How to transform your underperformers into exceptional performers!

Have you ever wondered what differentiates top performers from the rest? Are you looking for the difference that makes the difference to achieving exceptional performance? Would you like to unlock the potential in yourself and your people so that you can exceed your business targets and goals? Are you or your team not meeting their targets and performance measures? And how much is underperformance costing your career/business?

One of the untapped opportunities and areas of competitive advantage for businesses in the future lies in their ability to discover the secrets that drive their top performers and then being able to replicate that performance across other members of the team.

It is important to realise that we all have potential that we are unaware of and what differentiates top performers from underperformers is how they tap into that potential. Having said that, there are many possible reasons for underperformance and include our internal and external drivers as well as how we respond to and relate to our environment.

Your Internal Drivers are the Key!

Are your internal drivers aligned with top performance? Your internal drivers include your purpose, passion, vision, the meaning you seek from work and life, dreams, desires, goals, values, beliefs, language, personality and character traits, past experiences, memories, etc.

Just imagine two salespeople attend the same sales training. One of them has a fear of being rejected. That belief can block them from using their new skills to achieve their desired results. Similarly, if another salesperson attends the same sales training and making money is not that important to them in their career/business, this misalignment in values can prevent them from being motivated to use the sales skills to increase their sales performance. The end result in both instances is that although both salespeople have the sales skills, they are not demonstrating the skills in their behaviour, performance and results and there has been little or no return on that investment in training.

In business, when your desires, passion and vision are aligned with your beliefs, thoughts, language and desired goals and targets, this is reflected in behaviour and performance which is consistent with your desired result. However, if any of these are out of alignment, it can result in underperformance.

Are Your External Drivers Empowering?

External drivers of performance include the work culture, the vision and values within an organisation or team, roles and expectations, how others communicate with you, how others motivate and reward you for a job well done, the people and role models you surround yourself with at work, etc.

Personal challenges such as an illness in the family, stress relating to moving house or children starting a new school, a death in the family, separation, divorce or break up, mid life crisis or search for meaning in life, tragic world events or disasters, etc. can have an impact on an individual’s internal drivers and can, therefore, affect their work performance.

Too many business people assume that others are motivated in the same way as themselves and use that as a basis for motivating and rewarding performance. Often this can work in conflict with the desired intention of improving performance. One professional services firm that I gave a presentation to recently was planning to reward all their employees in the same way until they realised during that presentation that each of their ten employees had a completely different way of being motivated and only one of them would have actually been motivated by the approach the firm was going to implement. It is critical that you understand how best to motivate and reward each member of your team in order to obtain the best performance from them.

Exceptional leaders understand exactly what drives each member of their team so they can bring out their potential and empower them to achieve exceptional performance.

How Effectively Are You Responding to These External Drivers?

How we internally respond to and cope with certain situations and our external environment also affects our performance. For example, what are your coping mechanisms for success, stress, failure, mistakes, team conflict, disagreements, underperformance, etc? And what is your strategy for recovering from these situations? Do you recover well and engage your team to find solutions to any challenge or do you fester over problems, blame others or completely ignore the problem hoping it will disappear?

How we interact with people of different personalities, character types and communication styles also has an impact on performance because if people do not get along it may lead to misunderstanding, miscommunication, conflict, inefficiencies, loss of productivity and reduced performance.

Exceptional performers have their internal and external drivers aligned with their desired results and also have effective strategies for responding to the external environment. So if you want to transform your underperformers into exceptional performers, invest in their development and assist them to unlock the potential that lies within them right now and enjoy the significant boost to you bottom line results!

To read about how one of our clients turned his underperformance into exceptional performance, click here.

At Qt, we can show you how to unlock the potential in your people so you too can exceed your business targets and goals! Contact us today for your complimentary phone business needs consultation by clicking here or by calling Dr Vesna on 0411 479 256.