The Birth of a High-Performance Management Process More than anything else … more than anyone else, your managers will have the greatest impact on your organization’s growth. Growing up in the heart of New York City, as a student/athlete and part-time/summer worker in the business community, I realized that the key to the optimum performance of a class of students, of a sports team, or of a business work group, was the classroom teacher, the sports team’s coach, and the supervisor/manager of the work team. I realized at a very young age that when it came to maximizing effort, revving up achievement, and actually sustaining peak performance, the teacher of the class, the coach of the team, and the supervisor/manager of the work team was the key determining factor on what kind of results would be delivered!

Teachers’ Impact on Classroom Performance

As a young performer in the classroom, I saw that the principal of the school never really impacted my performance like my classroom teacher did. The culture, the history, the tradition of the educational institution had very little effect on my performance and the performance of my classmates. Granted, those educational institutions had strong cultures and storied traditions. They probably had an impact on me choosing the school, deciding to attend, wanting to go there. But when it came to performance in the classroom, the teacher had the greatest impact. When it came to performance in the classroom, the capabilities of the teacher and how he shared those capabilities with his students was by far the most powerful influence of my performance, my success, and my classmates’ success during our school years.

Coaches’ Impact on Sports Performance

The same holds true for my years competing and performing in the sports arena. I saw that what mattered, what impacted my performance, was not the history of the team, the winning tradition of the team, the team’s past. The simple reality was that my coaches were the key to team performance. How they coached, encouraged, supported, how they set expectations, taught, how they empowered and praised us made all the difference in the world to me and to my teammates. My coaches held such incredible power. Rightly or wrongly, just like my classroom teachers, my coaches were the single biggest influence on team performance, bar none.

Back in those days, the topic of conversation was mostly about our teachers. How we felt about them. What kind of difference they made. The kind of impact they made on us. It was very similar when we spoke about sports and our accomplishments. Sure, we talked about our performances. But we also talked quite a bit about our coaches, how they influenced us, and whether we would go the “extra mile” for them or whether we would go “through a wall” for them.

In fact, as a student/athlete, I noticed one other interesting phenomenon – how we viewed the coach, how credible he was in our eyes, how much we trusted him, how open he was to our ideas, how interested he was in us as people directly determined our loyalty to the team … how much pride and how much respect we had for one another as teammates … how collaborative and cooperative we were with one another. Plain and simple, our coach, our teacher, could bring us together as a strong cohesive unit, as a solid united team, or our coach, our teacher could create a group of players each with his own agenda of self-interest and turf protection.

Business Managers’ Impact on Work Performance

In the little exposure I had in business in those years, I observed the same occurrences. My limited business experience revealed the same truths about business managers and business supervisors. Business managers and business supervisors were the biggest factor, and made the biggest impact on the performance of the work group. It was not the company culture; it was not any well-intentioned C-level executive. It was my immediate manager. He was the king of the mountain. He held all of the cards. He plainly and powerfully had the greatest impact on our business performance, bar none.

Clearly then, as a team performer in the classroom, on the athletic field and in the business community, I observed first-hand that only high-performing teachers, coaches, and managers can create, drive and energize a high-performing team. The performance of each team, each class, each department, and each business unit is a clear reflection of the management/coaching/ teaching practices of its leader.

My Impact as a High-Performing Teacher

My own teaching experience in the New York City school system (South Bronx students through to Graduate students) gave me the opportunity to put into practice what I had observed in my younger years. I successfully used a High-Performance Teaching Process with my students. The performance results were outstanding. Below-poverty-level children were able to perform at high levels when I managed/taught them using those high-performance practices. The students’ performance results (from Junior High School through Graduate School) were outstanding far more due to “how” (the practices I used) than the depth of my understanding of the subject matter. The high-performing practices, how I thought and behaved, were the biggest keys to their performance. It mattered very little that I sported two Master’s Degrees. Knowing the subject material had some impact, of course. But what truly mattered were the management practices that I used with those students. Those practices, put into action by me, determined their performance. When I left the educational system, my principal sent a letter to the president of the New York City Board of Education. In it, he said that in his entire career in education, he had never worked with a teacher who had earned as much respect and cooperation from students, faculty and parents as I had.

My Impact as a High-Performing Coach

In those years I also coached competitive swimming at the Age Group level, the high school level and the Division II College level. Our swimmers achieved the same high-performing results. Whether they were winning championships and/or achieving High School All-American Status, the same high-performing management/coaching practices achieved the same high-performing athletic results.

My Impact as a High-Performing Manager

A ten-year business career in the television advertising industry yielded the same high-performing results. From sales management positions (New York City sales manager to Vice President of Sales), I applied those same high-performing management practices and achieved the same results. In an extremely competitive industry, my business results, my market share, my customer satisfaction rating and my talent retention record were public information that was promulgated through the entire industry by independent U.S. accounting firms. In a very high-pressure, high-exposure industry, the high-performing management practices yielded, delivered, and drove the same high-performing results. My teams became more productive ... more profitable ... created more customer satisfaction ... and continually retained their talent.

In fact, the Chairman/CEO of my company hired a New York City-based public relations firm to survey the effectiveness of his entire management staff. Reports, peers, superiors and clients were interviewed regarding each manager’s productivity, profitability, ability to satisfy customers and then retain talent. Out of a field of 100 managers, two managers were given the highest rating. I was one of them.

Improving Performance with Corporate Clients

Since 1989, the purpose of our “Performance Clinics” is to create high-performing managers to lead high-performing teams and ultimately drive the productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction ratings and talent retention in their organizations.

The beauty of our High-Performance Management Process (high-performance practices) is that it is teachable, repeatable, consistent, sequential, manageable, and measurable. It transforms managers into high-performing leaders and work teams into high-performing results-driven business units.

Working with senior executives over the last thirteen years, I have learned that in their heart of hearts they know their organizations are running at a fraction of their performance potential. They are aware of alarming fluctuations in the job performance of individuals, teams, departments, and business units. They know they must hold their managers accountable for those harsh business realities. They know they must do something about this, one manager … one work team at a time.

I also know from my earliest days as a student-athlete right through to my consulting days that employees/managers at all levels know, understand, live and work by a powerful truth about work team performance. They know that unlike Wall Street and the “business press,” employees do not put their faith into the myth of “great companies” or “great leaders” or “great cultures.” For all employees at all levels, there are only their immediate managers – good ones, poor ones and many in between. The best strategy a senior level executive can do to drive the whole company toward greatness, toward high performance, is to instill high-performing management practices to the point where they become inspiring, energizing beliefs that drive measurable management actions that in turn create, empower and sustain high-performance work teams.

 

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