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Performance Principles™
Performance Principles is an e-letter written by Eric Herrenkohl that focuses on creating the business you want by building the organization you need. This is copyrighted material. However, you can copy, reprint, or forward these newsletters in their entirety so long as any use is not for resale and the following copyright notice is included intact: Copyright © 2010, Eric Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl Consulting. All rights reserved. www.herrenkohlconsulting.com, 610-658-9790.
Thinking About Nothing
Research has been conducted on the brain activity of golfers when they are preparing to putt. The researchers found that intermediate and even advanced golfers focus on different things – the ball, their backswing, the lip of the cup, or the break of the green.
Elite golfers, however, focus on the same thing. Nothing. To a person, elite golfers have less brainwave activity when putting than do other golfers. They don’t think because they are confident that thousands of practice putts have conditioned them to make the putt automatically.
Top performance is often a function of bypassing our mind rather than engaging it. It takes confidence to allow your mind to be disengaged, confidence that comes only from serious preparation and experience. You may have heard the cliché, the harder I work the luckier I get. This is true in large part because people who have been working hard are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities. When a unique opportunity presents itself, they don’t think about what to do, they just do it.
Performance Principle: At the moment when high performance is required, you should be thinking about nothing. You should be performing, not analyzing. To perform at an elite level, you need to practice things so much that they get into your “mental muscle memory.” You don’t think about how to do them; you just do them, consistently, and without thought. Ultimately this provides you with the confidence to disengage your mind. You will then have attained the mindset of a top performer – thinking about nothing.
Questions to Consider:
- What mistakes do you or your team keep making over and over?
- How could you achieve mastery in this area?
- What type of practice will help you to achieve this mastery?
- When will you get committed to lifting your performance in this area and to achieving mastery of this area?
Growing Up with Your Kids
My father-in-law was a young man when he had his first child. As a result, he describes the first years of his marriage as growing up with his kids. Despite his youth, he never felt held back by having kids when he was young. Instead, he says, he just grew up along with them.
In our careers, our businesses, and our lives, we need to start having children earlier. I don’t mean literal babies. Rather, we need to start doing things today that we think require more experience or more maturity or more time than we have right now. Make that investment. Write that article. Give that speech. Go for that promotion. Champion that new idea. Take the lead in that relationship. Don’t wait.
Will it be the best investment ever? The most insightful article? The most effective speech? Will you get the promotion? Will this particular idea have a huge payoff? Will your relationship work perfectly? Probably not. These are baby steps. All you need is a little success to feel proud of your efforts. The quality of your work will grow as you get more experience. But you have to start somewhere.
Performance Principle: Do what you really want to be doing – don’t wait. Actual experience is always the best preparation for doing what you want to do. Don’t put it off by saying maybe next year or after the kids are grown. Try it today. Then you will have a brand new venture that will grow up along with you.
Questions to Consider:
- What is one activity that you have always wanted to try? What is one dream that you have always had?
- How can you make one small step today toward achieving these goals?
- What experiences/skills/talents do you believe that you need but currently lack in order to achieve your goals?
- Ask yourself and others you trust if those things are necessary to do what you want to do. Often, we create obstacles to our own success that don’t really exist.
I Know the Answer. What’s the Question?
I was once in a meeting where everyone knew one well. We were all having a good time, talking and joking around. The leader of the group, trying to get the meeting on track, asked a question. One woman was in the middle of a conversation and was only half listening immediately yelled out “I know the answer!” And then, realizing she had not heard what was asked, yelled out again: “What’s the question?”
Everyone in the meeting cracked up – in this setting, it was a funny slip among friends. However, the proclivity to want to provide answers without first understanding the question is much less amusing from managers and leaders in organizations. We know that our credibility rests in part on our knowledge and experience. People look to us for answers. But we maximize our impact as leaders when we not only provide them with answers, but help them to figure out answers for themselves by asking them good questions.
People want to benefit from our knowledge. But they both want and need to figure things out for themselves. If you ask people good questions, without trying to dictate all the answers, you help them to think for themselves. This makes both the individuals and the organization better.
Performance Principle: A good question is often worth more than a good answer. Insecure people parade their knowledge. Secure people use their experience to help people arrive at the right answers by themselves.
Questions to Consider:
- Is your own self-importance tied up in knowing all the answers?
- How often do you know the answer to a question but allow other people to figure it out for themselves?
- Ask five people you can trust to be honest to rate your listening skills from 1-5, where 1 is the worst and 5 is the best? Anything less than a score of 4 tells you that you are a bad listener.
Exiting at Someone Else’s Floor
I met a businessman at 8:50 a.m. after a seminar. We started a conversation that continued on the elevator ride down. However, he was exiting on the sixth floor, while I was heading to the lobby. I had a 9:30 meeting, but we were in the middle of talking. So, I stepped out on the sixth floor with him. Five minutes later our conversation was over, and I was again heading down on the elevator, this time by myself. I made my meeting with two minutes to spare.
An email showed up in my box later that day from that same man. He wanted to talk about hiring me as his coach. When we got together, he said “By the way, I wanted to tell you what got me interested in working with you. When l got off that elevator, most people would have just waved and said call me. You cared enough to step out with me in order to finish our conversation.”
Performance Principle: Occasionally, we all need to exit the elevator on someone else’s floor. We live in an efficiency-obsessed culture that focuses on squeezing as much as possible into each minute rather than getting as much as possible out of each minute. We need to take the time to finish conversations, to ask others about themselves, and to show genuine interest in what interests them rather than focus solely on what interests us.
People do business with people they like. People like people who take an interest in THEM. Take five minutes to show an interest in someone else. Get out of the elevator on their floor. It’s a better way to live life whether or not the person ever responds to you. And often, the interest you show in them will result in their being drawn to you.
Questions to Consider:
- Who is one person that needs a little bit more time from you?
- How can you show genuine interest in this person?
- When will you do it?
A Nose for the Goal
One of the stars of my high school soccer team was a talented player, but not the most talented on the team. What made him so valuable was that he had an uncanny ability to score. He would take shots on goal from almost anywhere on the opponent’s side of the field. Not every shot scored, of course, but many of them were right on target. And with incredible frequency the ball would slip past the goaltender, leaving him empty-handed and confused.
In soccer, this scoring ability is called having a nose for the goal. He was not afraid to shoot, and he knew how to make his shots count.
Performance Principle: As we build our businesses, we must develop a nose for the goal. Specifically, we need both clarity and focus on those activities that:
1. Provide real value to our clients.
2. Result in new client relationships.
3. Provide us with learning that we can capitalize on.
4. Create consistently high levels of customer service.
5. Help us to enjoy our life in the midst of the above four!
Questions to consider:
- What is your goal this week? Don’t underestimate this one – you have to see the goal in order to put the ball in it.
- What are the steps you must take to put the ball in the net? Top scorers can tell you, in order, the steps they take to create results.
- How can you increase the number of good shots you are taking? Great scorers don’t wait for that one perfect shot. They take 10 to 20 good shots per game, knowing that at least one will go in.
The Strength of Weak Ties
Paradoxically, often the strongest business relationships are not strong personal friendships. In his sociological study Getting a Job, Mark Granovetter interviewed 300 professional and technical workers from the Boston suburbs about their employment history. Of this 300, 150 got their jobs through someone they knew. Of this 150, 120 did not know well the person who got them in the door. Instead, they had a casual but friendly acquaintance that paid off in terms of getting a job.
Essentially, Granovetter found that while most people get their jobs through people they know, they usually are not people whom they know well. Granovetter coined the phrase “the strength of weak ties” to describe this phenomenon.
Performance Principle: Sometimes people with whom you have weak ties are more valuable in business than people you have known forever. It seems strange, but I have found this to be true. It is often our friendly acquaintances – not our family and close friends – who are the best sources of leads to jobs, clients, and other business success. While the reasons for this may be many, the implication is simple. We all need to expand our business network beyond our close social network in order to develop our careers and our businesses.
Questions to Consider:
- What is one group that you can begin attending regularly where you can cultivate valuable new business relationships?
- Who are ten business contacts that you can invite to coffee or lunch in the next few months? How could they become more valuable contacts for you?
- Who are 5-10 people in your network with whom you invest a lot of time but who have never been able to help you in your business or career? As friends they may be great, but as business contacts it is time to quit convincing yourself they are valuable contacts.
For this and other insights into social phenomenon, see The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. 2002.
Take Dead Aim
In his legendary book for golfers entitled “Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book,” Penick says that one of the most important pieces of advice he gives to golfers is to “take dead aim.” Analyzing your swing is important in practice. But on the tee, the last thing you want to do is analyze. You just want to take dead aim and swing the club. This is great advice in business as well.
Performance Principle: When it is time to take action, take dead aim. Don’t overanalyze. There is a time for management books and seminars. Those things are tools to help us develop better habits and ways of approaching problems. But when it is time for action, you have to trust that the skills you have been practicing have been absorbed into your intellectual muscle memory. Clear your mind and swing away.
Questions to Consider:
- Are you over thinking your business?
- Is this a time for action rather than analysis?
- If you stopped planning and just created more high-value activity, would you get better results?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, put that management book down and close your spreadsheet. Clear your mind, take dead aim, and swing away.
Fly by the Instruments
When pilots first learn to fly an airplane, they are required to maintain visual contact with the ground. This prevents them from getting disoriented. As they gain hours and experience, however, they learn how to fly using only their instruments, allowing them to navigate even when visibility is zero.
The first time pilots fly through an extensive cloudbank, it is not unusual for them to get vertigo and lose all sense of direction, including up and down. With their windows made opaque by the surrounding clouds, their minds scream out “we are upside down!” But the instrument panel in front of them indicates that the plane is flying perfectly straight and right. Even so, the sense of being upside down becomes so overpowering that pilots succumb and turn the plane over. When they fly out of the cloudbank, and find themselves staring down toward the earth, they realize that the instruments were right all along.
Performance Principle: “Fly by the instruments” is an important piece of advice for every entrepreneurial leader. Often, when business gets tough, we feel internal pressure to change course. Things go wrong for a little while, and the voice inside our head starts telling us that our business approach is upside down. But, when we look rationally at the leading indicators – prospects in the funnel, the discipline of our marketing & sales efforts, incremental revenue and profit – we can see that things are o.k. We need, in those situations, to trust the data and fly by the instruments.
Questions to Consider:
- Are you tempted to change course in your business or your life because of an internal sense that things are “upside down?”
- Objectively, are things as bad as they feel? What do the data say?
- Is there any downside to staying on course for the next 90 days? Can you wait and see how events unfold before you make any sudden changes?
- Do you have an objective, seasoned outside advisor who can review the situation with you? If not, can you find an objective outsider to give you some perspective?
Competing for Something, Not Against Someone
tournaments. No matter how well he played, Tiger played better. As a result, Els made changes to his game. He started playing more aggressively, gunning directly for the pin the way Tiger does. The result? Not only did he not beat Tiger in 2000, he had his worst year on the PGA Tour in 2001. He did not win a single tournament.
Why did this happen? Ernie Els stopped focusing on winning tournaments, and started focusing on beating Tiger Woods. He took his eyes off what he wanted and put them on what he was afraid of. And his game deteriorated badly as a result. In 2002 and 2003, Els returned to his previous form, winning two Tour events. He credited this improvement in large part to a return to his own, more patient game of golf.
Performance Principle: When we stop competing for a goal (winning tournaments) and start competing against someone (Tiger), the result is often a decrease in our own effectiveness. When our primary goal becomes beating someone rather than achieving something, we spend all our time watching and focusing on that person. Inevitably, we start to act like them. And that never works, because a copy is never as good as the original.
Questions to Consider:
- Are you focused on the competition for something or the competition against someone?
- How can you reorient yourself and your team to competing for the right goals?
- How can you remind your team what you are really striving to achieve?
- How can you refocus your efforts in ways that play to your strengths?
Why Two Engines Can Be Worse Than One
In response to an alarming number of helicopter crashes, the U.S. Army once built a helicopter with two engines. In theory, this backup engine would reduce the number of crashes. If one engine went out, the pilot could simply turn the other engine on.
In practice, however, the dual-engine choppers actually had more serious accidents than single-engine versions. It turned out that having the option of engaging the second engine was diverting the pilots’ attention from the immediate challenge – landing safely. At the first sign of an engine malfunction, the pilots were taking their focus off flying the aircraft as they attempted to switch between engines. The second engine proved to be a dangerous distraction rather than a helpful option.
Performance Principle: In a crisis, too many options can cause paralysis. When you are coaching individuals who have an immediate problem, help them to pick one strategy that they will stick to for the short term. This keeps them focused and gets them working toward a solution. Later, the strategy can be modified or even abandoned. But often, people need to work rather than think their way out of trouble.
Questions to Consider:
- What obstacles you can remove from the path of your team? What top performers most want from their leader is someone who helps them to overcome obstacles to their success.
- Are your people paralyzed by too many potential solutions to a pressing problem?
- How can you help your people sort through the possible approaches to a crisis and stick to one strategy that will get them moving forward?
