It's that time of the year again — whether you are making your new year's resolutions, writing annual evaluations for yourself and/or your team or simply reflecting on the year and what's ahead.

Folks who have read my past articles on LinkedIn know that I am a big fan of helping teams achieve their full potential. In that vein, one question I would love for folks to ask themselves and others is:

How would you compete against yourself?

Here's How
Last year, during one of my annual performance appraisal feedback sessions I realized that I was having a conversation with one of my direct reports that had a recurring theme. We had had this chat informally before, but now it was starting to impact his performance. The symptoms were familiar — a project would be kicked off very well with a lot of promise, but would lead to a slowdown in progress. He would appear to be or actually be overloaded and unable to take on all the responsibilities to make this happen.
He couldn't say NO to the hundreds of distractions that came his way and pulled away his focus.
I asked him this question, and he reflected (being a high performer, he responded with complete intellectual honesty, thank god!) that if he were competing against himself, he would simply focus. That would allow whoever was competing to simply get ahead while he was losing his attention and singular focus. The results of course would be obvious.
Asking this question clarified a few things for the two of us:
  • Looking at it from a disconnected or third-party perspective gave us both a way of identifying the root cause, free from subjectivity
  • Knowing that someone competing against him could easily and consistently outmaneuver him lent a sense of urgency to the situation and our need to fix this
  • Tying it to something he could actually control made it an issue he could take into his own hands (as opposed to blaming other factors for the recurring situation).
The story had a happy ending — in less than a month, he made huge improvements in fixing this weakness in his toolkit. In doing so, he hugely improved his and his team's performance.
Tying it to something he could actually control made it an issue he could take into his own hands (as opposed to blaming other factors for the recurring situation).
Asking this question of ourselves and of anyone who is providing directional or specific career feedback (and we might be providing feedback to) might be one of the best presents to give this holiday season. Hopefully it grounds your thinking and brings focus to whatever comes next — be it a new year's resolution or feedback in an annual appraisal.

If you would like an opportunity to improve and make a difference in others lives.  www.blazingradiance.com