Loading... (0%)

Elite Business Performance

02 May 2017

KPA Elite Business Performer

How many times a week do you hear or see the terms, “poor performance”, “great performance”, “performance management”, “key performance indicators” or “high performance”? Although you may hear or see the term performance referenced all the time, do you really understand what performance is? More importantly, do you know what to do to actually improve your performance and others in the workplace?

  CS_performer

Over the past 25 years, KPA Elite Performance has researched and consulted for hundreds of elite performers in sport, business, the military, performing arts, and show business. This led us to develop The KPA Elite Performance Model, which is a simple, yet powerful way of understanding performance and how to perform like the elite in an intense, consistent, and sustainable manner.

The basis of our model is that your performance is made up of six key skills that are represented as cogs.

  1. Performance Culture – this is the environment in which you perform. It’s the bedrock of performance. This is impacted both by you (in terms of the positive or negative choices you make) and external factors such as the company culture and co-workers attitudes and behaviors. An elite performance culture is one in which we can learn, grow, and excel. How often do we excel within a positive supportive culture and how often do we feel demoralized or demotivated when we experience an unsupportive or negative performance culture? There is no end to the research that supports the importance of performance culture to business results. 
  2. Physical Skills – these are the physical needs required to support our day-to-day performance like, wellness, nutrition, and proper exercise. It doesn’t mean you have to train like an Olympic Athlete to perform well in the workplace, but there are hundreds of academic articles that support the notion that physical wellness has a huge performance advantage in the workplace.
  3. Mental Skills – this is the mental toughness and mind set required to excel in your role. This includes resilience, focus, confidence, the ability to perform under pressure and what we at KPA call “right stuff” motivation™ – motivation driven by passion and a “love of the game” – not by punishment, rewards, control and guilt which are poor quality motivators. Read The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”for more details.
  4. Technical Skills – learning the skills required for your role or position. For example: IT, Finance, Sales, Leadership, Management, etc. This list also includes skills such as critical thinking skills, listening skills, and reflection skills. This article will help to clarify what KPA term technical skills.
  5. Tactical Skills – understanding the ‘X’s and O’s’ of your role and knowing what, when, and how to deliver. For example, a marketing director will need to have a strategic, tactical, and operational marketing plan that aligns to the company’s strategic plan.
  6. Lifestyle Skills – this is the ability to achieve the balance between work, family, and personal needs and commitments. It’s the “off the field” stuff, as they say in sport! This would include self-management skills, organizational skills, and sleep management. Investing in lifestyle skills isn’t just a “nice to do thing” .It has a huge impact on workplace performance and provides a tremendous return on investment for companies.

How well you are able to execute each of these skills has a direct relationship to the outcomes or results you achieve in the workplace and in your personal life. Put simply, the quality of your technical, tactical, mental, physical, and lifestyle skills combined with the quality of your performance culture will dictate success or failure! This model is represented visually below.

The KPA Elite Performance Model™

The KPA Elite Performance Model™

Some important things to note about this model:

  1. These are skills!

Firstly, these six performance components or interconnected cogs are skills. That means they can be learned, developed, and nurtured like any skill. They are not “gifts”. They are not something you either have or do not have, nor are they set in stone. They can be enriched.

Even performance culture is a skill. Culture is the way individuals behave and you have influence over the way you and other people behave. You can choose to have an elite culture or a debilitative one by the way you impact others.

  1. Elite performance is doing many things in a great way

Secondly, these six skills do not live in a vacuum; they impact and influence each other. They are like interconnected cogs in a highly tuned machine. Turn one cog and it affects others. If one of the cogs is defective, it negatively affects and influences other cogs.

For example, let’s take presenting. You may have respectable or great technical skills and know how to put a strong presentation together. You may have decent tactical skills and know how to work a room effectively when presenting. But what about your physical skills? It’s been a long week. Do you have the physical energy to wow your audience? What about lifestyle skills? Do you really think that missing lunch or grabbing a candy bar and a cup of coffee just before you speak is not going to negatively affect your presentation? What about your mental skills? If you are too nervous and anxious, can you calm yourself down? If you are feeling tired or low, can you energize yourself? Can you maintain focus? And what about culture? Do you have people around you who can support your preparation for that presentation in some helpful way or are they just too busy?

The bottom line here is that performance (what you do to acquire results) is holistic and your performance skills are integrated. Your technical and tactical skills do not live in a separate universe devoid of any influence from your lifestyle, mind, and body. What you think, what you eat, your recovery regime, your mind-set, your resilience, your quality of sleep and so on have a huge impact on what you deliver and the results you get. Getting performance right in these critical six areas can make or break you.

  1. Focus on mental, physical, and lifestyle aspects of performance

Thirdly, the higher the level people operate in an organization, for example at middle/senior management level, leadership level and ‘C Level’, the less time they tend to spend working on the performance skills that will truly impact the bottom line results they achieve. Our research and experience show that typically business performers over emphasize the importance of technical and tactical skills and spend a disproportionate amount of time operating in these areas.

Not enough time is spent on developing the areas that ensure as performers they operate at the elite level –which is about performing at an intense, consistent, and sustainable level. Somehow the mind and body don’t exist anymore! But to be elite, you have to focus on the physical, mental, and lifestyle skills cogs of performance as they cogs drive your technical and tactical skills. Back to our presentation example again.

Elite sports performers and military performers  have to constantly work on honing their skills and tactics but they also consciously and consistently work on the abilities that enable them to execute their skills and tactics under the toughest of conditions. They work hard on areas like relaxation, sleep, mental preparation, nutrition, and hydration for performance, personal management, wellness, and physical preparation and capacity.

  1. We all have individual performance needs

Fourthly, the KPA Performance Model™ recognizes that everyone is different and everyone needs an individualized elite performance development plan. One performer may need to hone in on improving lifestyle skills areas like work, life balance, and sleep. Another performer may need to work on mental skills areas such as resilience or confidence, while yet other performers may need to work on different mental skills such as mindfulness or physical skills like building physical energy and mental preparation. One size certainly does not fit all when it comes to elite performance.

  1. Performance Culture is huge

Finally, never underestimate the importance of Performance Culture. As you will see in the model, culture is the overriding performance component that drives all the other cogs.

If you don’t get your personal performance culture right or if the company or team culture is debilitative in some way, this can have a huge negative effect on the ability of individuals or teams to become truly elite performers. Culture is where the motivation for change, development and improvement comes from and without it performance cannot flourish or be sustained.

In Summary

At KPA Elite Performance, we believe the real issue is that both companies and their key players often do not see themselves as human performers, although ironically what they do everyday is perform. They perform themselves, they perform for their for company, to their co-workers and to clients. Yet, they have not learned the art and science of elite human performance and the best practices that prevail in arenas such as sport, the military, and the performing arts. The lessons learned from those other arenas are directly applicable and transferrable to the world of individual and team performance in business.

By understanding what human performance is, what human performance skills are and by measuring, monitoring, managing, and enhancing these skills, at KPA Elite Performance we can help clients ensure that their key performers and teams can operate at a higher and more sustained level.

We’re talking about what we at KPA like to call SELP – Sustained Elite Level Performance.

Our flagship Elite Performer program can help you reach towards an improved SELP and beyond your best.

Written By:

BW-Keith-Power-300

Keith Power, KPA CEO

Hazel Power - post author

No other information about this author.