Maximizing Employee Potential: The Importance of Investment in High Performance
Most employers do a decent job of investing in developing role specific skills for their employees as this is a must for any company or team that wants their employees to reach a base level, productive state. However, at 33 Sticks, we have a higher set of goals, we aren’t comfortable being average, for both our company and our employees. In order to reach those elite heights, we have to invest more in our employees than just role specific training, we have to invest in getting every employee into a high performance state.
As a business owner or people leader, it's important to invest in your employees' success. By helping your employees reach a high performance state, you not only improve their job satisfaction and productivity, but also the overall success of your organization.
1. Increased Productivity: Investing in your employees' well-being and professional development can increase their motivation and drive to work harder and more efficiently. When employees feel supported and empowered, they are more likely to bring their best effort to the workplace, leading to higher productivity and better results.
2. Improved Employee Satisfaction: By providing opportunities for growth and development, you show your employees that you value their contributions and care about their professional growth. This can lead to increased job satisfaction, which can result in reduced turnover and higher levels of engagement and loyalty among your workforce.
3. Attracting Top Talent: Investing in employee development can also help you attract top talent to your organization. This is especially true in the analytics space where we are seeing an ever widening gap between the number of open roles and the limited supply of qualified analytics professionals. A strong commitment to employee development and well-being is a valuable selling point for potential hires, who are more likely to be attracted to a company that values their professional growth.
4. Better Company Culture: A supportive and empowering work environment can improve company culture and enhance the overall morale of your employees. This can lead to a positive work environment, better collaboration, and increased productivity.
5. Competitive Advantage: By investing in your employees, you set your organization apart from others in the industry. High-performing employees can give your company a competitive advantage in the market, which can lead to increased success and profitability.
As part of our investment in supporting our employees growth into a high performance state, we are currently completing a full immersion program a company called CORE, led by Evan Lapointe. CORE is a company that is pioneering the industry’s first suite of scientific tools proven to make teams smarter, faster, and more successful.
During the immersion program with CORE, we are evaluating where we are today from both a mindset and an output perspective and we are creating individualized maps and plans to help each employee, myself include, move closer and closer to being in a high performance state in how we see, how we think, how we plan, the quality of our execution, and how we learn.
While you may not have direct access to all of the science that goes into building this high performance state chart shown above, it's easy enough to follow along and i would strongly encourage you to think about where you land on this chart and to also share it with your team members.
How we see:
Let's start with how we see things. From my professional experience, most people fall neatly into the fat part of this curve as being fairly observant but to start getting into higher performance states, being observant simply isn't going to be enough, we must start being more curious and when we are curious, we start being investigative.
This is especially important for those who work in an analytical role. Being a highly valuable data implementor or analyst, means you must do more than just observing e.g observing how the website works, observing the metrics going up and down. You must be curious enough to start asking why? Why does the website work this way? Why do our visitors not consume things on our website in the order our designers intended? Why does our conversion rate seem to drop on Wednesdays?
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, we've probably all worked with the team member who sees things from a highly dysfunctional state, seeking to block or obscure things, often as a means of creating job security for themselves. If we have team members in this state, we must act quickly to get them out of this state or remove them from the team, this is one instance in which one bad apple really can spoil the entire team.
How we think:
How we think is another really important component of unlocking a high performance state. A lot of employees, especially those early in their careers, are in a low functioning state, they not only want instructions, they NEED instructions in order to proceed with their job.
Sadly, a huge driver for this need for detailed instructions is built in over years and years of public schooling that rewards students who are best at following instructions and often labels those who want deep comprehension as "problem students," yet in the business world it's quite the opposite, we reward those who want deep comprehension and those that require instruction are often left behind.
How we plan:
Again, how we plan seems to be an area where most employees fall into the low-functioning state in which planning is done at the task level, often times not having a clear understanding about how their tasks fit into the larger project, let alone longer term goals around how the business operates.
While individuals have a lot of control in thinking about how they plan, the fact that most employees are focused on task level planning is a failure of leadership much more than it is a failure of individual employees not wanting to think bigger picture.
If you've followed my writing for any length of time, i'm sure you are aware of my commitment to the concept of sustainable analytics and the only way to be sustainable, whether we are building businesses, deploying data implementations, or creating personal brands, we have to be in an incredibly high performance state, which means that from a planning perspective, we are always thinking Future-Backwards.
Quality of Execution:
When it comes to execution, most good employees fall into the functional category of having trade level quality. Sadly, when it comes to the service industry, because there is such a focus on margins and maximizing profits, most agencies are dysfunctional, constantly looking to cut corners in order to increase profit margins. While this approach may work in the short term, in the long term this approach almost always is a losing strategy.
At the individual level, we should really be driven to become masters of our craft. This means we have to move beyond the quality that is expected for our role and truly embrace what we do as an art. The quality that we produce is a direct reflection of who we are. If we are just churning out widgets, we don't care enough to move beyond the beginner level but if we truly love what we do, we should be deeply motivated to produce things at the highest levels of quality possible, not because we get paid more to do that, but because we truly desire to honor the craft of what we do.
How we learn:
In Western culture, we have been led to believe that learning stops once we graduate from the formal education system. The reality is that graduation, be it from high school, college, grad school, is just the beginning of our learning journey.
Take a look at the employees in your company, how many only learn when they are forced to? Perhaps your team is a little better in that learning is scheduled, you have monthly brown bags, perhaps every quarter there is an opportunity for some sort of role specific continuing education.
How we learn is both at an individual level and at an organizational level. At the individual level, we have to motivate employees to move learning from being forced and scheduled learning into learning triggered by curiosity. At the organizational level, we have to build a safe place to learn, allowing employees the space and time to learn early and often.
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Investing in your employees' well-being and professional development is a win-win situation for both the employees and the organization. It can lead to improved productivity, job satisfaction, and company culture, while also helping you attract and retain top talent and gain a competitive advantage in the market.
About CORE:
CORE helps companies become smarter and more coordinated and helps businesses that want to address inaction, innovate, make fewer mistakes, and improve the success of their product, marketing, sales, and customer success programs. CORE has invented a proven, systematic approach to breaking down departmental silos, surfacing and connecting powerful ideas, and empowering employees to make great decisions.
CORE has a game-changing technology platform that helps businesses understand and optimize the chemistry of teams, make dramatically better hires, and select leaders who make companies smarter.
Learn More about CORE: https://www.core-sciences.com/
