The mind is the epicenter, the source if you will, of human performance. Because our thinking drives our behavior which determines our results. Why is this important to understand?
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you love high-performance sports cars. And you just picked up a new one right off the dealer’s lot. You know that you can increase its performance even more than what the factory does. The question is, what do you do? To improve its performance would you change the tires? Maybe. How about repainting it, or replacing the seats or radio? Of course not. To increase its performance, you’d pop the hood and work on the engine, because that’s the true source, the epicenter, of its performance. Just as the mind is the epicenter of human performance.
Now let’s say I volunteered to work on the engine of your sport car for you, admitting that I have no experience as a mechanic and don’t really know much at all about how an engine works. Would you accept my offer? Of course not. Not if you really like sport cars! Because since I don’t know anything about how an engine works, the odds are better that I’d hurt its performance than improve it.
Yet in the business world, every day people are hired into leadership positions – positions that are primarily responsible for increasing the performance of the team – who know almost nothing about how the human mind works. They know almost nothing about the source, the epicenter, of human performance. Therefore, they are as likely to hurt the performance of the team as improve it.
If you want to have leaders who can really improve the performance of your organization, invest time and energy hiring and developing your leaders so they understand how the mind works. Make sure your leaders understand how the source of human performance and human behavior really works. How it drives performance. Because when they understand that our thinking drives our behavior which determines our results, our performance; then and only then will they focus their efforts on effectively enhancing the thinking of the people on their team, so that they will get the results you are hoping to get.
Most leaders focus naively (and exclusively) on changing behavior. But attempting to change behavior alone without changing our thinking never works, at least over the long term. These people don’t understand the hardwired link between our thinking and our behavior, which cannot be broken. Therefore, effective people leaders always pursue understanding and improving the thinking of the people on their team to effectively improve the performance of the team.
Question: How much time to do you spend thinking about what and how your people are thinking, rather than just telling them how they need to change? What do you think might happen if you spent more time thinking about them?
