The Whole Performance Equation
What would change if we got beyond our fragmented conceptualization of performance as simply winning or getting the job done? Effective execution is absolutely necessary, but isn’t sufficient on its own to inspire us. Getting the job done and seeing our people as people is what whole performance is all about.
Experience + Execution = Whole Performance
As leaders responsible for the work and development of others and for sustaining the health and vibrancy of our organizations, connecting the greater “Who” and “Why” behind our work to the “How”, “What” and “When” is one of our most important daily challenges and opportunities. The reality is that the purpose and mission behind what we do is critical, but so often missed. It does not have to be that way, but it takes intention and ongoing maintenance to get there. Ensuring that every person in our organization understands their purpose while also maintaining the urgency necessary to produce results is one of our greatest challenges.
If we take action without a clear mission, we miss the point. And, if we have a compelling transcending statement of why without results or decisiveness, we are equally lost.
An old friend of mine named Alex Shootman is the CEO of an organization called Workfront. When I first met Alex I was compelled by his vision for what he described as “Getting it Done” and “Doing it Right”. That leadership vision has been a part of the fabric of culture in every organization he has led. From his start as a Sales and Commercial executive to his role as a CEO, Alex has always been driven by the aspiration that we can get our work done well, and we could do it with character and attention to a greater purpose. It’s been so key in his life and work that he was driven to write a book about it titled, Done Right: How Tomorrow's Top Leaders Get Stuff Done.
I recently became curious to see how Alex has worked to build culture at Workfront. Instead of asking him, I did some snooping to see what he’s saying out there that might give me a clue. In a video describing the culture, he said his hope is that working at Workfront would be a signature career event for their employees. Here’s what I found so powerful. Alex went on to describe three things that make that “signature event” happen for every employee.
Understanding your role
Seeing the impact of what you do.
And most importantly, having the opportunity to be proud of your work. You have the resources to say “This is good”.
I love it, and, I realized something about Alex. Knowing it or not (I’ll ask him next time we talk), he was applying something that Industrial-Organizational Psychologists have been taking about for years, but is so often misunderstood by leaders and organizations - the reality that there are certain characteristics of jobs that make them motivating.
First studied back in the 1970s by Greg Oldham and Richard Hackman, the Job Characteristics Model (JCM) is based on the idea that the key to motivating people is built into the job itself. The five characteristics being the following:
Skill Variety - The extent to which the job involves a variety of different activities.
Task Identity - Being responsible for a whole and identifiable piece of work.
Task Significance - The work is important and has substantial impact on the lives or work of other people.
Autonomy - The degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual.
Feedback - The work activities required by the job provide information back to the job holder about the effectiveness of his or her performance.
While the JCM has received many critiques such as the world changing and jobs being more interdependent, in many organizations we have forgotten how important the structure of work is for each of us. It’s not the only thing, but it’s an important thing. What this means is that if we paid more attention to individual jobs, we might actually take an important first step in building a culture of effective execution - a culture where things get done and we move forward with purpose. If our jobs have a variety of activities, we know and are responsible for a definable task, we feel a connection between what we do and its positive impact on others, we have freedom to make some decisions about how it gets done, and we have built in quantifiable feedback on our progress, we will be more motivated.
What makes these characteristics of jobs even more important is that they have been shown to impact some REALLY important psychological states - meaning, when jobs have these characteristics, people will think and feel differently.
They will:
Experience meaningfulness of the work performed
Experience responsibility for work outcomes
Have knowledge of the results of the work performed
Here is the necessary expansion of the JCM into our modern organizational cultures. In the 1970s, our conception of work was still being heavily influenced by the Industrial Revolution and even the idea of scientific management proposed by Frederick Taylor. In the 1970s’ we were just beginning to understand the interaction between human beings and jobs, and between managers and employees. While I would like to think we’re further along today, I’m just not sure it’s true. In many ways we have replaced deeper questions of humanity with our basic need to have some clarity about the job we are expected to do in our organizations.
What I want to suggest is that jobs require structure AND jobs are done by real people with real aspirations and deeper motivations that go beyond just being satisfied and getting it done.
Defining jobs as containing the inherent motivational characteristics necessary to motivate people is a necessary first step, but it’s likely not sufficient to move jobs from motivational to inspiring. Today we know more about people, and we have more permission to bring our humanity to work. We’re still figuring out how to do that, but at least there is openness. While the JCM tells a lot about structuring jobs for motivation, it doesn’t answer the question of how to fully connect a person’s greater mission and learning to the execution necessary to get the job done. Let me explain through the eyes of a child.
Megan Lawrence, on our WiLD leadership team, often brings her son Silas onto our virtual sessions with teams. I absolutely love seeing him for so many reasons. His smile is contagious, his presence reminds us that work and life are happening together and can happen together if we are thoughtful, and he reminds me that we are wired to get things done, but also to learn, to grow, and to sacrificially look out for others.
Our purpose is bigger than simply getting the job done.
On our calls (Megan has become a master of muting and unmuting when he wants to express that growing voice with more gusto) it is always fun to watch Silas as a young member of our team (He just turned 1:). He has no definable task. His job is just to take it all in, and to learn how things work or don’t work. It’s funny to watch him focus in and get frustrated when something is pulled away, or smile when he sees someone he might recognize on the screen. His presence is a constant reminder that we are wired to stay open, to learn, and to take it all in. We are wired to express joy, to laugh, to cry, and to pull things toward us that we want. We are wide open, and at some point, something changes. As adults that wide openness to learning doesn’t work as well anymore because we have to focus in on a task, skill or job. We don’t only do that for the sake of our organizations, but because staying focused long enough to get something done and to feel a sense of progress is important to us. At some point we lose our capacity to simply explore, to learn, to adapt, or to express frustration while staying connected well to others. While walking around as big-bodied infants probably wouldn’t work - starting a tantrum when someone takes our laptop or phone away - we might be missing something if we only focus on getting things done.
We might be missing our humanity and the deeper story of why we are here, what we struggle with, what we are considering sacrificing, and the spirit behind the jobs that move execution from something we do, to something we experience.
What would change if we transformed our mindset and believed that getting things done matters, but matters even more if we saw our daily activities as a critical piece of something larger that’s happening in our individual lives and in the lives of our organizations?
In our work helping organizations build cultures of whole and intentional leader and employee development, one of the steps in our process is having people audit the power of their experiences. Our goal is to help people realize that our work isn’t just a job, but an accumulation of experiences that have shaped us into the leaders we are, and the leaders we might be tomorrow. In other words, the outcome of a structured job to do isn’t just motivation for now, but a broader inspiration to go the distance, to withstand the storms of life and leadership, and to learn to be better versions of ourselves. Jobs are not only structures, they are the laboratories for learning. We learn not only as we succeed and progress, but as we fail, wrestle, struggle, and nudge forward. While organizational sustainability and profitability may be driven by more successes than failures, learning requires us to take it all in, just like Silas.
Jobs need structure for motivation, and jobs are also critical human experiences that transcend execution. In reality, jobs are the training ground for becoming better versions of ourselves for the sake of those we will lead.
Whole performance is the intentional integration of job structures and individual and corporate experiences. Coming full circle, here are the three things I would suggest as you think about how to intentionally begin to connect experience to execution. The whole performance equation is about integrating our understanding of job structure and our understanding of the way our people are learning and growing from their experiences - changing our paradigm toward a more whole perspective on performance and job satisfaction.
Wire for Execution - Begin to design jobs for skill variety, task Identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback.
Scaffold for Learning - Create systematic pathways for seeing employees and understanding their experience and the lessons they are learning.
Build on Purpose - Our capacity to get it done and get it done well will go through seasons and mini-seasons, but our underlying “why” is less susceptible to changes in climate, temperature, strategy or execution.
Finally, ask yourself and every employee this question. As you are getting your work done, what are you learning about yourself that is likely to have a lasting impact on the person you are, and the person you are becoming?
For more information on integrating the WiLD Toolkit into your organization as a system for whole performance - seeing your people and building their team capacity alongside their job structures, reach out to contact@wildleaders.org. We’d love to help you get started.
Founder and CEO, WiLD Leaders, Inc.
Find Alex Shootman’s book, Done Right: How Tomorrow’s Top Leaders Get Work Done
on Amazon HERE
