- Everything you know about performance is wrong.
Well, maybe not everything, but
whether you're a manager who focuses on
the performance of your team.
Or you're an individual contributor,
or an independent worker who's trying to
improve your own performance,
you're probably using an approach that's rooted
in a time and pace of change
wasn't so rapid as it is today.
Look, it's not your fault.
Most of our traditional management practices
come from what I call, the old rules of work.
Many people thought that those rules worked
just fine for decades.
When the pace of change was comparatively slow.
But the pace of change is rapidly accelerating now.
Driven by automation, globalization,
and the changing dynamics of business
we've never before been in a period
where change is happening so rapidly.
And there's no end in sight.
The pace of change isn't likely to slow any time soon.
As a result, those old rules of work,
they don't work anymore.
The world is changing far too quickly
for us to think of performance through the lens
of yesterday's management practices.
We need a completely new way of looking at performance.
I call this way of thinking adaptive performance.
Continually changing the way we approach performance
to match the speed of change around us.
So, what are the levels of performance
that it has to work at?
There are three that matter most.
First, performance is critical at the individual level.
Every worker needs to feel that they have the tools,
the resources, and the support
to perform at their best.
Second, performance is essential at the team level.
Teams need to know about the performance abilities
of each member.
And understand how they can best perform
in concert together.
And third, performance is important
at the organizational level.
Organizations, as a whole,
need to understand how they can perform
even at great scale.
What I've found is that if we focus primarily
on individual and team performance
in many cases, the performance of the organization
mostly takes care of itself.
Now that may seem a little counterintuitive.
Especially to people who have been trained
in top down strategic climbing.
But in a rapidly changing world, many top down
processes no longer benefit many organizations.
And in fact, those traditional approaches can actually
have the opposite effect.
In these rapidly changing times
you have a tremendous opportunity
to leverage the latest thinking
to increase your own performance.
And along the way, you can contribute
to improving the performance of your team
and of your entire organization.