Five Steps to Ignite Peak Performance

Edward M. Hallowell - 2/15/11

The right tools, workspace and resources are important to promote top performance, but employees also require a positive mental environment, the right job and the freedom to make connections and be creative at work.

Don’t Buy Performance, Grow It

Overvaluing smart, talented employees is a practice as common on the playing field as it is in the boardroom.

Life has changed radically from a generation ago. A manager’s job is getting harder and harder to do. Some experts say that managers are becoming obsolete, while others say managers are more important than ever. Whatever the truth may be, managers work hard in pressure-packed, confusing and unsettled times.

The central question for many managers is how to draw the most from the talent they manage. What can managers do when their most talented people fall short of their full potential, or worse, fall off their game altogether? Finding the “shine” in someone — helping people perform at their highest levels — isn’t rocket science. It’s actually more complex, mysterious and important than rocket science. It’s brain science but it has yet to be codified into a simple and reliable process that all managers can use.

The Cycle of Excellence, a process managers can use to bring out the best in their people, was developed as a part of a 30-year clinical field study. It is rooted in clinical experience as well as the most significant developments in neuroscience over the past 30 years, developments such as neuroplasticity, mirror neurons and the fact that the brain can grow throughout life.

Some of the participants in the field study were employees in businesses who had the trait we now call attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Others struggled for different reasons but they all shared the problem of not making the most of their talents. Their managers assumed they simply were not trying hard enough, but sometimes they were actually in the wrong job. In other cases, employees were shutting down because of a toxic workplace culture. In still other cases, these valuable workers’ capabilities were being wasted because managers were not challenging them or asking them to use their creative talents. Frequently what appeared to be a failure to work hard enough actually stemmed from a frustrated desire to work hard at all. Almost everyone wants to work hard if they see they can succeed and grow in skill and advance their careers. The Cycle of Excellence was created to help learning leaders address this gap and make the best use of employees’ talents.