Are you working harder than you need to?

As all of you who read my articles know, my passion has always been working with leaders and teams on performance, energy, healthy habits and the way individuals can be at their best more often.

As part of that 25 year journey I’ve spent a LOT of time identifying why good people and good organisations often make achieving peak performance harder than it needs to be.

Every day I ask leaders a simple question:

Are you working harder than you need to?

Because I regularly hear leaders and their team members say things like:

“We’re too busy.”

What I often see is:

We’ve normalised being reactive and haven’t learned to manage priorities effectively.

They say:

“People don’t have time to look after themselves.”

What I see is:

The culture has taught people that sacrificing themselves is evidence of commitment.

They say:

“We need people to work harder.”

What I often discover is:

The system is rewarding input, visibility and presenteeism rather than outcomes.

They say:

“Our leadership team has communication problems.”

But underneath that can be:

They don’t understand each other’s ways of working, perspectives or what’s important to each other.

And organisations tell me:

“We want more strategic leaders.”

Yet their leaders spend much of every day firefighting.

These aren’t necessarily individual performance problems.

They can be behavioural, leadership and organisational patterns that have gradually become normal.

That’s where I focus my work:

I help leadership teams identify the patterns that are preventing people from performing well, see those patterns differently, and then translate the insight into practical and sustainable changes that improve how the organisation actually operates.

The philosophy is simple:

Don’t change everything. Change what really matters.

If you'd like to know more about my Organisational Performance Diagnostic and Transformation service for CEOs and leadership teams, email me: jeff@the-tonic.com