5 Ways To Nurture Extraordinary Performance

Uber’s scandal in 2017 showed how only focusing on performance can damage a company’s reputation.  For those unfamiliar with the story, Uber’s management team sacrificed the fundamental values of integrity and respect to drive short-term profits based on performance. Sure, you want to be profitable, but profitability is not only about meeting performance targets.  Profitability, more than anything else, is driven by motivation. To achieve great success, you need to nurture extraordinary performance.

A motivated workforce

If you don’t create a culture of respect and meet the needs of the person behind the employee number or role, you’re negatively impacting performance. This is partly due to the decline in productivity caused by unethical behaviour, mostly due to the high and expensive staff turnover.

For extraordinary performance, you need highly motivated employees.

Extraordinary performance reviews

But first, let’s talk about the problem with traditional performance reviews. As mentioned, they focus mostly on hard, tangible targets. When you meet the numbers, whatever it takes, you get a good review and are rewarded generously. When you behave ethically and do the right thing but miss the targets, even slightly, you get punished.

Uber is an extreme example, but they are far from isolated cases.  It was unfortunate that they had someone with enough courage to speak up and uncover the scandal.  In most companies, it’s accepted and allowed by most employees, who are too afraid to speak up.

But there’s a far more significant issue with performance reviews, which are closely linked to the field of psychology and the birth of positive psychology.  Traditionally, psychology focused on looking for problems until Martin Seligman, at the turn of the century, suggested that, in turn, it should focus on human strengths.

He realized that the more you look for problems, the more you will find. This is extremely demotivating, as we all strive to be good inherently. Constantly hearing how what we are doing is not good enough is not exactly a recipe for a highly motivated team.

The birth of positive psychology was a radical shift in the right direction. The focus shifted to identifying strengths and enabling individuals, which resulted in extraordinary performance.

How to Cultivate an Extraordinary Performance Culture

Leveraging the field of positive psychology, here are five ways to nurture extraordinary performance:

1. Focus on behaviours, not targets

Increase our customer base by x users.  Sell y products by the end of the financial year.  Reduce costs by z.

Targets are easy.  They’re tangible, and they directly translate to the bottom line. It’s fair, with everyone measured equally, and there’s little room for misinterpretation.  The numbers don’t lie!  It’s the results that matter.  Or is it?

Results do matter, of course.

However, I’ve found that I get much better results when I focus on the behaviours more than the targets.  When the desired behaviours – like responsibility, communication, and trust – are reinforced, suddenly, the results are a natural outcome.  More often than not, challenging targets are exceeded as a result.

2. Reward what you want to see; don’t punish what you want to see less of

How exactly do you measure and reward responsibility?  How do you rate trust that doesn’t seem biased, depending on how likeable you are?  Or how do you quantify good communication?

Admittedly, it’s much more complicated to reward behaviours than results. That’s part of why targets are used as a performance measure. Measuring values takes much more thought and attention than simply pulling a few reports from a system.

As a leader, you need to constantly look for the desired behaviours in your team and recognize the employee when they demonstrate this behaviour.  A private thank you for boosting motivation, followed by a public recognition to prove to the rest of the organization what behaviours are desirable.

Most people want to be good and exceed expectations; it’s just that they don’t always know what the organization is looking for. So tell them every day. Recognizing desired behaviours should be part of the company culture.

3. Reinforce the change

Deciding something is a good idea is key for change to stick, and doing it once isn’t good enough. Reinforcement is key. Essentially, you are building new habits, which takes time and repetition.

Consciously practice the new employee recognition model actively until it becomes a habit.  Constantly remind employees to recognize their peers until it becomes ingrained in the culture.

4. Coach in real-time

Traditional performance reviews are not as effective as coaching. This is partly because they are a forum where the employee has little say in the targets, measures, and sometimes (and I dare say mostly) the ratings. It is mostly because they happen long after the actual events that lead up to the review.

A performance review’s primary purpose is to provide feedback and align the team with the organizational goal.  It simply doesn’t make sense to wait six months or a year to do this.

From my experience, team or personal coaching in real-time is more effective. Addressing an event—good and bad—as and when it happens provides immediate and valuable feedback and allows the team to re-align instantaneously.

Why wait?

5. Focus on strengths

I’ll never forget my first performance appraisal with a “problem employee”. He actively sabotaged me, purposefully not doing tasks I needed for important meetings where I would be made to look bad in front of the Executive Team, not having the results.

The first few times I ignored the passive-aggressive behaviour until eventually, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. We engaged in a conflict session facilitated by the CEO, and both allowed us to raise our concerns. His reaction was fueled by a feeling of personal injustice, having applied for my position but not getting it. I suddenly understood and had more compassion.

After the session, the resentment and passive-aggressive behaviour only increased, and eventually, he moved to a different team.

However, I was still responsible for his performance appraisal and decided to focus on his strengths.  As he walked into my office, I could see doom and gloom all over his face, expecting a bad review.  A few minutes into the performance appraisal, I could see the shock and surprise replace it as he listened to everything he did right during the year.

Before I even got a chance to discuss his weaknesses, he started pointing them out himself and offering commitments on how to prevent them in the future.

From that day on, he was my most loyal supporter and always put my deliverables at the front of the work queue. This was only because I chose compassion, not revenge.

Conclusion

The goal of performance management is to give feedback and set targets to improve and align the performance of different people and teams. Hard targets are not an effective tool for increasing performance, as extraordinary performance is driven by motivation more than anything else.

Positive performance reviews do not intend to exclude the negative side of personal or group performance. Like positive psychology, they are designed to complement rather than replace it.

For a highly motivated workforce, try a positive performance review next time and see what happens.