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Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.

 

It’s no wonder that so many C-Suite leaders are focused on how to build higher performance cultures.  The irony, we’ve found, is that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.

 

A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations – Peter Senge’s term — classically focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise.  That’s plainly critical, but a true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel, and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out; and spend less energy defending their personal value so they have more energy available to create external value. How people feel – and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.

 

Building a growth culture, we’ve found, requires a blend of individual and organizational components:

 

An environment that feels safe, fueled first by top by leaders willing to role model vulnerability and take personal responsibility for their shortcomings and missteps.A focus on continuous learning through inquiry, curiosity and transparency, in place of judgment, certainty and self-protection.Time-limited, manageable experiments with new behaviors in order to test our unconscious assumption that changing the status quo is dangerous and likely to have negative consequences.Continuous feedback – up, down and across the organization – grounded in a shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better.
Via The Learning Factor

Psychologist John Gottman can predict whether or not a married couple will be together five years later with startling 90 percent accuracy. How does he do it?

 

He watches them argue.

 

The ability to engage in healthy, productive debate is not only essential for ensuring a long marriage--it's also the key determinant of high performing teams.

 

A recently released six-year study cites the ability to manage conflicting tensions as the most critical predictor of top-team performance. Berkeley research shows teams that debate their ideas have 25 percent more ideas altogether and that companies like Pixar embrace healthy debate as a vital part of their performance (in its case to make better films).

 

Via The Learning Factor

Few people look forward to annual performance reviews. For managers, filling out lengthy forms is an onerous chore, and for employees, infrequent, one-sided appraisals can be a cause for dread. But new data shows companies are adopting shorter, more continuous feedback practices and it’s having a positive impact on their business.

A small number of firms like Adobe have been experimenting with simpler, more informal performance reviews for years. Now the practice is gaining wide adoption. “We see this massive re-engineering going on,” says Josh Bersin, a principal at Deloitte and Forbes contributor who oversees the Human Capital Trends report, an annual study of H.R. trends. Of the 10,447 business and H.R. leaders Deloitte surveyed, 71% said they’re either re-evaluating their current performance management system, upgrading it, or have updated it over the past three years.

 

Via The Learning Factor

Maybe you just bombed the bar exam. Or perhaps you’re terrified that you’re going to get laughed out of the room when you try to sell your product.

 

When the stakes–and your emotions–are high, it’s hard to think positive. But the thoughts that run through your head influence the way your body behaves and if you don’t think like a winner, you’ll struggle to be successful.

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Nearly 70 percent of CEOs now recognize culture as one of the greatest sources of competitive advantage. Whereas company processes, technology, and strategy can be copied, an organization's DNA cannot be reproduced.

 

With this realization, many organizations are turning to cultural change to fuel future growth and performance. Kaiser Associates, a business strategy and consulting firm, defines a high-performing culture as an organization that performs better than its peers in regards to business performance, innovation, employee productivity, and engagement, over a sustained period of time.

 

For now, let's focus on how companies can leverage performance management best practices to build a winning culture.

Via The Learning Factor

Is it possible to be a high-standards, results-driven leader while at the same time building an engaged, fun-to-work-with team? Many people would contend that doing either of these things well makes it almost impossible to succeed at the other. And yet our examination of 360-degree assessment data from more than 60,000 leaders showed us that leaders who were rated in the top quartile of both skills ranked in the 91st percentile of all leaders. It seems that not only is it possible to do both things well, but the best leaders are the very ones who manage to do both.

 

But there aren’t very many of them — specifically, we isolated leaders who ranked in the top quartile on both driving for results and people skills.

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There is a world of difference between normal activity and peak performance.  It’s the glimpses into the peak state that fuel the intuition that we’re meant for greater things.  In this article, we’ll take a look at peak performance and a surprisingly simple strategy for more consistently tapping into our peak mode.

 

The Psychology of Peak Performance

Two elements turn ordinary activities into performance activities: 1) we keep score of the outcomes that matter and 2) we institute practice measures to systematically pursue the improvement of our scores.  Such deliberate practice lies at the heart of the development of chess players, athletes, Broadway stars, and elite medical facilities.  Once we keep score and devote ourselves to a continuous improvement in what we do and how we do it, we transform routine into growth.  Recreation is not a cumulative activity.  It is activity pursued at the time for its own sake.  Peak performance, on the other hand, is cumulative: it’s a focused, ongoing attempt at improvement.  We can go to the gym for enjoyment or we can go to the gym to train for aerobic conditioning.  The first activity is expressive and present-centered; the second is instrumental and forward-focused.

 

Via The Learning Factor