Should you think of your employees as athletes?
Today, I want to talk about an article I read recently that talked about how athletes are conquering distance and whether you can apply some of those same concepts to elevate your team’s performance.
The article was in the Wall Street Journal, and it talked about how athletes are conquering distance in many different sports.
For example, top athletes can now can run two-hour marathons, something that was unheard of years ago. In the NBA, they can take and make more three-pointers two or three steps behind the three-point line. Professional golfers are hitting the ball sometimes 300, 311, 315 yards off the tee.
Better performance changes a lot of dynamics, but what if you could do that with your team?
What if you could get them to conquer some of the barriers to their performance? After all, we are all on a quest to increase our competitiveness and our productivity, and to reduce costs.
The article focused on little things that people do that create a huge difference in their performance in the long-run.
For example, when you notice the difference between your top performers and your middle and bottom performers, it is often just some little things your top performers do to focus that makes a huge difference in their productivity and output.
If you can identify just a couple of things you need your team members to focus on, this small change can yield great impact in terms of productivity. Additionally, it could help boost your effectiveness too.
Unlock The Secret To Top Performance Share on XThis sometimes gets handed off to the engineering or the continuous improvement folks in your organization, but there’s a problem with this.
If operational changes and improvements are identified in the front office and not on the shop floor, you are going to be missing some of the things you could gain from direct observation.
My suggestion is, you as the supervisor, along with your partners in continuous improvement and engineering, should take a look at what your high performers do differently and have all of your employees focus on those small changes that could make a big difference in their output.
