Rejig the workplace for performance

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Let me start this article with an incisive statement by Peter Drucker, the indefatigable strategist; he said: “Breakthrough ideas cannot move mountains. Ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work”.

Elon Musk, the itinerant American entrepreneur recently described the workplace as places where skillful and committed people are brought together to create beneficial outcomes from performance.

Another popular and successful entrepreneur, Mark Cuban pointed out that “the brutally honest business advice to leaders and employees is that they must outperform everyone” to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

He explained that the greatest source of paranoia of every worker should be “learn and keep learning” in order to find relevance for your skill-set through value-adding performance. “Workers must work harder and smarter as well as be obligated to do more”, he added.

Leaders and employees, no matter their specialisation and diverse disciplines, must come into the full and honest realization that outcomes or successful results are guaranteed only when you work in ways that enable performance. Execution is critical to achieving outstanding results from breakthrough ideas. Individual efforts and team assignments must be geared towards getting the work done.

The entire workplace should be concerned with “numbers” now, no matter our areas of specialisation or the departments we operate from.

We must urgently rejig our workplaces and perform to achieve more, instead of incremental profitability. Workers’ passion, focus, and daily preparations must be on profitability as well as inflow or cash going up.

We can definitely weather the storm and optimize values by ensuring operational effectiveness and performance. Leaders and employees must bring back and take a second look at failed efforts. Adopt the “mirror and window” model. Be ready to take the “heat” for non-performance. We should rejig our workplaces with a higher degree of esprit and achieve landmark innovative successes.

We cannot afford to just “get-along” as team members or stakeholders in organizations. High performing teams in spite of diverse professions and overarching criteria, must achieve creative and unique goals. Let us manage our egos and temperaments and satisfy customers.

We can us put the necessary premium on collaboration with positive and visible fruits as signposts. There must be individual and team-minded focus on goals. The entire workplace should be talking with pride about “our highly beneficial products or services”, not just departmental objectives and goals.

Motivation is another key requirement for exceptional performance. Kerry Goyette said: “we should unleash motivation and leverage it for greater success”. Leaders should understand what “drives human behaviour and why employees do what they do in the workplace”. The intensity they bring is important.

For performance, the employees “energy” is also very important. The worker must be motivated to perform in such a way that positive outcomes are achieved. We must watch out for toxic behaviours that suck life out of teams and organisations. We should elevate and maximise productive and performance-oriented motivations.

The powerhouse of performance is emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman noted that there are five skills that enable the best leaders to maximise “their own and their followers’ performance”.

Hallmarks of the five skills are: self-confidence or leaders and employees’ realistic self-assessment as well as sense of humour; openness to change; strong drive to achieve; optimism and organizational commitment. Of course, “out-of-this-world beneficial service to customers is a critical distinguishing characteristic.

To ensure beneficial performance, the leader (and of course, the employees) must know his strengths and fully appreciate organisation’s values and goals. Performance can only be built on strengths and not weaknesses.

We must all be continuously acquiring additional skills and knowledge to fully realize our strengths for effectiveness and performance.

I mentioned motivation earlier. We must grow passion for tasks as well as audacious challenges; energy to improve and optimism in the face of mistakes.

Empathy is to always “put your feet in your colleagues’ shoes”. Leaders and workers must understand each other’s make-up. Consider each other’s feelings and be sensitive to diversity.

Social skills, an important characteristic of EQ, is the ability to successfully manage relationships in order to achieve goals. To achieve maximum performance, the leader must be effective in leading adaptation and change. He must be intelligently persuasive and possess the ability for value-adding and extensive networking. The expertise in continuously building and growing teams’ know-how, is also essential.

Jason Bridges described Emotional Intelligence as “the people’s currency. He said: “We are in a people economy because our economy is essentially based on relationships”. He noted that “leaders must make and win friends in the workplace. Influence people and make them feel important”. We must also connect, engage associates and genuinely understand them. Jason Bridges would also want us to interact with customers by connecting with them always on what they want. He emphasized psychological safety. For teams to be effective and perform maximally, members must feel safe, trusted and there must be mutual understanding.

He spoke about “the smile challenge” and pointed out that for genuine relationship building, “we must make our colleagues smile when they are not smiling”.

Let me conclude by pointing out that to produce outstanding results and not modest achievements, recruitment must be guided by requirements for specific skills. Continuous training is also needed. It could be on-the-job or practical exposure with stints with subsidiaries and partners. Professional task-oriented training locally and internationally, would also be very useful.

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