In my 27 years of working with a wide range of companies and organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to HR associations to small businesses, it has become painfully obvious that, as the old saying goes, success “isn’t rocket science.” My job is to discover and report what high performance organizations and individuals have in common.
What do they do that others don’t? How do they think? What differentiates extraordinary performers from everyone else? It’s a shock to some people to learn that high performance factors seldom have to do with superior talents or skills, and have much more to do with the simple act of making choices.
I’ve come to think of high performance as showing off. Showing off, as I define it, isn’t about bragging or arrogance. Showing off simply means bringing your best to everything that you do. It’s about being focused and working with the intention of creating results that benefit the stakeholders in any given situation. Showing off means creating value through accomplishment.
Here are four keys to “showing off” high performance in the best sense of the term:
1. Grand Stupidity and Absurd Bravery in High Performance
This may seem incredibly counterintuitive, but top performers are the ones who seem to act with grand stupidity and absurd bravery. They make choices that others don’t make. They try things without knowing whether or not they’ll work. They often refuse to play it safe and they sometimes seem ridiculous and audacious.What I’ve just described is the behavior of an innovator. Ask anyone whether or not they believe that their company must be innovative in order to be competitive, and you’ll always get a “yes.” But that’s where the commitment to innovation often ends, with lip service.
Innovation means you go first. Innovation means you have to try things without knowing whether you’ll succeed or not. Innovation takes courage, sometimes even absurd bravery. It also takes a willingness to let go of what used to work; what has always worked; and everything that made you successful up to this point. It means acting with an attitude of grand stupidity that says “I don’t know what works. So let's find out.”
Casey Stengel once said, “They say you can’t do it but that doesn’t always work.” He’s right. Here’s another blinding flash of the obvious: 100 percent of the things you don’t try won’t happen. The lesson is this: take a chance.
Mark Twain once said “I knew a man who picked a cat up by the tail. He learned 40 percent more about cats than the man who didn’t.” Sometimes we have to pick the cat up by the tail. You may get scratched up, but you’ll gain information that will set you on the right path to success.
2. What Have You Done for Me Next? Action Rules. Speed Wins in High Performance.
The big question in business used to be “What have you done for me lately?” Today we’re not so interested in what happened “lately” anymore. Today we’re interested in what happens next. We have truly become an “I want it yesterday” society and we have no patience for what we judge to be unnecessary waiting. If you make me wait, you lose.If I could pass along one strategy that I’ve observed in top performers, it would be this: do it now. Those of us who live in the corporate world have become used to having meetings about new ideas, then studying the ideas, then having more meetings about the ideas. Then tabling those ideas in favor of even newer ideas. We talk them to pieces. We “meeting” them to death.
The most effective organizations I know have a tremendous propensity for action and speed. If it’s agreed that an idea is a good one, responsibility for the implementation is immediately assigned, guidelines for accountability are established, the check is written to pay for it, and they get on with it.
Top performers fear being stuck in indecision much more than they fear mistakes. They rightly believe that mistakes can be corrected, but standing still in a constantly moving marketplace can be fatal.
Along with a propensity for action is a need for speed. So you’ll get back with me tomorrow? Great. That gives me lots of time to find somebody else to do business with because you’re fired. Believe it or not, I still run into people who take great chest-swelling pride in their policy of returning calls within twenty-four hours.
Wake up and smell the millennium, folks. It’s the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. While you’re looking at your calendar to find a time to get back to your customers, co-workers, or vendors, they’re looking at their watches.
Find More Factors That Drive High Performance.
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Joe Calloway is an expert on high-performance organizations and individuals, a partner in Mirror, an award-winning restaurant in Nashville, TN, and a member of the International Speakers Hall of Fame. His clients read like a Who's Who of business -- from newspapers in Sweden, hotels in Great Britain, and computer companies in South Africa to world brands like BMW and American Express. He is also the author of Becoming a Category of One (compare prices) and Indispensable (compare prices), both from Wiley. Visit Joe's Web site.
