Your organizational success depends on the performance of your people. Growth, revenue generation and overall profitability is totally dependent on the contribution of your managers and staff, each person having a role to play and a contribution to make. Superior performance will only occur when you establish reasonable, yet challenging, performance objectives at the organizational, departmental, managerial and individual levels, and when you hold everyone accountable for meeting them.

​Yeah yeah – I’ve heard it all before.

I would like to provide you with a typical example to help illustrate my point.
Recently, I received a call from a human resource representative (rep) of a Canadian organization regarding CAES possibly providing assessment work to help in their hiring process. The organization has been around for a few years, and therefore had moved from surviving the ‘startup phase’ to now experiencing growth pains. The issue that they were grappling with was their ongoing hiring of poor performers in one specific (and important) director role. Apparently, they had hired a few people who did not perform.

I am currently helping a few people with their career development. Most of them are employed in attractive positions, where they are looking to either increase their mobility within their current organization or else to compete for external employment opportunities. Some of them are interested in enhancing their performance skills in order to be more effective and to gain more recognition in their current role. And a few others are unemployed, due to the economic circumstances but, rather than just trying to find a ‘job’, they remain interested in obtaining a real career opportunity as the next logical step in their career progression.

Without true desire significant performance just does not happen. For me, true desire represents what an individual specifically wants, to a great enough degree, that they will be motivated to take appropriate action in order to obtain it. Going way beyond hope, wishful thinking, dreams, expectation, and entitlement, true desire helps us to overcome our natural tendency to maintain and justify the status quo. True desire facilitates enhanced performance, it enables openness to positive change, it provides people with the motivation and confidence to change, and it is what separates above-average performers from the hopeful majority.
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 The absence of true desire allows mediocre performance to enter

The participants in the recent CAES Cross-Cultural Survey were offered a ‘bonus’ questionnaire that provided them with feedback regarding where they were positioned on a growth versus fixed mindset scale. The cumulative results, listed below, were quite interesting.  ​

Problem solving is so much more than coping with mathematical equations.
‘Visionary’ is a commonly used term to describe the incredible Mr. Steve Jobs of Apple. But what do we actually mean when we describe someone as having vision? Obviously, there is the implication of seeing something, but there must be more to it. Why was Mr. Jobs’ particular vision so effective in differentiating him from so many other people? Where did this vision come from, and where can the rest of us get some of it?

Innovative organizations are staffed by innovative people.
As we experience economic evolution, and the emergence of the “new economy”, we need to understand that our business attitudes and approaches must evolve accordingly. Many of us already accept that achieving profitability and organizational growth will be a challenge in this increasingly competitive global economy. But the all-important question remains; “what are you going to do about it”? Those organizations that ignore the new realities of the evolution, and who return to past “old economy” thinking, will fall behind. Those who adapt to the changes, reluctantly or otherwise, will keep pace. But those organizations that embrace and facilitate change will take the lead in the new economy.