Bring Out the Best in People: 5 Steps to Peak Performance
“You can get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.”
- Alan Loy McGinnis
How do you bring out the best in people? Managers want their people to achieve excellence at work. Leaders and management alike know that they can't achieve expected business results without the participation and engagement of individuals and teams.
Without people motivated for peak performance, companies will go out of business. Peak performance is defined as a combination of excellence, consistency and ongoing improvement.
To achieve peak performance, one must find the right job, tasks and conditions that match their strengths. Therefore, facilitating the right fit becomes one of a manager's most crucial responsibilities. While every employee has the potential to deliver peak performance, it's up to the manager to bring out the best in people.
Disengaged Or Bored?
Disengaged employees often appear to lack commitment. In reality, many of them crave engagement. No one enjoys working without passion or joy.
While many factors cause disengagement, the most prevalent is feeling overwhelmed — or, conversely, underwhelmed. Disconnection and overload pose obstacles to performance, yet they often go undetected or ignored because neither qualifies as a disciplinary issue.
Meanwhile, managers work around such problems, hoping for a miraculous turnaround or a spark that reignites energy and drive. They try incentives, empowerment programs or the management "fad du jour."
While it's impossible to create "flow" moments all day long, any manager can significantly improve the ability to help people achieve peak performance. Traditionally managers try various motivational methods, such as incentives and rewards, but with only temporary success.
Managing Knowledge Workers
You can't force peak performance with knowledge workers—those employees who need to think to do their jobs. The brain needs careful management and rest. Brain science tells us that knowledge workers must manage their critical thinking skills with care.
All humans require food, rest, engagement, physical exercise, and challenge in addition to variety and stimulation. It is unrealistic to expect a human being to sit at a desk for hours and produce quality work without providing these essential elements and more.
We often forget that thinking is hard work. When we work too many hours, the brain's supply of neurotransmitters becomes depleted, and we cannot sustain top performance. Without proper care, the brain will underperform—and brain fatigue mimics disengagement and lack of commitment.
Peak performance also depends on how we feel: hopeful, in control, optimistic and grateful. We need to know that we're appreciated.
Use Brain Science to Bring Out the Best
While no management guru has found the golden key to unlocking the full range of human potential at work. This research sheds new light on the possibilities.
As far back as a 2005 Harris poll, 33% of 7,718 employees surveyed believed they had reached a dead-end in their jobs, and 21% were eager to change careers. Only 20% felt passionate about their work.
The situation isn't improving. In 2014, 52.3% of Americans said they were unhappy at work, according to a report by the Conference Board, the New York-based nonprofit research group.
When so many skilled and motivated people spend decades moving from one job to the next, something is wrong. They clearly have not landed in the right outlets for their talents and strengths. Their brains never light up.
The better the fit, the better the performance. People require clear roles that allow them to succeed while also providing room to learn, grow and be challenged.
Dr Edward M. Hallowell, author of Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People (Harvard Business Press, 2011), synthesises some of the research into five steps managers can apply to maximise employees' performance.
Hallowell refers to the five cited essential ingredients as "The Cycle of Excellence," which works because it exploits the strong interaction between an individual's intrinsic capabilities and extrinsic environment. A psychiatrist and ADD expert, he draws on brain science and peak performance research for bringing out the best in people:
Select: Put the right people in the right job, and give them responsibilities that "light up" their brains.
Connect: Strengthen interpersonal bonds among team members.
Play: Help people unleash their imaginations at work.
Grapple and Grow: When the pressure's on, enable employees to achieve mastery of their work.
Shine: Use the right rewards to promote loyalty and stoke your people's desire to excel.
"Neither the individual nor the job holds the magic," Hallowell writes. "But the right person doing the right job creates the magical interaction that leads to peak performance."
Step 1: Select
To match the right person to the right job, examine how three key questions intersect:
At what tasks or jobs does this person excel?
What do they like to do?
How do they add value to the organisation?
Set the stage for your employees to do well with responsibilities they enjoy. You can then determine how they will add the most significant possible value to your organisation.
Step 2: Connect
Managers and employees require a mutual atmosphere of trust, optimism, openness, transparency, creativity and positive energy. Each group can contribute to reducing toxic fear and worry, insecurity, backbiting, gossip and disconnection.
A positive working environment starts with how the boss handles negativity, failure and problems. The boss sets the tone and models preferred behaviours and reactions. Employees take their cues from those who lead them.
To encourage connection:
Look for the spark of brilliance within everyone.
Encourage a learning mindset.
Model and teach optimism, as well as the belief that teamwork can overcome any problem.
Use human moments instead of relying on electronic communication.
Learn about each person.
Treat everyone with respect, especially those you dislike.
Meet people where they are, and know that most will do their best with what they have.
Encourage reality.
Use humour without sarcasm or at others' expense.
Seek out the quiet ones, and try to bring them in.
This is common sense, but we fail to use it when it is really required. When people are floundering, the last thing they need is to have their flaws and mistakes spotlighted. Instead, make sure you understand where they are at and what the real problems are.
Step 3: Play
Play isn't limited to break time. Any activity that involves imagination lights up our brains and produces creative thoughts and ideas. Play boosts morale, reduces fatigue and brings joy to workdays.
Encourage imaginative thinking with these steps:
Ask open-ended questions.
Encourage everyone to produce three new ideas each month.
Allow for irreverence or goofiness (without disrespect), and model this behaviour.
Brainstorm.
Reward new ideas and innovations.
Encourage people to question everything.
Step 4: Grapple and Grow
Help people engage imaginatively with tasks they like and at which they excel. Encourage them to stretch beyond their usual limits.
If tasks are too easy, people fall into boredom and routine without making progress or learning anything new. Your job, as a manager, is to be a catalyst when people get stuck, offering suggestions but letting them work out solutions.
Step 5: Shine
Every employee should feel recognised and valued for what they do. Recognition should not be reserved solely for a group's stars.
People learn from mistakes, and they grow even more when their successes are noticed and praised. Letting them know that you appreciate victories large and small will motivate them and secure their loyalty.
When a person is underperforming, consider that lack of recognition may be a cause. An employee usually won't come right out and tell you that they feel undervalued, so you must look for the subtle signs. In addition:
Be on the lookout for moments when you can catch someone doing something right. It doesn't have to be unusual or spectacular. Don't withhold compliments.
Be generous with praise. People will pick up on your use of recognition and start to perform for themselves and each other.
Recognise attitudes, as well as achievements. Optimism and a growth mindset are two attitudes you can single out and encourage. Look for others.
When you're in sync with your people, you create positive energy and opportunities for peak performance. Working together can be one of life's greatest joys. And, it's what we're wired to do.
These five areas of focus can help you avoid fear-based management practices. Use these five steps to identify problem areas and decide on a plan of action. In this way, you can creatively manage for growth, not just survival.
What do you think? I’d love to hear from you. I can be reached here and on LinkedIn.
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