ONE KEY TO RAMP UP PERFORMANCE RIGHT NOW
The world keeps moving and picking up pace. And what I’m hearing from leaders is that they need their teams to pick up the pace too. They want high performing teams.
This is one of your great opportunities as a leader. To release the potential in your people and teams. But how?
Performance = Potential — Interference
A big part of your role as a leader is to minimise interference, so that performance may be enhanced, and more potential realised. Great for you. Great for your people and teams. Great for your organisation.
This is not about spending more money to get more resources. It is about being smarter about how we do things and being selective about the things that we choose to do. And on top of this, it is about going back to one of the fundamentals. Considering the role of leadership.
What is the role of leaders?
One of the key roles of any leader is to minimise the interference. The more interference leaders can take out of the equation, the closer organisations get to raising their performance and achieving the full potential.
The most senior leaders in an organisation have a unique perspective. You have a birds eye view of the whole organisation and its context. You can see patterns and themes in a macro view. You have enormous opportunity to identify and remove the interference for your people and teams.
So where do you start?
Interference can take many forms. Let me share a few sources of interference with you, and you can take the opportunity to move closer to high performance.
SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE
⪢ Obstacles & Roadblocks — things you can see clearly that need to change or be removed in order to make progress.
⪢ Friction — something which unnecessarily creates bumps, is not smooth and slows you down. For example, approval levels that do not line up with business needs, or data that is transferred from one system to another that does not translate well.
⪢ Resistance — Resistance to change, resistance to learning, resistance to culture, resistance to the strategy, resistance to becoming a team.
⪢Lack of capacity — which may not be about resources, but rather a lack of capacity because you are putting attention on the wrong things, leaving no capacity for the right things.
⪢ Lack of capability — a lack of or limited capability in a particular space. Maybe as an organisation, you simply do not have this capability yet, or maybe there are individuals that do not have this capability yet. What do you need to do to develop the capability so you can lean into the space where you want to make progress.
⪢ Poorly designed process — speaks for itself. Perhaps duplication, excessive process, no real reason for the process to exist.
⪢ Unreliable systems — create unpredictability, time and energy spent resolving issues, poor user and perhaps customer experience.
⪢ Priorities that do not align with the strategy — priorities that individuals or teams work to, that do not align with the organisational strategy, and so they are working at cross purposes with the rest of the organisation.
⪢ Differing agendas across the business — a business unit or team is running their own race, and so not supporting different parts of the business working together to achieve the agreed outcome.
⪢ Silos — lack of: communication; shared priorities, support for each other.
⪢ Conflict — Conflict is a source of potential interference. You need to become more proficient at moving through conflict to a future state that serves you all better.
⪢ Lack of collaboration — slows down or stops important activity, creates friction between teams and people, simply makes things harder.
⪢ Lack of communication — you need to ensure the opportunity for the open transfer of information and knowledge.
⪢ Lack of focus –which may be in itself simply a lack of focus, or it might be a lack of clarity, which means people do not know what to focus on.
⪢ Lack of motivation or inspiration — Lack of motivation or inspiration, engagement, productivity. These are all things that you can put your attention to and may be able to address or overcome to reduce the interference.
⪢ Lack of rest and recovery — If you are not giving your people the opportunity to replenish, to re-energise, to have holidays and breaks and to integrate all the factors in their lives, then they may not be able to operate at their best.
⪢ Lack of clarity and agreement about what is important — what is important in my own role, perhaps across my team or across the organisation as a whole. Again, it may show up as interference because we are all doing different things that are not aligned, and that do not help us all to move forward together.
The objective here is to understand which are the areas of interference which are impacting your ability to move fast. to work at pace with ease and grace, but also that might be having cost implications or energy implications in your people, and that may be compromising their ability to achieve their potential. Directly, or indirectly, impacting performance.
When you step back and look at all of the moving parts and the bigger picture of what it is that you are aiming at, both the long and short term goals, vision, mission:
- What are the areas of obvious interference?
- What are the areas of opportunity that you may be able to help to smooth out, remove or find a way around so your people have the opportunity to achieve their potential, to perform at a higher level in a way that is easier to achieve?
This is one of the fundamental responsibilities of leadership, to remove the interference so your people can achieve more of their potential, and your organisation may achieve its potential.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
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