How Performance Betrays Leadership

Performance, who doesn't love it?

It drives results. It makes progress unfold quicker. It yields greater efficiencies and ultimately yields greater adaptability. All in all the drive for refined and elite performance is something many of us love and knowingly or unknowingly worship. I've been doing performance coaching for a solid decade now and I have to say performance still has a bright and curious life force within my heart. As I use the term worship here, I am pointing us toward an integrated gesture where we offer ourselves to that which is worthy. For leaders who change the landscape of the world we live in, they know how to identify that which holds great value and worth. And, they know how to drive us toward these aims with proficiency in mind.

Yet we are only looking at the bright side of performance. Performance has an underbelly. It has a dark side. It is this dark side that few leaders know how to successfully manage. The underbelly is simple, the drive for innovation, speed and responsiveness within the ideology of performance commands the leader. The leader loses his or her power. The loss of power is the forfeit of the leader. And thus we must ask ourselves an important question, as leaders are we commanding performance or is performance commanding us?

One yields greater power while the other leaves us powerless in the face of the ferocious drive for higher levels of performance.

The reason why I love performance is that it can have an intimate and alive connection with development. If there's an area I've focused my attention it is on this intersection: human performance and
adult development. Leaders must acclimatize themselves to learn how to yield both. If they don't they run the risk of not leading. And just for the record leadership is not a position, but an activity.

You are either leading or your are not.

The development of yourself and your employees as well as the organizational structures within you operate is one of your chief concerns. If you're not developing yourself, your people and your structures you aren't leading. It's that simple.

And, if you're not developing to yield greater measurable capabilities you're likely wasting your time. Development and performance need one another. Performance left it its own devices precludes or blocks development. Why? You stop experimenting. Your team stops testing new ideas. Your organization backs down from the courageous acts that risk genuine innovation. When these kinds of experimentation is pressed out of your work day and your organization's activities you have fallen off of the leaders razors edge. You aren't leading. You are following the rote mechanisms of chasing efficiencies. When people are turned into efficient cogs you lose human ingenuity, human creativity and the kind of innovations that change market places and reshape our world.

Performance, keep a hold of it or it will control you. Development, study it. This is your counterbalance, this is an ideology that can hold, regulate and interface creatively with the worthy drive for performance. When you get it right, leadership ignites. When you miss it, you're either stuck in wasting your life ruminating about possibilities that never will be or you'll be uncritically chasing more efficient ways to tie your shoes.

Lead & lead boldly. Aim for the moon, not just for performance but for the development and advancement of human kind.

~Rob McNamara
Harvard University Teaching Fellow, Leadership Coach  & Author of The Elegant Self
www.RobMcNamara.com