How do you turn into a high-performance individual? How do you become the best at something?
There are several theories for this. During our research, we found that there were three distinct and completely different mechanisms through which professionals are able to do their best and able to shine as high-performance individuals.
Let me share an interesting experiment. A select set of employees were given a pre-defined task that they had never done before. These employees were picked for research purposes and supposedly had demonstrated similar levels of skills, experience, and knowledge on similar kinds of assignments as seen from the performance measures. They were also believed to have quite comparable approaches (attitudes) toward handling jobs. They all were given the tasks in a controlled environment to ensure that environmental impact is isolated from the outcome. Their performance or task outcome was measured in terms of the level of effectiveness (quality of output), efficiency (speed of output), and level of value-addition in the output (over and above specified requirements). Interestingly, in spite of all parameters being the same, their performance showed wide variation. If you are a manager, you may call it normal and I am sure you may have seen such variations even among the employees with the same performance rating.
Even though it looked normal, it raised some questions to ponder while organizations are investing millions of dollars in training events to provide a similar level of knowledge, skills, and attitude to their employees, still they have not been able to figure out the wide variations of the performance among employees of similar caliber. An analysis of the results was performed to associate the results with several attributes and parameters. Interviews were also conducted with the participants. A long story short, the post-experiment analysis showed three distinct mechanisms taking place to develop individuals to high performance.
