How to Not Become Low Performance
In Life and Work
I was talking about low performance-low accountability businesses with Rebecca at Your CEO Mentor this week, and decided to talk about it with you today.
Never Settle for Mediocre
In 2015, I had outgrown a business whose Board said they wanted growth, but reached a point of being maintainers. I am a business builder who cannot trade my personal devotion to reaching the peak of my potential, purpose, and meaning in life to be part of Team Mediocre.
When maintainers who wish for more money become risk averse, the business starts to go backwards. Slippage is small and barely visible to the untrained eye at first, but it grows over time. When business owners or shareholders are not willing to move beyond small incremental annual cost of inflation growth to do what it what it takes to grow exponentially, there are several things usually going on below the surface.
Status creates big fish in a small pond syndrome. Many people like to feel important in small settings. I learned this as leader of a community volunteer based non-profit. I often compare life and work to a video game. When you master one level, you must start over again on the next level. Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach got me thinking about this one day. Here is my view of how you develop the mindset to grow to the next level:
Resistance and Lack of Development
When I challenge people to move to the next level after mastering their current level, there is resistance. There are three levels of resistance:
R-1: Not aware,
R-2: Not capable
R-3: Not willing.
In the business world, many C-level leaders and executive teams don’t develop professionally. They lack self and collective awareness that others in the business race are running faster and smarter than they are. Their skills stagnate like a smelly brackish backwater swamp. They lose touch with being cutting edge and keeping the organisation growing and their stagnation and status quo spreads to everyone. Big egos often drive this, but people who are burned out or weary also go through seasons where they take their foot off the accelerator and coast to get their energy back. That is normal for short recovery periods, but if it goes on for too long, it must be confronted like cancer in the body.
The Peter Principle
“The Peter Principle” was articulated in 1969 by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian educator and who studied how hierarchical structures impact both organisational efficiency and employee performance. What Peter discovered in his research is a concept that suggests in many organisations, people are promoted based on their performance in their current role, rather than on their abilities relevant to the new role they're being promoted to. This means that employees keep getting promoted until they reach a position where they're no longer competent or effective, which is often called "rising to their level of incompetence."
In simpler terms, if you're really good at your job, you'll keep getting promoted until you get a job that you're not good at, and then you'll stay in that position. I call this being out of your operating range. When a person decides to not keep developing professionally, they lose touch with the reality they are no longer aware of what is required to be cutting edge leaders. They have fallen behind in the pack without realising it. They fell in love with status and not customers, and fell behind as leaders and as a business without realising they were rotting from the inside out.
When Leaders Resist Professional and Business Development
When a leader and business has stopped developing, they become unwilling to change and this leads to the business going backwards. How do we repair this? First, the leadership need to catch up on personal growth and development. Once the leader is up to speed, they need to bring the entire business knowledge and skill level back to where it should be had it been developing constantly. Only then, can the business catch up with competitors who have been developing faster and smarter for the same period.
To be very frank, lousy leaders decide to kick back and not be committed to high performance. This is why I eschew “fat cats” who coast and allow a company or organisation to not move and not exercise their innovation and growth muscles. These leaders and companies grow stiff, fat, and lazy. Lazy accounting, lazy marketing, lazy operators, lazy sales, lazy R&D and customers and high performing team members leaving. Now the death spiral has started leading to lost market share, lost sales, and profit decline. Business death is already, but not yet.
Mediocrity
Yesterday, I had someone tell me that a lazy, unwilling, growth-resistant area of an organisation didn’t like being challenged to reach for higher potential and the upper limits of the state of the art in their area. When we say something is "state of the art," it means that it uses the newest and best technology or methods out there. It's like the latest and greatest version of whatever it is — the kind of stuff that makes people go "wow." In the business world, if a company says their product or service is state of the art, they're bragging that they're at the top of their game. It's like they're saying, "Hey, look at us! We've got the latest tech or the smartest way of doing things, and nobody else can beat us right now." It's all about being the best and most up-to-date at that moment.
I reflected on the invitation to mediocrity. What this person was saying to me was, “join our herd of status quo, low performing-low accountability culture resisters and don’t make waves.” Here is my response after thinking about it for 24 hours: “Without waves you never surf. You are dead in the water. You do not get to the C-level, greatness, or from 5% to 5x results with stinking thinking like that mate. You go decline. I choose growth.”
Copyright 2024 by Kevin Baker.
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