Performance & Learning: Time to Evolve
Our pursuit for improved results is greatly undermined by our cultural imprinting. Doing things how we’ve always done them is hardly the foundation for improvement in any area. We have a traditional education system that rewards us for what we know, not what we do, yet life and our business world is constructed to reward people for what they do, not what they know.
What’s makes this even more concerning is that the predominant learning model for our adult education system, including organizational development, remains largely based upon traditional educational strategies, immersing people in information in the blind hope that it sticks and can be regurgitated when required.
The performance gap in life is between what we know and what we do. Most people know how to do a better job, yet few of them are. Why is that? Because no amount of knowledge will help a person perform better unless that knowledge is applied, and that is not as simple as it might sound.
Any sustainable change in performance can only result from a change in behavior, and that takes more than just an intellectual understanding. Ask any smoker, they know what they are doing is killing them, and yet they still do smoke. Ask any overweight person, they know they need to exercise and reduce calorie intake, and yet the vast majority fail to so.
The part of the human personality where all learning takes place happens also to be where all behavior is originated. It is not the intellectual mind. That’s why Einstein said “we should be careful not to make the intellect our God, it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality”.
An evolution needs to take place in our thinking. In the pursuit of performance there needs to be a shift from focusing on performance (effect) to potential (cause). Only then can a sustainable improvement in performance be accomplished. This is one of the primary differences between a manager and a leader, the former measures performance, the latter nurtures potential.
