What I Mean When I Say Performance

Over my 25-year career, I've been part of businesses where the number looked good and the work underneath it, frankly, did not. I've also seen the reverse. We overcame difficult barriers and worked better together, yet finished short of the number for reasons we could not control.

Those years taught me to control the controllables, mitigate the uncontrollables and keep recalibrating.

That's why I built a practice around performance. Executive coaching, leadership development, and organizational design and transformation each address part of the problem. I work across all three because the person and the conditions they work in belong in the same conversation.

Performance is behaviour, not outcome

This distinction comes from industrial and organizational psychology. John P. Campbell and Brenton M. Wiernik describe individual work performance in terms of behaviours within a person's control that contribute to organizational goals. Outcomes are the results those behaviours produce, influenced by factors beyond the individual.

The number matters. But it cannot, by itself, tell you how well the business was run or whether the work that produced it can be sustained.

Judging only the result risks teaching people to manage the number instead of the business. Behaviour gives you something to examine while the work is still happening: how decisions are made, how people respond to pressure and what they do when conditions change.

What drives it, and what derails it

Research in sport distinguishes two states associated with excellent performance: flow and clutch.

Flow can feel effortless. You're absorbed in the task, your skills meet the challenge and your sense of time changes. Clutch involves deliberate concentration and intense effort under pressure.

That distinction offers a useful lens for leadership, rather than a complete account of an executive's working week. Performing well cannot depend on the work feeling effortless.

Leadership also draws on three core executive functions. Working memory lets us hold and work with information; cognitive flexibility helps us change perspective or approach; inhibitory control helps us pause before acting on an impulse.

A leader can have those capacities and still get pulled off course. A strength used without regard for the situation can become a limitation. For example, decisiveness can leave too little room for challenge, or attention to detail can crowd out delegation.

The question is whether the response still fits. That calls for examining the leader's behaviour and the conditions around it before deciding what needs to change.

The same examination belongs at team level. When people keep doing what the system rewards instead of what leadership asks, look at what makes those choices sensible. Asking for different behaviour while rewarding the old behaviour leaves the conflict intact.

Why performance

Performance is what you do, shaped by the conditions in which you do it. You can work on both.

That is the frame behind Inception Performance Group. It connects the development of a leader with how a team works and how an organization is designed.

Results remain part of the judgment. Separating them from behaviour makes it possible to ask what produced them, what was within reach and what should change next.

Don't wait for the final number to examine the work producing it.