Three keys: Talent, motivation, and support

- [Narrator] This is an audio course, thank you for listening. - [Pete] You are known as one of the leading thinkers in the area of rapid performance improvements and we're all about performance improvement here. So could you maybe just start us off with a bit of a framing of how do you define performance and how do you think about performance just overall? - [Instructor] Sure, well, performance is a... We use the term, like, how is your performance? How was her performance? Did we hit the performance goal? So we use performance as a metric and organizations are kind of quick to say we need better performance for people. And they do rah rah things and burning platform speeches and they kind of send emails and let's go and all that stuff. At the end of the day, I want to share something with your listeners and it's a really important equation and it's equation for a lot of business leaders. It's somewhat not revolutionary but it makes it easy to focus on the issue of performance. Performance is always a function of three things. Number one, it's a function of talent. Do we have the requisite talent to compete at the highest possible level? Number two, performance is always a function of motivation. So if we couple talent and ability with motivation now we're starting to move in the right direction. Do people want to work hard? Are there incentives to work hard? Do they have ownership in what's going on around them? Do they feel like they are part of the team? All of those things are motivational devices that will help people feel good about plugging into work and doing a good job. And the third part and it's the biggest part, Pete and we all know this, your leaders know this too. It's the support function. So do people have the tools that they need, the information that they need, the access that they need the technology that they need to be able to compete at the highest possible level. So when you find somebody that's not performing really well you can say, all right, what is it is do they not have the talent? Do they not have motivation? Do they not have the tools that they need to effectively perform their job? Those three things work in constant and it's a great diagnostic tool when we're trying to figure out how to improve performance. And if you look at the great organization out there they make sure they hire people with talent, they help people up gun their skills all the time. They create a motivational environment where people are engaged and they have ownership, they have skin in the game and they typically reward high performance and they want to provide the support necessary for people to compete at the highest possible level. And sometimes it's a simple as having access to a computer code or having a budget that supports or having unnecessary information we need to have to be able to perform our jobs. So that's my, you know, quick take on the issue of performance. Now to get at performance and to improve it typically we're going to manipulate or work on or hype up one of those three variables or a couple of them in concert.