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 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.

1. By learning and practicing what you do

The concept of ‘Performance by learning’  is that performance is a function of learning and it improves with the amount of learning. Historically, learning is considered as a function of several factors which include knowledge, skills, and attitude. These are mostly trainable factors. On top of that, practice plays a very important role in retaining knowledge, and skills and also keeping attitude polished. Ericsson says one needs to engage in deliberate practice to shine his expertise. The overall amount of learning, if it could be quantified, is a complex function of how much you know, what exactly you can do and how well you can do and it is also a function of how much practice (or experience) you are gaining in applying it. Thus, learning takes time.

Taking it one step further, performance is also a complex function of learning. This mechanism historically has explained several high-performance phenomena across corporations for several decades. Individual accumulates deep skills, knowledge, and experience as a result of systematic training, continuous learning, and intense ‘deliberate practice’ over the years. This mechanism has been very popular among corporate managers as this mechanism deems performance as “trainable”. I don’t deny that your high level of practice, in-depth knowledge, and wide and deeper experience in fact would have played a great role in making you what you are. This mechanism helps you learn and perform at your workplace.

This first-level performance comes through a training event or the very first learning event. During this event, the performance rises sharply but only to a certain level. This is termed as CRAWL stage (Stage 1) in which you are yet to figure out how you would make the most of the learning you just received. This sudden rise is similar to the charging of the capacitor. In this stage, you can perform only to a certain level as a result of training irrespective of how much you learned during the training event.

If you do not give any reinforcement or practice to this newly learned information, you may lose the performance eventually. However, in the professional world, we usually practice what we learned and that’s how we start building performance steadily. This is termed the STEADY state (Stage 2). The slope of the steady state can be changed by reinforcement. Larger the amount of reinforcement longer you keep the rate of slope intact. This enables you to reach a level of optimal performance. You got to reach this level as a professional to survive your day-to-day job responsibilities. This is the minimum level you have to show to survive in the job.

Performance being a function suggests one very important point that not the entire learning of an individual will convert into performance. You may be highly skilled, and knowledgeable, with years of practice and “wow” attitudes to problems, but you may not be the “best” your manager would want you to be. Why so? It is because performance does not necessarily come out only from learning. Your entire learning may or may not transform into performance. There are several other factors also involved in shaping learning to convert into visible performance. The environment is one such factor that may render a large amount of learning into low performance. There are many internal and external environmental factors and variables that may affect your performance. External factors could be pressure, competition, job stress, relationships, etc. Internal factors could be negative or positive. Sometimes jealousy with your peers, a negative internal factor also plays an important role in developing competence. The environment acts as an important transfer function and it depends on it how much of your learning actually gets converted as performance. If you see most of the time there is a big struggle with the environment and you continuously keep practicing to master it. If you are able to assess the environment around you, be able to anticipate the factors that may impact your results, react fast to those factors and then plan for any unforeseen changes, then a point reaches when you get to know the rules to control your environment. That’s the stage of “steady-state” performance you can derive from yourself as a result of all the trainable ‘stuff’ you learned over the years.  So as an average learner or as an average performer, once you get a handle on the environment, you should be able to achieve that steady-state performance by suitably using your years of learning.

This is fundamentally the trainable part of the ‘Performance by Learning’ model. We have seen examples of people showing great performance through great learning and training provided it is orchestrated correctly. But it is fair to say that performance does depend upon to a reasonable degree what you learn and how much you practice. However, the downside of this mechanism is that one may take too long to internalize learning before it shines as the best one can do. The end result is that time to performance is pretty long.

2. By loving and being passionate about what you do

Those who come from a math or science background would know that like every function performance function also has a maxima. That essentially means it needs certain specific attributes or certain ingredients in your learning at which it may resonate and give you maxima. If it has maxima, that means at a certain learning level, the possibility to take performance beyond a certain level is not possible.

As you start getting more opportunities to better handle the unpredictable parameters of your environment, you get a sharp increase in performance. The beginning portion is called RUN (Stage 3) and the latter portion is called JUMP (Stage 4). Usually, this is the strategic component of your learning that makes you shine in your job or profession for a short time. This leads you to achieve MAXIMUM performance. This is the maximum performance you can achieve with a given combination of skills, knowledge, attitude, and the environment i.e. all the learning an individual accumulated over the years.

It also suggests that performance is not proportional to learning. In other words, not the entire learning of an individual will convert into performance. Here is where things defy rules. Even if you continue learning more and more at this stage, it would not mean your performance will improve. Also, an interesting finding is that it declines more as you learn more. After a certain point, your learning should not add to the performance. That means after a certain point your learning should not add to the performance and further, it may mean you don’t need to learn anything more or maybe learn something different.

Isn’t it surprising against conventional theories? The reason probably is…now you need new opportunities to experiment with. And if you don’t get it, your performance will start declining. As usual, you cannot maintain it at the same level due to the dynamics of the environment. We observed an inherent capacitive-type decay effect in performance.

We have seen examples of star performances of certain individuals which could not be explained by ‘Performance as a function of learning’ alone. There is some evidence that there exists a stage of ‘jump’ that potentially cannot be accounted for through a relationship with learning or training interventions. That means there is something ‘else’ to this equation that may result in “jump performance” (Stage 4). Along the same lines, it also may mean that individuals could achieve high performance sooner in their professions compared to when they solely depend upon learning. 

In the above experiment, most of the top-scoring employees indicated that they loved doing what was assigned to them and they described being passionate about tasks assigned to them. This made them task leaders. An interesting finding was that performers who described this mechanism as the reason for their performance actually outperformed the professionals who described the first mechanism for their performance against several factors against which they were being measured.

This is no secret I guess. Several leaders have talked about this in several different ways. All mean the same thing: Do what you love and love what you do. This factor of ‘loving what do’ has been seen as a key differentiator between a performer and a leader. Our research indicates that this mechanism is the key to breakthrough inexplicable performance. This is a powerful mechanism that indeed differentiates between a performer and a leader.

It sounds like common sense. However, this common sense seems to have taken a backseat in management theories and practice. The irony of most management and leadership training programs is that this key parameter remains unaddressed. Maybe because this entity is not easy to measure, act upon and bring into action.

3. By aligning your skills and experience to what you are passionate about

We have seen examples of breakthrough exceptional performances of certain individuals which could not be explained by ‘Performance as a function of learning’. Those exceptional performances could also not be explained by using the logic of passion or love, though there is always some ingredient of that kind. That means there exists a stage of ‘breakthrough performance’ which potentially cannot be accounted for through a relationship with learning or training interventions or factors like passions or love. That means there is something ‘else’ to this equation that may result in the “true peak performance” of these elite individuals. It seems that at one point in your life there comes the “breakthrough” when you know how to use your skill, knowledge, and attitude to make it resonate with your environment to give you all possible channels leading to a FLY stage (stage 5) leading to the true peak performance. Breakthrough is a certain set of alignments of internal and external forces in your personality, behavior, and learning which opens up gates for new possibilities for your personal performance and expertise. This is the stage at which the organizations ideally would want to drive their top talent to be. This is the breakthrough point where they can transform their top managers or employees into leaders with peak performance.

All the participants in the above experiment were also asked to the extent they liked the task assigned to them. This included expressions like being passionate about or loving doing it. With that information, we tried matching their learning (as a function of knowledge, skills, experience, and amount of practice) to the extent they expressed how much they were passionate about doing the assigned task.  The interesting outcome of this analysis was that the highest scorer showed the highest level of scores in both learning parts as well as high scores on their description of passion.

We conclude that skills, knowledge, experience, and practice all alone are not enough to reach peak performance. Same way, being passionate and loving what you do is also not enough to drive you to peak performance unless you have completely complementary skills, experience, knowledge, and practice in the same area. This is the third mechanism of gaining performance in which you accumulate experience, and skills and work with all the focus on what you love the most.

This shows that you need to know what you love to do and start aligning your best skills, experience, and energy on excelling in it further. This is how you can develop your personal performance into an amazing professional performance and eventually shine as a task leader in whatever you do. This alignment stage is what I call “PERSONAL RESONANCE.”

However, this “aligning” part is the challenging one. Talking to many professionals, I realize they have no clue how to strike this alignment. The way I look at this is that high performance in the professional world starts with personal performance. Personal performance eventually gets transformed into self-leadership before getting transformed into professional performance and leadership. When you drive this alignment, the time to attain true peak performance is drastically shortened. The real question is what kind of strategies do you need to practice to create suitable conditions for that breakthrough? And how can you achieve that breakthrough faster?