Accelerate Your Performance with 3 Critical Questions
As we approach the end of the year, it’s essential to look for ways to optimize your performance so that you can accelerate the results you and your team create.
Yes, for so many leaders, it can feel like the “final stretch” of a very long race where the focus can be on finishing using the approach, tools and pacing you are using now.
However, it’s a good time to reflect on how you might be able to approach the final stretch in a new way this year so that you can accelerate performance to finish stronger than you ever thought possible.
In a recent Executive Advisory session, I was working with a newly appointed Vice President who said, “I just want to get my team over the finish line, it’s been a hard year, I don’t want to push them too much as a few of them are at risk of leaving the company.”
We worked together to unpack what the VP had shared and found that while it was admirable to want to go easy on the team before the end of the year (to retain a couple of key players), it wasn’t actually serving the VP or their team.
I then shared that when people are challenged, supported and engaged so they can win, they are actually more likely to stay in a company and perform better.
We stepped through an exercise to consider what the new VP could do in the upcoming month to take her team to the next level and accelerate their results.
Here are the three questions I asked in our coaching session:
1. What can you and/or your team STOP doing in the next month that would make space for better performance? What is holding them back that could be removed/resolved?
2. What can you and/or your team START doing now that would make the biggest difference to the work you are doing and what you want to accomplish before the end of 2023?
3. What must you and/or your team DO DIFFERENTLY in the next month to radically change the course of a project, product or initiative? What would allow you to optimize your performance and create new results?
After the coaching session, I asked my client to create a plan with answers and actions to each of the three questions. Within 48 hours, they sent me a plan for both themselves and their team. They brought these questions to their weekly leadership meeting and a robust conversation ensued with a new level of commitment and engagement! They said, “this will make all the difference to how we end the year, thank you Athena.”
This is one of the many tools and practices we teach to help leaders optimize their performance so they can accelerate performance, retain key people and build a new level of engagement quickly.
Are you ready to use these three critical questions in your own leadership?
Join our Optimize Your Leadership program to learn our proprietary system to strengthen your leadership and accelerate your results before the end of 2023!
Leadership Practice
Take time this week to work through the three questions for yourself. What can you stop, start or do differently in your own leadership to accelerate your performance? Begin here then you can move out to asking those questions to your team, business unit and company.
About Athena
Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations. Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.
