Why nailing your 2023 resolutions isn't about effort

Welcome back, Positive Deviants! We hope that you had a wonderful holiday season with time to reflect, rejuvenate, and recharge. As "time waits for no man," let's get right into 2023!

Considering that two-thirds of all resolutions fail by the end of January, and that working harder and applying more effort will only lead to the burnout that so many of us experienced last year, we'd do well to replicate the outcomes of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, who changed their respective swings and training programs at least four times - and always after major victories and while at their top of their games. In this issue we'll explore why it's not trying harder, but doing things differently, that will lead you to unprecedented results this year.

Authorship and Acknowledgement: Special thanks to teammate?Jordan Graves?for his intellectual contributions to this month's publication.

Forward-thinking innovation is at the heart of all high-performing organizations. They understand that to set themselves up for success in the new year, it’s crucial to look at the last one. What were our company’s greatest accomplishments? How can we achieve those results again? Can we surpass them? Will what worked last Q1 still make sense for this Q1?

It’s normal for wide-ranging analysis like this to spark a dizzying array of questions—and to result in an even less focused cloud of answers. There are so many different decisions made in a single year, often compounding on one another. How can you possibly tell which ones were significant??

The Outcomes Thinking Difference

At Exemplary Performance, we tackle this uncertainty through outcomes thinking. By reverse engineering what the star performers in a given role do to generate value, we unlock the behaviors and mindset that, once replicated across the organization, drive better results. We're considered industry experts in discovering what one client told me are "the differences that make a difference."

Consider what we learned as children: The surest way through a maze is to start at the end and work your way back to the beginning. We use a similar approach at Exemplary Performance: We start with the outcomes a business wants to replicate, and then we work backwards through the decisions and circumstances that led to that initial success, identifying the difference-makers along the way.

This may come as a surprise, but many of the top performers we profile are unaware of what really makes them special. They’ll often attribute their success to generic strengths, like hard work or intelligence, and to prior experience. In doing so, they are starting the maze at the beginning—identifying what they had going into it and assuming that must be what’s guided them down the right path.

But many good workers are also smart and hardworking. They often have similar educations, competencies, and work histories compared to top performers. So why aren’t they reaching the same levels of success? Why might you be recycling some of the 2022 goals not met to your satisfaction into 2023? And if so, are you changing how you plan to achieve them, or are you just going to apply "more effort" and hope for a different outcome?

The reasons for performance variance are complex and unique to each team, and simply having the same traits isn’t enough to improve an employee’s trajectory. We can’t modify our behavior through knowledge and skills alone. If we could, none of us would have any bad habits. We’d recognize they’re bad, and we’d give them up. Something other than effort, skills, and knowledge must be at play.

Consistency and the principle of supercompensation

My grandparents loved the beach. I can remember visiting their house in Havertown and playing with their large sea glass collection - a glass jar at the base of their steps filled with soda, beer, and medicine bottle pieces smoothed by the relentless movement of the salt water tides along the sand and ocean floor. I was always amazed that lapping waves over time, not harsh filing or sanding (a.k.a. "effort"), made these stones so soft and polished. In other words, consistency itself is a high-performance habit. (Our team will tell you that I say that, well, pretty consistently! Oh, the irony??). Pebble gains lead to milestones.

Now consider the principle of supercompensation, used extensively in athletic training. In short, supercompensation is the body's anticipated adaptation to higher levels of fitness. It's the fourth stage of training, following pre-training, training, and recovery. During the pre-training period, a base level of fitness exists (shown by the first time sector in the graph below). Upon entering the training period, the level of fitness decreases (shown by the second time sector in the graph).

Anyone watching me use the BOSU Ball in the gym today can attest to this initial performance decrease! After training, the body enters the recovery period during which the level of fitness increases up to the initial fitness level (shown by the third time sector in the graph). This is where micro physiological adaptations occur, and where most folks abandon training due to lack of "seeing results." Finally, because the human body is an adaptable organism, it will supercompensate, and prepare for an additional, higher level of fitness. To "grind" "hustle" and "push through" (a.k.a. apply extensive effort without recovery) actually reduces any training gains, overall performance, and can result in injury. Once again, the right strategy and tactics, not sheer effort, determine your performance outcome.

Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap

Transformational change requires bridging the knowledge-doing gap, which is integral to our process at Exemplary Performance. We use our outcomes thinking approach to identify the crucial information, then we implement a strategy based on our findings to actually change behavior.

By starting with the goals a company wants to replicate (profits, high returns, customer satisfaction, reduced turn-over), we work backward through a top performer’s accomplishments, then behavior, and then influences to both locate and understand the inflection points along the way—not just what they did but why it worked.

• Client Example: During one road trip with a Senior Vice President at one of the largest telecommunication companies, we shadowed him as he visited two of his markets. Though the stations' sizes, offerings (news and non-news programming), on-air talent, and demographics varied widely, the first day of each site visit always began with a review of the station operations: walking the facility, checking the server room, viewing and critiquing the evening programming, and a customer dinner. We learned that these activities were critical to his outcome of producing the highest-performing stations (profitability metrics like market share and media research ratings) with the lowest server room incidences, lowest workers compensation claims, highest employee engagement scores, and highest promotion rates.

As you can see, the difference-maker here wasn’t some innate, unattainable quality but instead something straightforward that any employee can duplicate.

Take a look at your budget and strategic plans for 2023. Do they consist of the same tactics (sales meetings, TV host-turned-consultant guest speakers to "motivate," benchmarking analysis subscriptions, the same selling workshops, client panels, etc.) What are you prepared to do differently this year to change your results? How can we help?

Can you think of a time when you changed your approach to something and achieved a different result? What was the outcome? What did you learn? Share in the comments below!