Preconditions for a High Performance Environment

Getting It Set Up Right

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The environment has an outsized influence on our experience. Think about your drive to work. As you go, you start to imagine your day. You think about who you'll interact with, what film you'll watch, or what conversations you need to have. All of those things change your neurochemistry. Your brain is changing and activating from the moment you anticipate going to work, producing the chemicals it believes you'll need to succeed during the day.

Last week, we covered the basics of creating a successful environment for developing talent. This week, we take a look at the preconditions - the necessary, but not sufficient features - of making that environment facilitative.

Here's the breakdown. Though this research comes from sports, it can be applied nearly anywhere there's a desire to build a better environment for people to work in.

This is the starting point for having a good environment.

Hire Good People

This may seem obvious, but many organizations are composites of friend groups that don't represent the highest, best available talent. In a scrappy start-up, that might work fine - for a little bit. But, over time, the best environments evolve to attract and secure the best talent. Your environment is the synergistic sum of your people.

Let them be role models

When you've built a good team, you can allow everyone to add value and showcase strengths in different ways. That means that members in the organization who are earlier in their career have a variety of people to look up to and emulate, and that they can choose who they most closely want it follow. You can confidently let that process unfold, knowing whoever they choose will be great.

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Invest in your infrastructure

The Super Bowl champs failed miserably this offseason. Quite literally, they received an F for their working conditions from the NFLPA. Now, it's all relative - most NFL facilities, including the Chiefs, are still very nice - but it goes to show that winning won't cure everything. People will still be unhappy if you don't invest in creating physical conditions that allow them to thrive.

Work as a team

Despite what you see on the field, you might also be shocked to know that, behind the scenes, many world-class sports organizations more closely resemble a high school class. You've got an in-group, out-group, gossip, complaining, an unwillingness to help, and sometimes worse.

Players pick up on that. Good people pick up on that. And it drives them away, while undermining performance.

I've seen the dysfunctional side of this equation play out on more thsn one occasion. Those teams never reach their full potential.

The best organizations and teams nip this in the bud, with a simple, "we don't do that here." They see and hold a standard that puts interdisciplinary support above individual agendas, and work hard to make sure that standard is upheld.

Putting it to work

If you want to build a better environment, you need to be honest with yourself: which of these 4 have you done well, and what's missing? Where could you improve?

A change in any of these can make a huge difference in the experience, and as a result, is a very high-leverage opportunity for intervention. We know this intuitively in sports - one great player can change a whole team's season. The same is true with the professionals in the building.

If you want to build a great environment, you start with getting these right.