The People Bulletin

What is a High Performance Environment (HPE)? Think about an environment where success is not just a hopeful possibility but a sustained inevitability because everything that surrounds you is geared towards achieving world class performance.

In an environment like this, you understand how to reach your goals because you helped shape them and are therefore motivated to achieve them. You are guided by a compelling vision that inspires you to excel every day and keeps you focused even when times are tough. Talented people around you offer strong support when you need it, as well as posing a constructive challenge when things are too comfortable.

This is the type of environment that will help you be the very best that you can, not just occasionally but consistently. Now consider if people in your organisation feel like this about the performance environment they experience.

Although you can do great things to help individuals and teams develop and grow, but if the environment they operate in remains unchanged these people will soon regress back to where they started. The invaluable lesson is that the performance environment an organisation creates is just as important as the people performing in it.

This article explores the importance of creating a HPE in which people can thrive. It discusses the four key components of a HPE; leadership, performance enablers, people, and focus. It goes on to outline behaviours and processes that need to be put in place to ensure that your organisation is creating a HPE for its people (see figure 1).

What is a High Performance Environment (HPE)? Think about an environment where success is not just a hopeful possibility but a sustained inevitability because everything that surrounds you is geared towards achieving world class performance.

In an environment like this, you understand how to reach your goals because you helped shape them and are therefore motivated to achieve them. You are guided by a compelling vision that inspires you to excel every day and keeps you focused even when times are tough. Talented people around you offer strong support when you need it, as well as posing a constructive challenge when things are too comfortable.

This is the type of environment that will help you be the very best that you can, not just occasionally but consistently. Now consider if people in your organisation feel like this about the performance environment they experience.

Although you can do great things to help individuals and teams develop and grow, but if the environment they operate in remains unchanged these people will soon regress back to where they started. The invaluable lesson is that the performance environment an organisation creates is just as important as the people performing in it.

This article explores the importance of creating a HPE in which people can thrive. It discusses the four key components of a HPE; leadership, performance enablers, people, and focus. It goes on to outline behaviours and processes that need to be put in place to ensure that your organisation is creating a HPE for its people (see figure 1).

Leadership

Leaders are bombarded with the daily complexities of modern business, but their primary role is profoundly simple – they must create conditions in which people can thrive. Leaders are accountable for developing HPEs for their teams.

There are three key leadership behaviours that are required to create an environment where high performance is inevitable and sustainable – vision, challenge, and support.

• Leaders must develop and communicate a compelling vision which inspires people. Employees will be able to connect emotionally with this strong and meaningful vision and, during tough economic times, it will be vital to an organisation’s survival strategy.
• Leaders must also challenge people to ensure they remain focused on delivering high performance.
• The third key leadership behaviour is support, in the form of things like coaching, feedback, being available to give advice, and recognition.

The need to set a vision and challenge people is widely understood by senior leaders across industry sectors, but the support element is too often absent or insufficient. A performance environment in which levels of challenge are high but levels of support are low is likely to be stressful, with the potential for employee burn-out.

Organisations intent on creating a HPE will probably already have 360 leadership feedback processes in place, but are they measuring the right aspects of leadership? Too many of them measure the functional and transactional dimensions of their role without addressing the vision, challenge, and support behaviours that will help drive the environment they aspire to.

Performance enablers

As well as providing employees with vision, support, and challenge, leaders need to ensure that their people have the necessary tools to do their jobs to the best of their ability. These ‘performance enablers’ comprise information, instruments, and incentives.

1. Information.  People require information and communication from the organisation about how to do their jobs effectively. For example, they need clear goals that they have helped to set, which are specific to their role, and which stretch them appropriately. People also want to understand their responsibilities and the behaviours required to fulfill them. Once they are aware of this, they will want to know how their role is evaluated and what they can do to progress within the organisation. While goals and role clarity provide employees with direction and structure, people also need regular feedback to help them improve and develop.
2. Instruments.  As well as information, people need the appropriate instruments or tools to help them perform effectively. Instruments do not just include things like sophisticated IT networks and video conferencing facilities to improve communications channels; they also include effective performance review systems. Such systems, in place to monitor performance regularly, will give employees a systematic route to gather feedback and improve performance.
3. Incentives.  Finally, leaders must provide incentives so that people are motivated to perform to the best of their ability. Of course, we all know that compelling salaries, bonuses, and benefits can attract, motivate, and retain people as well as positively impact on individual and business performance. But this is only one dimension of incentives.

Other incentives include strong relationships with managers which are valued by employees and are vital if communication is to be open, honest, and frequent. People also want opportunities for development and a chance, not just to have their say, but to be heard by senior leaders. These are fundamental incentive factors that go above and beyond traditional pay and bonuses.

People

There are three aspects of the people delivering the organisation’s performance that are important – attitudes, capacity, and behaviours.

1. Attitudes. Trust in a leader is a big factor in motivating employees to perform above and beyond what is expected of them. People who trust their leader and buy in to what he or she is trying to achieve will perform at a higher level, enjoy their job, and show more commitment to their organisation than those who simply don’t trust their leaders to act in their best interests. This commitment to the organisation means that people put in more effort at work. Our experience of consulting with high performers in business shows that job satisfaction and high performance are inextricably linked. Simply put, people who enjoy their work try harder and, in this way, their attitudes drive their behaviour.
2. Capacity.  In addition to having people who possess the appropriate attitudes towards the organisation and their own work, companies also need people with the necessary ability or capacity to do their job. These include a blend of knowledge, experience, and technical capabilities as well as the ‘softer’ skills like mental toughness, confidence, and emotional intelligence.  It is not sufficient to have people with the right attitude and desire to achieve, with none of the vital technical skills and behavioural capacity required do the job properly. Therefore, leaders must ensure the recruitment and development of individuals with the right mindset and ability to do their jobs because both are critical for high performance. This means that talent assessment and development must be a high priority.  Naturally, these assessments will have a focus on technical skills and knowledge specific to the role. Yet the importance of emotional intelligence (the ability to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions) and mental toughness (the ability to consistently perform to high standards through times of personal and professional pressure) must also be factored in.
3. Behaviour.  People are more likely to give extra effort and commitment if their leader inspires them and has created the right performance environment. They will regularly go beyond what is expected for the benefit of the organisation, and will have high levels of energy, dedication, and absorption in their day-to-day work.

Getting the focus right

At any one time, an organisation has a finite capacity level. There is only so much time and resource available to achieve tough targets, so leaders must take responsibility for distributing focus appropriately.

They will make these, often tough, decisions with current and future needs of the business and a thorough understanding of the economic climate and marketplace demands in mind. For example, the implementation of a new IT platform to support growing numbers of employees, deemed vital at one stage, may lose focus if the economic climate means that redundancies are necessary.

The HPE model shows four areas of focus which compete constantly for an organisation’s attention:

• Achievement. An emphasis on short-term productivity and goal achievement.
• Innovation. An emphasis on creativity
• Internal Processes. An emphasis on formalisation and internal control of systems and procedures.
• Well-being. An emphasis on the development of people within the organisation.

These competing areas of focus will provide tensions for organisations to manage. Leaders are therefore accountable for an appropriate relative focus across the four areas in relation to organisational, priorities, objectives, and timeframes. At times, it may be necessary to prioritise innovation in a crowded marketplace to develop competitive advantage. Consequently, the other three areas will drop down the agenda. This prioritisation is essential, but leaders must constantly re-evaluate focus to ensure sustainable levels of performance.

Measuring high performance environments

Lane4 has developed a measure – the HPE scan – to uncover the extent to which an organisation with aspirations to create a high performance environment is being successful. The HPE Scan creates a profile of an organisation’s performance environment following analysis of a questionnaire sent to employees. Results identify both areas of strength and areas for development. The scan has been used with organisations from sectors as diverse as management consulting, aviation, holiday and leisure, the legal sector, IT services, investment banking, engineering and construction, and retail.

Each time, it addresses different challenges, including assessing employee perceptions during a merger or as a framework to devise a people development strategy and performance management system.

It has also been used to help organisations benchmark their performance environment against competitors, to address underperformance, to understand performance discrepancies across functions, and to demonstrate organisational health in order to secure financial investment.

Getting the processes right to maximise impact

Leaders and practitioners will know that the implementation of performance management diagnostics, frameworks, and processes are riddled with challenge and internal politics. Too often, employees across all levels of the organisation lack a thorough understanding of the purpose and benefits of such systems and so they are often doomed to fail.

In order to maximise a HPE scan, a clear plan must be in place to engage people in the process and deliver the intended performance benefits. It’s vital that leaders communicate openly about its purpose and process and how the results will be used to improve performance. Conducting a scan and then doing nothing to address development issues risks doing more harm than good.

Strong internal communication prior to survey dissemination is also imperative to mobilise employees to complete in an honest and timely manner.

When data is available, forums for employees to make sense of it, discuss themes, and action-plan are essential. Leaders should prioritise these types of conversations with their teams so that the appropriate development plans are put in place.

Summary of key points

Leaders need to:

• Accept and prioritise their responsibility to create a HPE in which people can thrive.
• Provide vision, challenge, and support to their people, even when times are tough.
• Equip people with the tools or ‘enablers’ they need to perform to the best of their ability.
• Find ways of monitoring attitudes and behaviours regularly to ensure people have what they need to perform.