What I Mean When I Say Performance

Over the course of my 25-year career I have been part of businesses that had years where the number was good and the work underneath it, frankly, was not. Other years the work was the best I’d ever been part of, the barriers overcome seemingly insurmountable, peak collaboration achieved, and yet, the number came in short. For reasons that had nothing to do with anything we could have done differently.

The lesson I took from those experiences: control the controllables. Mitigate the uncontrollables. And recalibrate. Constantly.

That’s why I built a practice around performance rather than executive coaching, leadership development, or organizational design and transformation. I do all three. None of them by themselves are complete solutions.

Our view of performance is too often reduced to the show and the score it produced, with little attention paid to how the work was actually done. That is not the sense I mean, and the difference matters more than it sounds. Which leads to a definition that is narrower than most people expect.

Performance is behaviour, not outcome

This is not my idea. It comes from decades of industrial and organizational psychology research. Dr. John Campbell states it most cleanly: performance is behaviour — the observable actions and mental decisions under a person’s direct control. Outcomes are the downstream results, and they are shaped by a great deal that sits outside that control, such as market volatility, organizational friction, and even luck.

The distinction sounds academic until you notice what it costs. Judged on outcomes alone, everyone watching learns to manage the number instead of the business.

Results can often be a lagging report on decisions already made. Behaviour is available now.

What drives it, and what derails it

Two distinct states drive performance in this context.

Flow is the effortless one — immersion, skill matched to challenge, time going strange. Clutch is conscious and deliberate: heightened attention under pressure, applied on purpose, and it feels like work because it is.

Most of the advice written for executives is written for flow. Most of an executive’s week is clutch. Improving how you perform under pressure is what buys more time in flow.

Underneath both sit the executive functions — working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control. In leadership terms: holding several competing realities at once, changing your mind when the evidence warrants, and maintaining space between stimulus and response.

When a leader does get derailed it is rarely due to an underlying weakness. Most often, a leader’s greatest vulnerability is a strength overleveraged. Their strengths become a hammer and every situation they face is a nail. Even when what’s required is the opposite.

It’s not that something has gone wrong with the person. Something has gone wrong with their bearings, and it requires recalibration. Those are different conversations, and only one of them is useful.

The same logic scales past the individual. When a team keeps doing what the system rewards instead of what it was asked to do, that’s an organizational problem wearing a person’s face as a mask. The right behaviours have to be the easiest behaviours.

Why performance

Performance is what you do. What you do is shaped by conditions. Conditions can be changed.

That chain is why I use the word for everything Inception Performance Group was built to deliver — one frame that holds a leader, a team, and an operating model.

Performance is also the only part of the picture visible while there is still time to act on it. A number cannot tell you which kind of year you are having until the year is over.

Control the controllables. Mitigate the uncontrollables. Recalibrate.

That last one rarely happens alone.