Seth Godin recently blogged about performance, and outlined four kinds: Bad, Good, Remarkable, and Personal. Here is the whole post.
In a world where we too often treat performance with labels like Right person/Right seat or A player / B player / C player – it is good to just use words that we all know.
Leading performance is about not walking by the work without letting people know what you see. It is about getting their view of the work and what they see in others. It about celebrating things being done, asking a few questions to plant seeds that might lead to a different view of the work, and challenging people to a different level of involvement and ownership. Try these:
- Where did you see passion in someone else’s work this week? How can we celebrate that?
- How did you personalize your work this week and who benefited from it?
- What work do you have in front of you that has a chance to be remark-able in how you do it? What will make it worthy of that label?
Of course you ask these questions, listen, and always revisit them.
Personally, I would drop Bad and Good in favor of Absent and Solid.
I like reading Seth – his thoughts are generally remark-able.