The underpinning principle of this blog is “meaningful failure”, and what you can learn when you examine this critical juncture of where you fail and embrace what you can learn through that failure.
I’ve been seeking out others who share this interest, and last year I discovered Ross Bentley who runs a consulting business, Bentley Performance Systems, that focuses on improving performance for executives and interestingly, professional race car drivers. That latter constituency intrigued me. Failure on a race track has specific tangible implications that failure in business does not: bent metal, physical harm, or worse.
Ross spends his time working with his clients on very personal elements of improving performance, along with more straightforward tools and techniques of planning and analysis. His focus on who you are as a person I find interesting, the examination about what emotionally or psychologically may be holding someone back from achieving their potential is an area like failure where people are less comfortable speaking plainly and openly.
In the case of the racers and the executives the conversation goes in the same direction: how can you best prepare yourself to be constantly improving, learning from success and failure? He engages them in relevant and specific conversations focused on getting them to do to what they do differently and better.
And after this discussion, examination, and hard work the racers go to the track and the CEOs go to their offices. In both cases they’re in environments where the information is flowing by, fast, and they need to make decisions and situation assessments rapidly. And each ends up with a quantifiable data set telling them how well they performed: lap times & finish order, income statements & balance sheets.
Ross and I got together yesterday so he could share a research project he’s starting called Performance in the Workplace. He wants to to better understand how executives assess their own performance, and what affects their performance over time.
The research is nice and simple: he’s asking them to fill out a short survey, once a week, and tell him how well they feel they’ve performed, and why. You can participate in the project by signing up here.
What I like about his approach is that he’s not defining “performance” for the participants. He’s letting them define it for themselves. When he first told me about this my reaction was “that’s pretty subjective, why not quantify performance with metrics”?”. But then I realized, that really misses the point. When you’re trying to help people do better every day, metrics are the product of your performance, not the measure of it.
We run businesses based on a set of milestones, KPIs (key performance indicators) – “dashboards” – and these are important measures of the recent past. And they’re critical – I’ve written about why a well documented operating plan and the corresponding assumptions are essential to managing your business.
But executives spend their days making decisions, asking questions, analyzing and assessing – and of course this results in metric-based results. But not in the moment. How do you assess the effectiveness of your performance while you’re making those decisions, asking those questions, digging into those numbers?
I think Ross is onto an interesting topic here. What causes you to feel you’re performing well one day, and not so well the next? Will the act of self-assessing performance help you, in and of itself, to become more effective and cause you to be closer to the top of your game?
I’m going to participate, because in my business, at best I get monthly or quarterly metrics from my companies in terms of valuations I can apply to rates of return – on paper – and it takes years to get to the point where you can convert the paper value to cash or stock you can sell for cash. Daily performance is not at all quantifiable with metrics, but matters oh so much.
I’m sure I can learn something from this, and am eager to see how what he finds.
Tags: improvement, performance, research, self-assessment
Open Ambition 
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