Peak Performers: Not Always Good for Business

Are you a peak performer? According to organizational psychology, the five fundamental peak performance proficiencies are:

• Awareness of self in all domains

• Control of effort

• Visualization

• Cognitive skills

• Self-programming

These proficiencies are common to all top achievers. However, a top achiever on a team when all other members are not top achievers may be counterproductive. Why? When one team member is working harder (or less hard) than other members, workflow is hindered. In their book, Learning to See, Mike Rother and John Shook illustrate this concept.

Rather and Shook

In this graphic, you can see that individual process steps, if not optimized to the system, can create an inefficient system. A system’s parts (or team members), if synchronized, enable the system to run smoothly. This means that no one piece of the system is running faster or slower than it should. What this means for service or manufacturing settings is that workflow needs to be balanced among all individuals if the organization is to function efficiently.

There is a prevalence of advice on managing underperforming employees, but an equivalent amount of literature is not available for managing over-performers. Perhaps this is because over-performance is not seen as a problem. But it can be a problem on teams, especially in a manufacturing setting, but it can also affect service.

I am not espousing that everyone should be an underperformer—far from it! But organizations can benefit if they ensure that their systems are free of waste (especially travel and motion waste), so that their employees can be as efficient as possible. By eliminating waste and creating flow, underperformers and over-performers can work together more productively, creating efficient workflow.

Performance psychology teaches us that workers want to succeed in an organization. By extension, these same workers want the organization to succeed. What is not clear is what motivates workers to want this success.

Regardless, organizations need to remember that their front-line workers are often the face (or voice) of the organization’s brand to the customer. Organizations that provide their workers with tools and systems that enable efficiency will help their workers want to continue to succeed. It’s that simple.