Recipe for Performance Leaders

How do they do it? Each of us have witnessed individuals who consistently outperform their peer group and either inspire us to emulate their behavior, or scratch our heads in wonder.

While there are few substitutes for a high-energy, goal-driven attitude as the fuel for this level of success, fundamental skills exist that will improve nearly all participants at any level and represent the foundation for transforming your personal achievement.

Pause. Take a moment to review your existing status. If I were to ask you how well you are performing against your results last month, quarter, or year - would you be able to clearly articulate the differences, or would you struggle to answer that question?

Relax. Most struggle to answer that question, supporting the notion that improvement is within reach. The secret is to get into the habit of reviewing your actions, pinpoint areas for improvement, and adjust to changes before committing to the next actions (this helps protect you from slipping into the comfortable death spiral of doing the same thing with ever-diminishing returns).

Performance leaders review their performance often and regularly; for salespeople, this is in the form of a forecast pipeline review; "are we creating more opportunities this year?", or "am I effectively progressing my existing business to the next level in a timely manner?"

After this review, performance leaders pinpoint areas for process improvement; an example would be identifying the current qualifying factors for sales opportunity advancement. Since the market changes rapidly, what may have been an important factor last year is less so today.

If too many opportunities are stuck in a stage of the sales pipeline, this is a signal to investigate the steps in this part of the process as a candidate for improvement.

Finally, the adoption of new methods/processes and adaptation are sources used by performance leaders for adjusting to change. In our sales example, using LinkedIn to find the extended stakeholders of a project is an adaptation of the same data used by others to find new employees.

Performance leaders are exceptional and by definition are superlative to the peers in their group; this accomplishment is based upon a recipe of:

• having a personal plan to achieve success,
• working the plan with timely reviews,
• changing the plan to improve results, and
• adopting new ideas/technology/processes to accelerate the plan.

Now that you have the recipe, the next steps for your personal achievement transformation belong to you and your performance team.