Peak Performance

We've been talking about the disconnect between leaders and frontline, which reflects a natural disconnect between strategy and execution. The gap we've been discussing, however, is really a chasm. It's deeper than we initially thought and the disconnect is causing change management to crash and burn more often than it succeeds.

Once you understand what the chasm is, it's easier to take steps to resolve it.

Most leaders know that change is necessary to survive and that the right change drives innovation, productivity, and competitive advantage. What they don't know is that change is destined to fail for a reason that is not well understood.

In this episode we examine the hidden cause of change failure and the assumption that hides its destructive power.

Conversion is the strongest behavioral motivator. When people act out of love for a cause, the people, or organizational objectives, the results are the highest levels of individual and organizational performance. In addition, benefits such as trust, transparency, and humility also increase.

Last episode we talked about how to get your team to follow you. In this episode we talk about how to get them to follow you as committed members of the team, not just as compliant employees. Compliant is what you do when someone is watching. Committed is something you do when no one is watching.

In our last episode we talked about how trust is difficult to build and easily lost. But there is a case where trust is resilient and strong against events that in other cases would destroy it.

What kind of trust is this? How do you get it? How do you keep it? Listen for the answers!

Defensiveness is a productive and innovation killer. Unfortunately, it's a natural response for humans that has been deeply ingrained in us over eons of time as a survival mechanism. But in a fast-paced and competitive landscape, the defensiveness we employ actually kills the organization that provides our security and our survival.

In this episode we talk about some ways to eliminate defensiveness from your organization.

A culture that builds psychological safety in the work place is critical if an organization is to reach peak performance. But safety is hard to create. We are all naturally wary of putting ourselves in a vulnerable position. But without vulnerability, friction hinders innovation and restricts progress.

In this episode we dive into the need for safety and how process, correctly structures, can help us get it.

This podcast explores the idea of continuous improvement for self, team, and organization. We examine the process of identifying gaps at all three levels, developing plans to address those gaps through applying key performance activities and best practice sharing. We also focus on the importance of practice and role playing to improve performance.

In this episode we discuss how transparency is the foundation for every important cultural trait that underlies peak performance. Transparency creates clarity, reduces politics, improves trust, encourages ownership, and fosters accountability.

Our conversation discusses what transparency is, how to get it, what the results are if we do get it, and how it all works with SPORT. We hope you enjoy it!

In this episode we talk about the five components of a Peak Performance culture: Transparency, Continuous Improvement, Process Driven Safety, Accountability, and Trust. In future episodes we'll talk about how to build each of these components of a strong Peak Performance culture.

This episode explains how to help your organization stay focused throughout the year on your most important objectives. The skill you need to develop is the ability to focus on the important, but not urgent, priorities of the organization.

We all know that micro managing our teams is a recipe for toxicity in the workplace. Yet we often fall into this trap. What is the alternative? We call it Latitude Leadership, which is the ability to create spaces where team members can be their own CEO. When we do this, the outcome is transparent relationships between behaviors and results, easy accountability, and high job and work satisfaction.

Organizations have always changed. Pressure from AI and other sources are leading to substantial changes now. But what is needed is a complete paradigm shift from people as inputs to people as people. All of the outcomes associated with SPORT - trust, vulnerability, accountability, transparency, ownership - have the potential to change completely the way we think about organizations and our relationship to them.

In this episode, Bryan and Mary Claire talk about how to make sure that the process you introduce into the organization turns into culture, the force that drives long-term peak performance.