it involves others. Get tensions out in the open. Discuss them.

3.   Make decisions and take action. Procrastination never pays off, so make the tough decisions first. Learn to say "no" and not just "yes", and don’t even think about saying “maybe.” Be clear in what you want to/can take on. Think of the option to say “I’ll let you know by …” to provide you with more time to consider what the request entails, whether it fits your goals and priorities, who else could take on the task, and the consequences of saying “no”.

 

4.   Start the day by completing two things on your list that must get done today. Do the hard or unpleasant stuff first. The feeling of already having accomplished something early into the day will energize you.

 

5.   Deal with every e-mail once. Read it and take action on it now, don't save it for later or leave it in your inbox. This implies you only go to your in-box if you have time to read and take action now. After dealing with the message, file it in the appropriate subfolder if it is needed for later reference.

 

6.   Understand how long things really take. In reality, many tasks take longer than you expect. The items at the bottom of your list are likely to be put off for another day – how discouraging if this is recurring. To break this cycle, get a grip on just how long things take. Schedule extra time. We’ve all heard it and just won’t do it.

 

7.   Close programs you don’t use. Many open applications makes searching for those you need at a certain moment more difficult and they eat a lot of RAM slowing down your computer.

 

8.   Boost your productivity at work by taking a 10-15 minute break. Breaks give you much needed time to rest your eyes, change perspective, move around and stretch your stiff muscles, get more blood and oxygen flowing to our brain, to unwind, and to obtain a fresh outlook on things and people. Can’t afford it? Think about how much more focused and productive you can be after a refreshing break.

 

9.   Do something artistic or physical in between long, boring, or hard tasks. Write or doodle something. Take a no-cell phone walk. If you can’t go outside do a simple stretching exercise. Google and you’ll find enough suggestions even for behind your desk or in the restroom.  

Which are your three most important ideas to start with? Any others that really work for you and you’d like to share?