The Real secret to performance success

Those of you who know me have often heard me say that people who are successful, and who have great careers, accomplish this because they actually perform in their current positions and they can show the potential to perform at their next career level. It’s all about performance. And my consistent message is, “for superior performance to be achieved, and sustained over time, there needs to be a balanced match between an individual’s technical capabilities (education, technical skills and experience) and their non-technical (‘soft’) skills, to their specific work, manager, team and overall organizational culture”.

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Since the presence of both technical and non-technical skills is essential to performance, over the years I have made a point of increasing my understanding of the influence of non-technical work personality on performance. To assist in this I have found it easier to first group the vast number of personality-based performance characteristics into these ’core’ soft skill categories:

• cognitive capabilities and thinking preferences,
• motivation,
• concentration preferences,
• productivity traits,
• communication skills,
• interpersonal skills, and
• emotional intelligence.

After doing so, we can move beyond these core soft skill categories, to higher level capability evaluation and development activities pertaining to managerial, leadership and innovative performance.
But it is within this core category list that the real secret to performance success resides. Cognitive capability in fact should be given ‘special status’, because it is fundamentally important to a person’s ability to perform.
When there is a cognitive mismatch between an individual and the requirements of their specific role, NOTHING else matters - the person simply will not perform to expectations.


Cognitive capability ‘trumps’ all.


So what do I mean by cognitive capability?


For me, cognitive capability involves a person’s ability to organize and evaluate complex information (sometimes seemingly unrelated) in order to develop effective solutions to problems within a given time horizon. The farther into the future that a person has to contemplate, and plan for, the greater will be the complexity of the information involved, the strategies to be developed, the solutions to be formulated and the contingencies to be considered. And therefore higher levels of cognitive capability are required to be effective. It is also important to know that, as young adults, we all develop various levels of cognitive capability (but we do not all start at the same level), and that everyone’s capability will grow, at various rates, as they mature.


While a person can have both sound technical knowledge and notable strength in all of our core non-technical categories, if their cognitive capability is below that of what is required for their specific role, despite all good intentions, they will be overwhelmed, incapable of effectively solving problems and their performance will suffer. In some cases their response to this will be to do many of the things that typical sub-standard performers do; justify, hide, self-protect, blame, deflect accountability etc. etc. Since few people will willingly admit that they are incapable of performing their work, they will be little help in determining the reasons behind their substandard performance – better yet whether cognitive capability is the culprit. External evaluation will be required to determine if inadequate cognitive capability is the actual root cause of poor performance, so its evaluation must be included in the investigation of all possible causes when performance objectives are missed. Failure to properly ‘diagnose’, should cognitive inadequacy actually BE the root cause, will only result in putting a ‘band-aid’ on symptoms, and the performance issue will never be resolved.


In those less frequent instances where a person’s capability is above what is required in their role, they will typically be bored with their work and, depending on the influence of their other performance traits, may perform poorly because of such factors as; poor motivation, lack of interest, poor concentration and errors of omission – the list can be quite long. Those underwhelmed people who are career-oriented will become uncomfortable and more interested in moving on to a new challenge. And, if they are truly talented, they will be very attractive to your competition (and recruiters). Those who are not career-oriented will simply accept their situation, remain bored and ‘hang on’ until retirement (if allowed to). In either case, whether the person’s capability is above or below the capability requirements of their role, don’t expect to see significant positive performance. An accurate cognitive match is the desired condition.