Our work is premised on one assumption: you are committed to elevating your performance. 

Pause, and take a moment - are you committed to that too? Are you ready to take responsibility for becoming a high performer? If not, then no amount of reading inspiring blog posts will make a difference.

What will make a difference is commitment, and action. This comes from you, and it starts now. 

Before we get any further, take a moment and get clear on your 'why' for beginning this journey. Are you serving a bigger mission, or are you here because your boss told you to be here?

Your authentic pathway to increased performance will be unique, based on where you are at in your life and career. The embodiment of performance will also vary, depending on whether you are a leader, manager, supervisor, contributor on a team, partner to a colleague, or working individually. 

Regardless of the way you achieve performance or what performance looks like for you, we have noticed in our many years of supporting teams and organizations that poor performance comes from two main sources:

• a lack of integrity

• a lack of distinction

Integrity

Dictionary.com defines integrity as the state of being whole and complete. While many definitions of integrity also point to morality, ethics, and ‘being a good person’, that is not the operative understanding that we are referring to here. For our purposes, we think of integrity as structural; integrity is achieved through putting sufficient structure and process in place to generate a desired outcome.

For example, if you are competing in a marathon, your diet, training and recovery regime must be consistent with the demands of running 42.2 km in order to cross that finish line. If you were instead running a 400 meter sprint, your diet, training and recovery regime would still need to have integrity with the end goal, but you would likely not need to run for three hours to prepare. In the end, integrity is about ensuring that your actions, practices, systems and structures match your desired outcome. If they do, you’ve created the conditions for performance to happen. 

Unfortunately, this alone does not guarantee performance; something else is needed! Once we have created the environment where results can happen, we need to shift the way we look at the world, so we see more clearly, more broadly, and in a way that new actions are obvious in this new environment. This is where distinctions come in.

Distinction

A doctor sees a set of symptoms in a different way than I do. A stock analyst can look at charts and know how best to manage risk. An auditor can look at a set of financial statements and see sources of fraud. A military officer can look at terrain and know how best to move through it safely.  The difference between a bona-fide expert in medicine, finance, accounting and so on, is the set of distinctions that they have developed and collected over time.  Each domain of expertise has a specialized language that equips effective practitioners with ways to interpret and make meaning (i.e. see) in a way that reveals a set of possible actions to take that others just can’t see to take.   

We call this ‘specialized language’ - the set of distinctions to master in order to perform in a way that matches the context of a particular domain.  A distinction is linguistic in nature. Think of the domain of colours.  Now think of the word “shade”.  The word “shade” enables us to distinguish between the subtle differences in colour.  People who travel safely in avalanche terrain have many distinctions for slope, terrain, snowpack stability, weather effects and after they have mastered these distinctions they see terrain differently than you or me and can choose a less risky route to travel.  

In the domain of working effectively with others, either as a leader or a collaborator, there is a set of distinctions that enable those that are highly effective to perform at a high level.  They see interactions differently, they see and hear different things in a conversation that allow them to alter the direction of a meeting that has gone off the rails, they “intuit” when to speak, when to listen. The source and accuracy of this “intuition” comes from the mastery of a distinction in the domain of working with people.