INTRODUCTION
Everyone is looking for high performance but no one seems to know definitively what it is or, perhaps most importantly, how to achieve it consistently.
Having worked with over 3000 elite sports stars, athletes and business people over 21 years I felt sure that if we looked hard enough we would find a psychological profile or a set of characteristics, behavioural strategies and personality traits that underpin top-flight performance in any domain.
My thinking was that if I were able to unravel the performance DNA of individuals who excel far beyond their peers, the rest of us would know the recipe for high performance and would be better able to emulate their success. I was so sure that there was something different about these individuals that I started to collect detailed psychological profiles with a view to analysing them so I could identify the key elements of their success. Only, that independent research indicated no formula. There were no statistically significant correlations that marked certain traits as must-have characteristics or processes for achieving high performance.
At first I was quite disappointed, and my ambition to write this book started to fade. But the more I thought about it the more I realised this was good news, not bad. After all, what if the research had identified a specific high-performance recipe of personality traits and characteristics? What if the rest of us didn't have those ingredients? Were we meant to go crawl under a rock and accept a life of mediocrity? That didn't seem right (or helpful) – and, as it happens, it's not!
It turns out that star performance comes in all shapes and sizes. The fact that there is no performance lottery was actually an exciting realisation. Not only does this research finally disprove the often-touted theory that the alpha male, A Type personality is the only route to success, but it offers real hope for a solution that could massively impact performance for the many, not just the few.
So. If performance isn't a collection of strengths, characteristics and a specific skill set, what is it that makes elite performers elite performers?
In a word: fit!
The more an individual's natural strengths, characteristics, skill set and values fit with the requirements of a role, and with the organisation itself, the higher the performance will be. And yet the notion of fit is almost exclusively ignored in favour of talent, intelligence or some other holy grail of performance.
The weird thing is that we have all experienced or witnessed what happens when fit is ignored. Take sport, for example: how many times has a ridiculously expensive, highly talented sports star moved to a new club, only to fall flat and never really reach their expected potential? The player is still playing the same sport in the same position. He still has the talent and IQ he arrived with, but he just doesn't fit in the new team. It may be that they coach differently and he doesn't respond to the new style; perhaps he's allowed more free rein in this club and gets into trouble off field. Whatever the reason, he doesn't fit and is eventually moved on or ‘kicked upstairs' to a well-paid, senior, but largely ineffectual position. This also happens in business, where individuals are headhunted for huge recruitment fees and yet never reach their previous heights. It can be extremely difficult to get rid of those people once they're in, so they are moved around the organisation or shipped off to a new territory. Whatever the outcome, they just never seem to realise the promise they were hired to deliver.
So what does fit actually mean? Surely there are a huge range of circumstances that can cause someone to fit or not fit – in which case fit becomes as useless as talent or IQ, because its impact comes down to chance? Not so.
What I discovered was that while the content of fit is different between individuals, the context of fit, and therefore its role in star performance, is not. In other words, while there may be thousands of ways that a person can fit into a particular role or organisation there are only three areas you need to look at in order to ascertain fit. These three areas effectively create a structure or framework that makes high performance possible, and this framework is common to all elite performers.
Think of this framework like the skeleton in the human body. Everyone has a skeleton underneath their skin and muscles. Every skeleton has exactly the same number of bones that do exactly the same job. The skeleton is our framework, or context.
The content – height, weight, skin, hair and eye colour and so on – is what makes us all look different on the outside. On the inside, though, we all have the same bones, in the same place, doing the same job.
It's the same with high performance. All the elite performers studied in the research looked very different from the outside – playing different sports or working in different professions in different industries. And while I didn't discover an identikit profile of what someone capable of high performance looks like, I did discover that underneath their outward appearance there was a framework that, when understood, can help us all achieve elite performance by ensuring we are in the right place, doing the right thing, in the right team or organisation for us. In short, ensuring we fit.
What I've discovered is that star performance is not so much about what you do (which, incidentally, is what almost all performance improvement programs focus on) but about how you do it, why you do it and where you do it (see figure I.1, overleaf). In fact, the only important thing about what you do is what you do to screw things up.
Figure I.1 the three components of fit
The reason high performance is so mysterious and inconsistent for so many people is that we are almost solely focused on improving behaviour, skills, knowledge and experience that an individual brings to a sporting or corporate team. As a result we completely dismiss the impact of personality on performance.
When we look at individuals we see a seemingly infinite array of complex and unpredictable thoughts, emotions and behaviours. This apparent randomness is too overwhelming, too daunting and too confusing, and as a result most performance improvement theories don't dig deeply enough into wiring or personality. If there is any focus at all on this internal invisible world it tends to be on visualisation or meditation techniques, or on making a person comfortable and happy so that their natural ability can express itself unhindered by negativity or upset. If, however, we go further than the superficial and seek to identify the unique wiring, we can very quickly uncover and understand the process that an individual uses time and time again to deliver results. And when we do a great deal of that, overwhelming randomness disappears and predictable, consistent process emerges from the chaos.
When we understand our innate patterns of behaviour and they are no longer confusing it becomes possible to turn on performance. Even if we find ourselves in a role or organisation we don't naturally fit into, this knowledge allows us to orchestrate and implement simple, practical bespoke solutions that can radically alter performance almost immediately.
I realise that's a bold claim, but this book seeks to back it up.
What I have found across over 3000 profiles of elite performers in sport and business is that they all have four or five behaviours that evolve as a result of their unique personality. And they use those same four or five behaviours consistently. The difference between mediocrity and stellar performance is that mediocre performers are