Build Peak Performers

ONE OF YOUR primary responsibilities as a manager is to build a team of peak performing individuals for your company. People who are positive, motivated, and fully engaged with their work are vastly more productive than the average staff member. They get much more done, produce work of a higher quality, and are more creative and innovative in everything they do.

High-performance organizations are those in which people feel terrific about themselves and are happy in their relationships with their superiors. People who are happy in their work, and who feel good about themselves, produce far more and better work than those who are not.

The foundation of peak performance is high self-esteem. Self-esteem is defined as “how much you like yourself.” The more a person likes and respects himself, the better he performs, the better he works with other people, and the more confidence and competence he has.

Unlock the Individual's Potential

Psychologists have identified seven key managerial behaviors or conditions that you can create to motivate the people under your control, in turn raising their self-esteem and increasing their performance.

Challenge Them

The first motivator is challenge. The number one desire of people in the workplace is work that is interesting, meaningful, and draws on the very best talents they have. People want to feel challenged and fully involved in their work.

To satisfy this need, you must give people jobs that are beyond their capabilities so that they have to stretch, in terms of their time investment and effort, to get the job done well. It is only when people are stretching to improve themselves and how they do their work that they feel fully alive, and that they feel like winners.

Give Them Freedom

The second motivator is freedom (as mentioned previously in Chapter 7). People enjoy having a maximum of freedom to do their jobs. Practice giving each individual as much freedom as possible to achieve an agreed-on goal. The key to giving people this freedom revolves around your skills in using management by objectives and management by exception, and your ability to delegate well.

Give Them Respect

The third motivator in building a peak performance team is respect. People have a great need to be respected by other people whose opinions they value, especially their bosses. Employees need to be able to express their thoughts, feelings, and concerns to their boss—and they need to feel that the boss genuinely respects their ideas, whether or not the boss accepts or agrees with them. The more your employees feel that you respect them, the more they respect you and want to do a good job for you.

The Friendship Factor

The fourth motivator in the world of work is warmth. In the workplace today, one of the most important elements is what is called the “friendship factor.”

People like to work for others who they think care about them as individuals. You express warmth when you ask people for their opinions or judgment. You convey warmth to your staff members when you talk to them and ask them questions about nonwork-related issues, such as sports and hobbies. You can ask them about their families, their personal lives and activities, their children, and so on. Whenever you express a genuine interest in these subjects, you convey that you care about the other person as a human being, rather than simply as an employee in your company.

Keep in Touch

The fifth motivator is control. Assigning someone a job and then forgetting about it is much more demoralizing to that person than if you give an assignment and then regularly check in with the worker. The more you check on the performance of a person in completing an assigned task, the more that person feels that the job is important—and, therefore, the person is important as well.

Perform a regular series of “nonjudgmental performance reviews.” Ask questions like, “How's it going?” Ask if there is any way that you can help or if there are any resources that you can provide to help the person do the job. This gesture lets the employee know that you consider the task to be important and that you are concerned about both the task and the person performing it.

Let Them Win

The sixth motivator is to provide success experiences. Whenever you assign a job that your employees can do well, and when they complete the task, they have a success experience and feel like winners. Everything that you can do or say that causes your employees to feel like winners raises their self-esteem, improves their overall performance, and increases the value of their contribution to the organization.

Expect the Best

The seventh motivator is positive expectations. This is one of the most powerful of all tools to raise self-esteem and self-confidence in others. When you express confidence in your staff members, they will usually do everything possible to show you that you are right. Continually convey to your staff members that you believe in their ability to do an excellent job.

Some years ago, I hired a young man to run the parts department at a large automobile importation and distribution business that I was setting up. The reason I hired him was because he had the required experience with a previous company. Unfortunately, he had been fired unceremoniously from that job because of a clash with his boss. This experience had really shaken his self-confidence. As a result, he was shy and insecure. He continually downplayed his ability and tried to convince me that he had limited experience, stating as a reminder, “As you know, I was fired from my last job.”

Nonetheless, like a force of erosion, I kept telling him how good he was. I just kept telling him that I believed he had the ability to be an absolutely excellent parts manager. And of all the people I hired to help me build that business, he turned out to be the best performer of all.

Make it clear that you believe in your people. Tell them that you believe in them. Even if you are not quite sure, pretend a little. Your positive expectations of other people will seldom lead to disappointment.