Not all choice is created equal
Chris Shambrook
Common sense Performance Psychology applied with uncommon commitment. Helping you get better at getting better. 6 Olympic Games and 25 years of Coaching across multiple commercial sectors.
Performance is a choice.
This is our aspiration for everyone. This is what we are working towards being true. We play our part, every day, helping customers understand the power of these four words, but also in appreciating the responsibility required to make these words as true as possible for everyone we're privileged to work with.
When performance is an easier choice
Performance is a choice and that choice is a lot easier when:
- You understand the difference between performance and results, and the way in which the two concepts are related.
- You've had the opportunity to realise that you've got what it takes to carry out your role with confidence and ambition, which will result in you performing to your own strengths and recipe.
- You're fully focused on the conditions that you're performing in and ready to choose the best approach to preparing yourself and delivering a performance within those conditions.
- You've taken the time to create connections of expertise, value, understanding and expectation of the people that you work most closely with and perform alongside on a day to day basis.
- You know you are valued and valuable, and you have the explicit support and permission of key people around you to seek to excel.
- Your basic human needs to feel a sense of autonomy, competence and belonging are strongly present in your life.
For some people these things are true and have been a consistent feature of their life experience, allowing them to develop and grow, unencumbered by adverse systems and structures. For many others, performance is a tougher choice – sometimes much tougher.
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So what?
We believe that any leader who has had the benefit of these favourable playing conditions also has a responsibility to ensure that colleagues, teammates and co-workers who haven't been naturally afforded these same privileges do not have to continue their pursuit of personal performance excellence encumbered by those environmental factors that they face through no choice of their own.
Thinking about – and then acting upon – your answers to a few simple questions will help level up the performance playing field and give more people a place on the same performance start line:
- Who do I work with for whom it’s a lot tougher to show up as themselves?
- Who do I work with who haven’t been given opportunities because they don't fit the accepted image of a performer in this world?
- Who around me do I see making the same choices as others who are not like them, but are given different labels for their behaviour?
- Who can I open doors for that swing easy for me but are closed to them?
- Who can I champion and give a lift to?
- Who can I ensure feels valued and valuable?
- Who can I celebrate for their difference?
This isn’t a zero sum game. We all benefit from high potential people having an equitable chance to fulfil it.
SaaS | Information Services | Strategy | GTM
2 年Hi Chris - this was shared with me today and I enjoyed reading it. To set up my question, could you perhaps simplify the first half of your paper to "performance is an easy choice when you are lucky enough to have had experiences that make you self aware and confident"? The operative part of this being - self aware - my thoughts being that self awareness is a pre-requisite to choice in this context. I fully agree that your 7 points are great for a leader to level a playing field at a systemic level. However, systems are full of humans and humans come on a broad spectrum of self awareness. Is there anything a leader can do to raise the self-awareness of those they have the privileged to influence and thus support more active and considered choice making all round? Should this be something a leader should even try and influence / coach, or is it too personal, outside the purview of leadership? I would guess it is much easier on a small scale, have you ever seen such a thing on mass? How do you avoid being deeply patronising? (asking for a friend) haha PS really like your performance intelligence poster as it somewhat relates to this.