10 drivers of high performance you need to implement

To help with this, we’ve been digging into what makes a high-performing organisation. We started by surveying 1500 employees and 150 C-Suite executives across the public and private sectors in the UK and Ireland. You can discover the results of that survey in our complete The Secrets of High Performance research report. We also met with leading business theorist André de Waal, and found out his ideas about the factors that make a high-performing organisation.

André de Waal is a leading business theorist and senior lecturer, known for his contributions to the science of high performance and performance management. His ideas have shaped the modern perception of high performance around the world. For example, he notes Many wrongly assume some of the world's most dominant brands are high performing. But this is not necessarily the case. Just because you have the monopoly on something, doesn't mean you are high performing.

From De Waal’s work and our own research, we’ve created this list of 10 key drivers of high performance. If you want to become a high-performing organisation or individual, read on to understand those drivers along with practical tips to bring them into your team.

Shared vision and goals

At a glance, this might seem like the simplest factor at play, but getting it right is the most critical step you can take to achieve high performance.

Simply put, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you expect to get there?

Goal-setting is critical because what precisely high performance looks like will vary from team to team, organisation to organisation and person to person. When you set that goal, you draw a line in the sand that people in your team can understand.

Ensuring those goals are attainable is your next step. There’s no point setting a KPI if there’s no way to tell that the KPI has been achieved. Likewise, goals need a deadline, or else you’ll keep vaguely moving towards them with no direction.

A shared, central vision makes for a pillar from which other factors can be directed. Breaking down a primary vision into smaller goals that will help you achieve that vision is the best approach.

With that said, a vision also needs to be inspiring. In his book What Makes a High Performance Organisation, André de Waal observes that one can become an inspiring person by being “passionate about the goals of the organisation, showing emotion, and generating enthusiasm for these in your employees.”

People given empowerment and autonomy

“HPO employees want to be inspired by their managers to continuously perform better and achieve extraordinary results. They want to be kept on their toes and be challenged. They continuously want to develop themselves, to achieve the best they can, and contribute to the success of the organisation,” notes De Waal. It’s impossible to achieve this if you’re constantly hovering over your people and micromanaging them.

Some employees will need that extra push, but for the people with the potential to become high performers, agency is key. Good talent management and employee engagement principles will support this. Nurturing your people gives them the space to follow your goals in a way that works for them and for the organisation as a whole.

Clear communication, collaboration, and feedback

None of the above will matter if you’re not clearly communicating your intentions to your team.

Some leaders like to say they have an ‘open door policy’ and leave it at that. However, if we’re being truthful, we can see that this policy can lead to less communication, not more. Employees tend to be nervous about openly approaching senior leadership, or don’t know the right questions to ask. Therefore, leaders need to start those conversations themselves, using a combination of techniques. Check-ins are good for one-to-one communication, but townhalls, stand ups and internal communication platforms are all useful tools to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Crucially, good communication comes from psychological safety. Employees need to feel like they can flag concerns, take risks and make mistakes without fear of reprisal.

Openness to risk-taking and innovation

Tying into the above is the idea of risk. 25% of male leaders identified risk taking and innovation as one of the most important drivers of high performance.

While one of the key features of a high-performing organisation is stability, it can be difficult to achieve true high performance without an element of risk. Truly competitive, high-performing teams will be willing to try new things, and new things can fail.

“The only mistake you’re never allowed to make in a high performance organisation is the same mistake,” says De Waal. Taking the opportunity to try a new approach and then learning from what worked and what didn’t is a pivotal step.

A culture of learning and growth

You can’t build a culture of learning and growth without allowing for mistakes, but there are also some proactive approaches you can take.

Most people ‘learn by doing’, especially when they’re pushed a little bit out of their comfort zone. This ties into the risk-taking above. If employees are given space to experiment and fail, they’ll learn more, and be more likely to deliver high performance.

On top of this, creating a culture where learning and development are enshrined as part of the working week is helpful. This is a more long-term project, but it could start by having employees block out time in their calendars to focus on personal development. Mentoring and reverse mentoring are also useful tools, as employees can help support each other on their learning journeys.

Finally, implementing an LXP that integrates with your other systems will also help build this culture, as LXPs focus more on creating accessible materials that suit a range of learning styles.

Operational excellence

How often do you actually think about your processes? Are they locked in place because that’s just how things have always been done, or do you take the time to evaluate if they’re adding value to people’s days?

According to De Waal, high-performing organisations “eliminate unnecessary procedures, work and all forms of excess and waste and standardise the remaining work.” By doing this they ensure the organisation can respond to all events efficiently and effectively.

Managing this effectively is important too. Organisations often have a big desire to shake things up a little, but that desire needs to be backed with methodology. Otherwise, it will look like you’re changing things for the sake of it, which can really hurt buy-in. Processes rely on people actioning them, and changing processes requires effective change management.

Focus on specific improvement initiatives and set out clear deliverables from those initiatives. This will help you achieve operational excellence.

Agility and adaptability to change

Setting out a plan is all well and good, but plans rarely survive contact with the world. Different factors you didn’t see coming can come into play, and the environment around you can rapidly shift.

Agility is a word that often gets tossed around, but what does it actually mean in practical terms? Simply put, it means you can pivot. When change comes, whether expected or otherwise, a truly high-performing organisation can adjust its plans on the fly without compromising their core vision. It’s not simply a matter of withstanding change, but embracing it and ensuring you aren’t caught short.

Commitment to recruiting, retaining, and developing top talent

People are one of your biggest costs in any organisation, but they’re also the most necessary. If you want to be a high-performing organisation, you need highly talented people. As De Waal notes, “Without good employees, the high performance organisation can never be achieved.”

Interestingly, our data indicates that 65% of female leaders said that with more investment in people, their organisation would perform better, compared with 40% of male leaders.

This commitment needs to run through the entire employee life cycle.

You need to find employees who are keen to be high performers, through an effective recruitment and onboarding campaign. You then need to retain those employees, using employee engagement principles that will make them less likely to go to your competitors. You then need to give those employees opportunities to develop, whether that’s through more directed learning or through ensuring they have opportunities to be challenged.

To learn more about how to attract, retain and develop the best talent, take a look at our skills gap guide.

High employee engagement

Employee engagement is a key metric that ties into employee experience. It’s not about satisfaction or happiness. Employees can be happy without being engaged. Instead, think of employee engagement as a term that refers to how connected an employee is with the broader organisation. Engagement is intrinsically linked to a sense of purpose – work needs to feel meaningful.  People need to feel the impact they make.

Engaged employees tend to be: 

• Excited by the work they do, and as such are motivated to push through tasks that are less pleasant 
• Interested in development opportunities 
• Flexible, and able to adapt to changes 
• Happy to take on extra responsibilities within their skillset

As you can see, engaged employees have traits that, with a little extra nurturing, can lead them to become drivers of high performance. Find out more by taking a look at our employee engagement guide.

Future focus and investment

The strongest high-performing organisations are always thinking ahead. Treading water can be comfortable, and staying in the organisation’s comfort zone can be tempting. But you’ll never achieve high performance doing that, and given how the world is shifting and changing lately, a focus on the future is necessary. You need to start thinking five, even ten years ahead.

If this seems daunting, you’re not alone.

75% of leaders are worried about how they’re going to achieve high performance in the year ahead.

By laying strong foundations and investing in solutions and people that will help keep you future-proof, high performance will become second nature, helping you stay ahead of your competitors no matter what.

If you’d like more practical guidance on how to achieve high performance in your team or organisation, take a look at our latest guide.

Download eight proven methods to creating high performance now.