I feel privileged to have had some amazing experiences in my work with top performers in business, sports, and the military. I’ve always been intrigued by exactly what sets these people aside from those who don’t make it to the top. More recently, I’ve become especially interested in what enables them to stay at the top when they get there. Sustainability and longevity as a global leader, in particular, has never been in more jeopardy, and the next generation will need to heed the harsh lessons that some current incumbents are experiencing.
Recent headlines have borne ample witness to how demanding it is to be at the top. The most senior leaders at organizations such as Barnes & Noble, Pfizer, and Lloyds have stepped down due to reported fatigue, exhaustion, and stress. However, there are many examples of people who have reached the top and stayed there for a long time. Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan and Jeff Immelt at GE immediately come to mind as leaders who have come through thick and thin and demonstrated an impressive sustainability and longevity.
So what is it that the next generation of global leaders can learn from those top leaders, athletes, and performers in any domain who are able to deliver success time and time again, rather than succumbing to the demands of being highly visible, scrutinized, and accountable?
Let’s start with how people get to the top in the first place. If you are one of the many who have delved into popular psychology books on this topic, notably by Geoff Colvin and Malcolm Gladwell, then you will know that the argument that “talent is overrated” is very much in vogue. These books focus on research by Anders Ericsson and colleagues at Florida State University which showed the importance of deliberate practice in predicting who will make it to the top. Specifically, it was estimated that experts spend typically 10 years or 10,000 hours in deliberate practice to attain exceptional performance. These works further minimize the role talent plays in reaching the top by emphasizing other factors such as birth dates, and citing case studies on people of the likes of Bill Gates and the members of the Beatles to show how “being in the right place at the right time” is also a crucial factor.
However, the narrow environmentalist position underlying these popular works reflects only half of the opposing nurture versus nature views which have dominated the scientific literature on expertise development. The opposing genocentric position is similarly limited so that neither is sufficient in isolation to explain how people get to the top of their professions and stay there.
Even when you combine these positions, there is still something missing. And this is where the sustainability factor in success sheds important light. Talent, hard work, and luck are indeed important in helping performers reach the top, but are insufficient to enable people — in any domain — to deliver high performance on a consistent basis when they get there. Having observed top performers at very close quarters in a variety of arenas over several years, I have come to realize that the missing ingredient in sustained success is what I believe to be a form of wisdom, know-how, or intelligence. It is very evident among the world’s best athletes and I have also witnessed it among the best leaders and performers in work and military settings. Since this intelligence is about delivering superior performance on a consistent basis, I did not deliberate for too long before naming it “Superior Performance Intelligence” (SPI).
Recently, I conducted a study of SPI with top performers and leaders from the worlds of business, sports, military, performing arts, and medicine which will be published in the scientific literature later this year. The study identified SPI as:
A common critical awareness and know-how that top performers, from business leaders to cardiologists to athletes to performing artists to military leaders to entrepreneurs, possess to apply their minds, skills, techniques, strategies, and tactics to the same high standard every time they perform.
SPI has three core know-hows:
1. Knowing how to maximize your potential, comprising three dimensions which reflect a self-knowledge and ability to self-regulate to realize your capability and potential: ‘Knowing yourself’, ‘Stretching yourself’, and ‘Sustaining yourself’.
2. Knowing how to work with your environment, comprising three dimensions which involve knowing how to shape and use the performance environment to your advantage: ‘Knowing your environment’, ‘Shaping your environment’, and ‘Being in tune with your environment’.
3. Knowing how to deliver top performance, comprising three dimensions around the process of performing to high levels on a consistent basis: “Planning and preparing,” “Delivering,” and “Evaluating.”
A gap or weakness in any of the know-hows will jeopardize longevity at the top. For example, the CEO of a company which had been acquired by a much larger organization had consistently hit his numbers —he excelled at knowing how to deliver top performance. And he had risen quickly through the organization, demonstrating a strength in maximizing his potential.
However, he was poor at knowing how to work with his environment. His suspicions about the acquiring company’s plans led to constant confrontation and working against the “new environment” rather than with it. He role-modeled a victim mentality, which soured relations between his own people and the acquiring company. This gap in his SPI had serious consequences — he was sacked.
So for the next generation of global leaders, getting to the top and staying will be about much more than working hard and long. And it will be much more than being in the right place at the right time. A big factor will be developing the know-how or intelligence identified here.
Comments (1)
I found this article to be rather interesting, the characteristics which lead to the successful and the fully directed CEO or model of success under any circumstance, for I would have place the intelligence quotient above all things, knowing full well, that a savvy and almost brutal management approach is often associated with achievers. One would rarely choose a CEO as their best friend, for in most cases, the will they have to succeed often puts them at odds with such characteristics as empathy and to consider relationships with others as much beyond that which they can use for self aggrandizement. Some people are so incredibly out for the career ladder climb that they will take the shame of openly contradicting themselves if it means than someone else is not going to see that they are dark shawdows always willing to compromise themselves or others if it achieves a small corner of their notion of how to move towar their definition of what is, “Ahievement.”
Those who finally break, I would dare say, have arrived at the place where moral and family issues are creeping in to this inflexible being who suddenly realize that truth may not be so kind to them across the web of humanity they have trampled on to become, “The very best CEO. Conscience can be a wonderful but disturbing friend when one realizes that lives are about to be caught in upheavel, because a human being dared to cast off armour even for a day. I conjecture that most CEOs have a God impression of themselves; Blow that cover, and you’ve got an ordinary person ready to shatter, and we all know some who have been such non persona little Deities that their fake worlds can threaten the entire financial and government officials as was the heart of The Bernie Madeoff scheme.
Who among us could ever forget that pathetic, unappologetic, thieving, lying, souless human being who showed us that success can be the biggest lie ever told. I see him as the reason we cannot go on placing trust in singulair individuals without serious oversight from the outside and for a very long time. What do I know when I have never championed even a career ladder? I am a mere nurse, Mom, book author, but I have spent my whole life observing people, and that is my grain of knowing something about CEOS, just what they have shown themselves to be within this remarkable country of ours and across the world.
Among my best old friends was a former Executive Vice President of Sandoz Drug Company, and lessons he taught me about succeeding were those that meant; “Work your way up,” and how sad Louis Begin would be now to see that all of that is shattered by those who are the tin men who need a heart. Sometime in the 1980s we lost our great gentlemen and ladies as corporate heads, and until that day a great man can become, “Self Made,” have a heart, soul, body, and spirit; then we are lost citizens thinking evil champions are just great for as long as pockets of money outweighs the merits of a man or a woman being champions because they cared and they believed they had a larger purpose than corporate profits, then we can count on wealth’s danger and destruction shattering lives beneath them or taking lives which are their own or the symbolic lives of others.
Companies are now too big, too powerful, and too under scrutinized to have one CEO, and that may even be happening within nations as large as The United States where it is entirely feasible that the nation envisioned by the founding fathers is now beyond the control of the central governing body of Washington, D.C.. Within another century; Will we be talking about four distinctive regions marked by direction on the map with a body of presidents? It is neither implausible nor impossible, though the decades will come and go and those such as I will be long forgotten before such an event would occur. Whatever happens in the future, then may it be without devestation and war, for are we not Americans where we have grown out of a system which recognizes that the needs of all are based on the decisions of rationale men and women?
Respectfully, Barbara Everett Heintz, Author of, “Pinkhoneysuckle, “Amazon — Kindle Ready, Create Space, With First Honorable Mention under Biography, Autobiograph, The San Francisco Book Festival — One story of people who have zero power, marked by the abuse and the sacrifice of The men, the women, and the children of hidden Appalachia and America’s Bible Belt. Read the free portions at my Amazon site, if that is all which you can afford.
God Bless, Barbara Everett Heintz