8 Steps to High Performance

So things like everyone likes having a good manager. Whether you're sitting in Japan or London or Mumbai, you want to have a good manager. So it's that type of universal truth that there are many of and that we've gathered together in "8 Steps."

Rachel Salaman: Well, tell us how you ended up with eight steps.

Marc Effron: Well, it was a somewhat arduous process. This started a few years ago, I had written my most recent book, "One Page Talent Management," more for human resource leaders, telling them how to help make other people successful, and fortunately some of that information did filter down, but my perception was that not as much information was getting to typical leaders as much as I would like to see.

So I decided I would write more of a "direct to consumer" book, and I started by looking at every academic article I could find, more than 2,000 of those, that claim that it said that something influenced performance at work. And I read through all of those articles and pulled out any that had the absolute strongest level of proof, so what we call meta-analyzes, and grouped those together into the eight steps that we have here. So it was really a process of winnowing down the science that's out there to the most powerful and conclusive science.

Rachel Salaman: Right, so literally anyone can use these?

Marc Effron: Yes, again that's the great news, a lot of this relies on universal human truths of psychology and how people and organizations interact. The goal really was though, Rachel, when I started writing the book, to orient it towards a somewhat younger reader, meaning 25 to 45. Not that those of us over 45 can't benefit, but in many ways what I thought was a lot of us go through a lot of our lives kind of stumbling around, trying to figure out how to be a high performer, when the science tells us very directly, "Here's how to do it."

Wouldn't it be nice if we went to that 22-year-old university graduate, gave them a copy of the book and simply said, "Instead of you learning from the school of hard knocks as much as you would, here are eight very solid pieces of advice about how you can be a higher performer." So it felt a little unfair that we weren't telling people this great information, and so part of the book was to really democratize high performance a bit more and make sure that everyone knew what the proven steps were to get there.

Rachel Salaman: Now, one of the ideas that comes up in the book is the "flexible 50 percent," so can you tell us a little bit about that and its implications?

Marc Effron: Sure. At the beginning of the book I outline – and this came through all the voluminous research that I did – one of the things that I found was about half of what influences our performance at work we cannot do a darned thing about, meaning our level of intelligence, our core personality, not our behaviors but our core personality, even our socioeconomic background, factors of our appearance – these are all things that, by the time you enter the working world, you cannot do a darned thing about, which is why the subtitle of the book is, "Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)."

We call those things the "fixed 50," fixed meaning you're not going to do a darned thing about them so stop worrying about them. But that leaves 50 percent that you can control, and that's the "flexible 50" and it really is what the eight steps are all about. It says, "For all of those things that may give you an advantage or disadvantage that were given to you by your parents or by your background, great, you can't control those, let's focus on the flexible 50 that you have complete power over."

Rachel Salaman: Well the first of the eight steps is "Set Big Goals," so what makes a goal big and how else do high performers in particular use goal setting?

Marc Effron: Sure. The "Set Big Goals" is the first step for a very purposeful reason. The science around goal setting and its ability to motivate us is unbelievably powerful and conclusive, and it says that the bigger goals we have, the more that we will stretch to achieve those goals. So we're hardwired as individuals to respond to a challenge with more effort.

So if Rachel says, "Marc, jump a foot in the air, I'll give you a dollar," I'll try and jump a foot. If you say, "Marc, jump two feet, I'll give you two dollars," I'll keep going until either the reward doesn't equal the effort or I'm just too physically exhausted to do the task. But up to that point, I'm going to keep trying really, really hard to perform, which says, or suggests, that the bigger goals that I have, the more likely I am to overachieve. So the science is very clear, which is why it's the first step. What does the bigger goal mean?

What I love to challenge people with is to ask them, "What would it take to deliver next year twice what you delivered this year? What would it take to deliver twice next year what you delivered this year?" And people will often say to me, "Well, Marc, that's a ridiculous question, I am already flat out, completely busy, I cannot give 1 percent more next year."

I'll push, "Now just think about that: what would you need to learn? What would you need to stop doing? What would you need to start doing? What behaviors might you need to change? What might you need to give up to allow time to do this? Just think through that."

It's amazing how that can focus our minds around, "Well actually, I'm doing this one project, it's kind of fun but it's not that important." Or, "You know what, I probably spend a little more time on social media at work than I should." So if we simply think about where can we take some of the time that we currently don't apply properly and apply it to those goals, it's amazing how much you can overachieve on the things that really matter.

Rachel Salaman: That idea of stretching your goals comes from a four-part process that you outline in your book. The four parts are: align, promise, increase, and frame. Could you talk us through that whole process, maybe with an example?

Marc Effron: Sure. So align, promise, increase and frame is really just a simple way of thinking about "how do I ensure that the goals I have actually matter to someone?" So let's start with that: does this goal actually matter to anyone? Which is the aligned piece. So aligned means that I am working with my boss to ensure that the few things that I'm focused on are perfectly aligned with what the organization is trying to achieve.

Now you might say, "But, Marc, don't people work harder based on goals that they set themselves?" Nope, the science is absolutely clear, we are going to put in equally as much effort whether our goals are set by ourselves or goals are set for us. So aligned means I'm working on the most important things according to the company that I'm working for.

Promise. Now I like calling goals "promises," not because it's a cute word trick, but because I think it really elevates the seriousness of what we're doing. We all have goals and we hope we meet our goals and we try, but how many promises do we make and not keep? I'm going to guess, very few.

To me, goal setting is really a process where I'm saying, "Rachel, here are the three big promises I'm making to this organization for what I will contribute this year." I think it elevates the seriousness of what we're doing. So a promise may sound just like a goal, but what you're doing is you're stating it in that slightly different way.

The increased part, or the stretched part, that's really what I talked about before, how do you set that goal at the maximum level of stretch. Now some people will say, "Well you can set a goal too hard that you can't achieve it." Well yes, we need to figure out what the maximum achievable stretch is, but the research would suggest most of us have another 20-30 percent of performance in us that doesn't involve us killing ourselves at 80 hours a week, so have you stretched that goal to the maximum possible level.

Then finally, framed. Have you expressed that goal in a very simple way? A goal should be as simple as, "Rachel, I promise that I will deliver the big marketing strategy by June 3 and that it will be successfully implemented by August 1." Simple, straightforward, and we present templates and tools in the book to help people to get there.

Rachel Salaman: Now, you also stress the importance of coaching in this goal-setting step. How can a coach help and what can people do if they don't have access to a coach or a coaching figure?

Marc Effron: Sure. Most of us probably don't have access to that coaching figure. On the other hand, most of us often don't ask for coaching as well, and there's a good reason we don't ask for coaching: most of the time we probably don't want to hear a lot of what we'd be told.

So the first hurdle that we need to get over if we want to be higher performers is to recognize that every single person that you know can get better at something, but some people actually want to know what they can get better at, and if you don't have access to a coach there are a few ways to get those insights. One is, most of us are going to have at least one, hopefully more, trusted friends at work. Go to that trusted friend with your goal for the year.

You might say, "Hey, Bobby, I tend to be someone who doesn't speak up a lot in team meetings, I don't really like calling attention to myself, it's kind of embarrassing, but I know I need to show up a little more boldly. I'm going to try doing that over the next month, would you mind just listening and letting me know at the end of meetings if I'm actually showing up a bit more presence in those meetings?"

So one way is just asking people who you trust to give you a little bit of feedback. No one's going to make fun of you trying to get better, and if they do they're probably not your friend anyways.

Rachel Salaman: An idea that comes up in a couple of the steps is "feedforward rather than feedback." Could you tell us about that?

Marc Effron: Sure, and again this may sound like a cute word trick. It is far from that. The feedforward concept was actually thought of by a brilliant coach named Marshall Goldsmith. (If you don't know Marshall Goldsmith's work, one of his best books is "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." I strongly recommend it.) And what Marshall did is turned the feedback process on its head by recognizing that, first, most of us don't like getting feedback. It feels painful, it feels like it hurts, and the brain really struggles to deal with feedback. Because if Rachel's giving me feedback, you're telling me, "Hey, Marc, here's some stuff you've done in the past that you haven't done that well." And the challenge is, I can't correct anything that happened in the past.

So our brains are pretty rational, they like to fix things, and when you bring me something that I've done in the past, I can't fix that, it's already over. Feedforward says, "What's the end of that concept on its head?" And if the goal is to help Marc perform better in the future, why don't we simply say, "Hey, Marc, going forward it would be great in team meetings if you spoke up a bit more. You tend to be a bit quiet and I think you'll be much more successful if your good ideas are heard by other people."

Now that feedforward suggestion gets me the exact same result – Marc tends to speak up more in team meetings – as that feedback, "Hey, Marc, you don't talk enough in team meetings." So I get at least the same result, but what doesn't happen is my brain doesn't struggle to deal with that feedback.

Rachel Salaman: Another step in the framework is "behave to perform." Now, this helps us separate out our personality, which gives us our default responses, from how we choose to behave. So what do you think is most useful for us to remember about this step?

Marc Effron: Well, I'm glad you brought up default behaviors from those that we choose, because our personality is going to give us some natural behaviors, and I compare this to our natural hair when we wake up in the morning, I'm going to bet most of the folks listening to this podcast, their hair looks different right now that their hair looked when they woke up this morning. Mine certainly does, and people are very thankful that it does, and we do that because, over the years, we've realized people don't want to see that natural hair, they want to see it slicked back or blown out or whatever we do.

Use that same comparison of personality to behaviors. Personality is your natural hair, it's always going to be there, it's always going to look that way, it's a gift or a penalty from your parents you can't do a darned thing about. But you might also recognize, "Hey, not every element of my core personality might be wonderful, and I'm going to slick some of that back or blow some of that out, so that it appears to other people to be more attractive."

So part of this is, let's separate out personality from behaviors. All of us have complete, 100 percent control over our behaviors. People saying things like, "Oh that's just who I am, I can't change." Completely untrue, you can change if you want to.

The key thing, though – we talked about behavior change for high performance; the good news from the science is we know exactly what is going to screw up your career, and those are called derailers.

There's a lot of science that studies how otherwise high performers are going to mess up their careers, and we list in the book, there are 11 derailers – this comes from a great firm called Hogan Assessments – 11 different ways that we can derail. And counter to what many of you have probably heard, that you should focus on your strengths, the science would say, "If you want to be a high performer, you should absolutely not focus on your strengths. Your strengths will take care of themselves. What you need to focus on is all of the things that are going to get in the way of your continued high performance."

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Rachel Salaman: Well the next step is "grow yourself faster." So what exactly do you mean by "grow" in this context?

Marc Effron: Grow means how fast can you get even better at both the functional or skill area that you're in, and at being a great manager. What we know from the science is that we grow fastest by the types of experiences that we have.

So most of us probably went to a university or a college and we're pretty proud of the degrees that we got, but the science would say that is a lovely starting point, but that people are going to grow most quickly after that by getting a diverse and adverse and challenging set of experiences. Which means that if you want to grow yourself faster, and continue to be a high performer, you should be mapping out, "What are the few big experiences that will most quickly advance my career?"

The best way to find that out is to ask other people. These may be people in your organization. Let's say you're a finance leader. You might go to your CFO and say, "Hey, Mister CFO or Miss CFO, I would love to be in your job someday, could you tell me what you think are the big experiences that a young finance leader should have to start preparing herself to become the future CFO?"

Or even reach out to someone who's more of a luminary in the field, if you know someone who is a great finance leader outside your organization. Most people love giving career advice. You could ask them the exact same questions: "If you were trying to build the perfect résumé for a CFO, what would you like to have on that?"

Once you get that input then you can come up with your own personal experience map – and we have this in the book, and you can download it from our website as well – come up with that personal experience map where you list out, "Here are the next four or five big experiences that I need to get to most quickly grow my career." The key point here is, remember, experiences grow us faster than anything else.

Rachel Salaman: You also advise us to connect, which is Step 4, and you say that we should make an effort to connect with our manager and our peers and team members. How should those three groups be approached differently, and why?

Marc Effron: Let's start with boss. Here's the challenge for a lot of folks: they think that there's no distinction between having a warm personal relationship and sucking up to your boss. There's a lot of gray between those two points. It's helpful to remember that bosses are people, too, and bosses like it when people say nice things about them or compliment them or ask them for advice.

That's all that you're really starting to do, or doing, when you're starting to build that relationship with your boss, you are consciously making sure that you're interacting with them in a way that's not just transactional: "Hey, boss, here's the report you asked for," but more personal: "Hey, boss, how was your weekend? Hey, I know you like cricket, how did your favorite team do?" So having a conscious strategy, and I'll talk about that more in a moment, for building that relationship with your boss. The science also says if you have a strong relationship with your boss you are going to get reviewed more positively and move up faster. So there are some tangible benefits.

But also with your peers, what's the relationship with your peers like? Your peers can't necessarily propel your career, but they can certainly undercut your career if you don't have strong relationships, and for both your boss and your peers what I recommend in the book (and we provide some great tools for doing this) is to literally rate and chart out that relationship, meaning for my peers, numbers 1 through 8, do I have a great, OK, or not good relationship with them? When's the last time I had a quality interaction with them? Not a fly-by at the water cooler but a coffee, a lunch, time to really get to know them?

Anyone, whether it's your boss or your peers, that you rate as less than a high relationship, a strong relationship, in the next two weeks you should be setting up a coffee or a lunch or a really good get-to-know-you conversation.

Rachel Salaman: And you've hinted at the fact that some people feel not just uncomfortable but like they're almost being false building relationships like this. What would you say to them to help them get over that feeling?

Marc Effron: Absolutely. Well let's start with the science, so I always start with the science. The science says if you do it you'll be more successful, but then, if you say, "Look, I'm just not that guy, I'm not that guy who walks into the meeting and starts shaking hands with people and saying, 'Hi, how you doing?'"

Well, Chapter 6 then is probably a great one for you to read. Chapter 6 is about faking it, and faking it is the exact strategy you want to engage in if you are someone who just says, "I feel fundamentally uncomfortable doing this," you recognize it, "Yes, I know it's good but I just don't know how to do it."

You need to put on that actor's face or that actress's face and say, "When I walk into that meeting today where I don't know anyone, I am going to play the role of someone who is thrilled to be there and can't wait to meet with people." Literally just saying, "This is not going to be me, this is going to be someone else."

The good news is, one, we're all capable of doing that, and the science suggests that if we engage in that behavior people believe it's the genuine us. They don't say, "Oh, Marc's faking it by talking to people at the meeting." They say, "Gee, it's nice that Marc's actually interacting with people at the meeting instead of standing in the corner."

Now that doesn't mean becoming a fake you. So sometimes people say, "Well I want to be the genuine me." Well, be the genuine you 90 percent of the time, but recognize that the genuine you might not be the perfect you in every single situation. If you want to be a high performer you might need to fake some behaviors that are proven to be effective but that you just don't naturally feel comfortable with.

Rachel Salaman: And you make a really good point in the book when you say that actually we fake things all the time, even if we're laughing at an unfunny joke to make the joke teller feel appreciated, that's a kind of faking, and we all do it.

Marc Effron: Absolutely. I mean, this is the "Oh no, that was a great meal, I loved that." It's engaging in a type of social interaction to make sure the other person doesn't feel bad, or to make sure the other person feels good.

Rachel Salaman: So that's Step 6. Let's just go back a little and talk briefly about Step 5, which is "maximize your fit." You say this is the only one of the eight steps that relies on something that you can't directly control. Could you explain that?

Marc Effron: Sure. Well, let's start with this mantra, which is, "Companies change faster than people change." What does that mean? That means that companies are evolving at a very rapid pace, meaning they might move from being a start-up to a well-established venture, into turnaround mode in five years, or I work with Silicon Valley companies that go through that cycle in 18 months.

If the company changes and you remain the same wonderful you that you are, then there might be a gap between the company's new needs and the capabilities that made you successful in the past. So, for example, let's say that you're in an entrepreneurial environment, and what you love about that environment is that it is fast moving, you just get stuff done, you don't need to talk to a lot of people about it, action is favored over talk, and the best, loudest idea is the one that's going to dominate.

Fantastic, that probably is going to make that entrepreneurial venture very successful and allow it to start to expand, and as it expands that company will probably put in place some processes and some discipline and some infrastructure, and all of a sudden your acting like a cowboy isn't advantageous; in fact, it's disadvantageous.

You're now seen as somebody who doesn't cooperate well with others, who surprises people with ideas out of the blue. Things that, in the past, were looked at very favorably, but now are actually seen as things that probably won't make you a good fit for the future.

If you're an entrepreneurial venture and it's growing really well, you'll want to think about, "Hey, I like being in this venture, but if I want to be in the next phase of this company what are the behaviors that are going to make me an optimal performer in that new environment?"

Rachel Salaman: So moving to Step 7 now, "commit your body." You say that sleep, and in particular sleep quality, matters more than exercise or diet. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Marc Effron: Sure. So this was an interesting chapter. When I started reading through all those thousands of articles I knew that if I looked hard enough I would absolutely find an article that said that exercise is conclusively related to performance at work, and if I found that article it would give me an excuse to go to the gym one more day a week.

Unfortunately, there's not a single article out there that says that, but there are lots of articles, lots of great scientific research, that says that sleep matters more than anything else that you can do for your body to influence your performance. But to your point, it's not what most of us would think about – which is, "Well I need my eight hours" – it's the quality of the sleep that you'll get.

The science is very clear that it's the sleep, your sleep quality, that impacts what we call "executive functioning." So executive functioning doesn't mean you're an executive, but it means your ability to think strategically, your ability to interact positively with others. Low-quality sleep takes the edge off of those things very, very quickly, and the challenge also is that the research is… well, it sets rather a high bar. It says things like, "For a great quality sleep you should sleep in a perfectly quiet, perfectly dark room, with no animals present and no device reading beforehand." And that is lovely I guess in the theoretical world, but in the real world that probably doesn't work.

So my advice is, well, see what you can do to turn down each of those dials a little bit. Can you make the room a little quieter, a little darker, a little colder, maybe put the dog at the end of the bed instead of up next to your face? You know, are there a few things you can do to turn those dials down a bit? But yes, quality matters much more than quantity.

Rachel Salaman: Now, perhaps the most controversial of your steps is number 8, which is "avoid distractions," and here you debunk some of the sacred cows of performance improvement literature. Could you share a couple of your favorites?

Marc Effron: Sure. This is meant… to be honest, one of my biggest frustrations is that I want everyone to be a high performer because there are great benefits that happen when we're high performers.

But for the average Jill or Joe it's really difficult for them to sort out among the thousands of books and articles and conferences and consultants and blogs, and all the ideas flying at them, what's really proven to work.

You might have 10 million views on a TED Talk – doesn't mean there's any science that backs that up. The challenge for someone who wants to be a high performer is, if you engage in what that person tells you to do and it's wrong, then you've wasted time. Not only have you wasted time but you could have been using that time to do something proven to help you be a high performer.

There are a couple of things I think we need to be very cautious about. One is, be careful of concepts that just sound too good to be true. So there is a book that came out a couple of years ago called "Grit," and this is by a Harvard Business School psychologist.

It said, "I found a new factor that will allow people to be higher performers and it's called grit." And she describes these factors. It all sounded almost too easy, and then some other scientists looked at this and they discovered actually all she did was relabel a part of personality that we've known about for 70 years and it's calling it something else. So sometimes people present solutions that are too easy but also present them as something that you can change.

So saying, "Rachel, you should have more grit" might sound like a good idea, but because grit is part of personality you actually can't change that. I mean, you can maybe become a little grittier, but there's people who are simply going to have a natural advantage over you. So the challenge for the average Jill or Joe is to sort through all these ideas flying at them and be very critical consumers. So if something sounds too good to be true, let's just assume it is until it's really well proven.

So Step 8, avoid distractions, really says, "Let's make sure that you're focusing on the few things that are proven to work." Which is the seven things we list in the book, rather than something that pops up on YouTube or on TED Talk that sounds really good but that perhaps isn't backed by science the way that it should be.

Rachel Salaman: Do you have any final tips for people who want to follow your eight steps? Should we work on them in order or concurrently, all of them, or just choose a few? What's the best way to do it?

Marc Effron: Well actually let's even start before the steps. In the introduction of the book I lay out what's called the "high performers mindset" and I think before we think about any of the steps we each want to say, "Do I really want to be a high performer? Because if I'm going to be a high performer, I'm probably going to need to do a few things that other people aren't willing to do. First, I'm going to simply have to work harder, flat out, I'm probably going to work more hours than other people work."

Now sometimes people will come to me and say, "Well, Marc, I work smart, not hard." Cool, you'll need to work smarter and harder than others.

Second, you'll probably need to sacrifice more than others, meaning you might not see your family as much, you might not get to engage in the hobbies that you like or see your favorite sports team. High performers sacrifice time at work versus other things they could be doing, and high performers recognize that performance is always relative – "I'm always going to be competing against someone."

Every day there is somebody who wants to be better at your job than you do, you need to figure out how hard you want to compete against the most aggressive person in that field.

So let's start there, with that high performer's mindset. Then, after that, I would start with whatever step shows up as the weakest one, based on a little quiz that we have in that first chapter.

So in the first chapter, you're going to set yourself against those eight steps and understand where are the ones that you don't feel are your strengths, and I would simply start there. And you may ask other people to say, "Read through these questions and tell me which of these you think would be most helpful to me if I started to change it?" So your self-assessment is great, others' assessments of you may be helpful as well.

Rachel Salaman: Marc Effron, thanks very much for joining us today.

Marc Effron: My pleasure, Rachel. Thank you.

The name of Marc's book again is "8 Steps to High Performance: Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)," and you can hear a Book Insight podcast about his book, "One Page Talent Management," on the Mind Tools site. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.