Building a High Performance Environment

Whether it’s maintaining the prestige of a great artistic institution, creating elite military capability, or succeeding in business, it comes down to leaders’ ability to stimulate performance. An ineffective leader can render an entire organization useless — while effective leaders improve their people’s performance just like a great coach improves an athlete’s.

Improved business performance comes from better strategy execution through improved individual contribution. Leaders can ensure this by creating and maintaining a high performance environment (HPE) — one that stimulates the individuals within it to improve. The Olympic Games are a classic example of such an environment.

Developed by Elkiem from 16 years of research into what stimulates improved performance in human populations, HPES describes the common elements of high performance environments: concepts addressing direction (achievement, failure, strategy), concepts showing the current status of performance (measurement and exposure systems), and concepts addressing motivation (reason/purpose plus reward and consequence). The unifying element is “The Way” — the culture, values, or guiding philosophy of the environment.

An environment needs concepts defining direction, performance status, and motivation — but those concepts must be clear and effective to produce results. A lack of clarity and effectiveness in one, some, or all of the nine HPES components is the cause of many of today’s problems with driving improved execution and productivity in business.