TRANSCRIPT

Leaders Journal EP01: Introduction

INTRODUCTION:
Hi, I'm Coach Jason Ho and this is the Leaders Journal.

The Leaders Journal is designed for MNC leaders, directors, and SME business owners who are searching for practical leadership stories and coaching insights.

This Leaders Journal will help you and your team attain Perfect Performance.  

It is a state where your team performs tasks at the highest speed, highest quality, and with the highest motivation to become world class.

In this first entry of the Leaders Journal, I'm going to share about the 4 greatest challenges that leaders like yourself face and how world-class teams overcome them.  

But first, allow me to introduce how i came up with the concept behind Perfect Performance.

(1:04) ORIGIN STORY:
In the last 20 years, I've done 32 businesses.

There were businesses where I failed really badly, and there were businesses that I succeeded really well.

What intrigued me was that I began to identify a recurring pattern through my experiences.

I realized that in the most painful businesses where I failed, losing hundreds and thousands of dollars, and a huge amount of my time, I was focusing on areas in my life that I wasn't utilizing my talents or playing to my strengths.

Looking back, I was actually trying to build areas where I'm most weak in, create businesses around it, and invest everything I have to get it to succeed.

But in contrast, for those businesses where I felt I really played to my strengths, I was able to do very well and receive international recognition and awards in those businesses.

Give you an example, one of the businesses that I did was design, and I was really enjoying the designing of logos.

In a competition, I was able to beat 148 entries worldwide to win the first prize.

That made me highly sought after by many different companies to do a lot more logo designs.

Yet the funny thing was that I didn't feel like it was work.  

I enjoyed the process.

I actually felt really energized even though it was difficult.

So in essence, when I studied my own life, I realized that when I'm able to play to my strengths, I was able to succeed almost accidentally, whereas when I was not playing to my strengths, I failed miserably.

So the main concept that I learned was that the more we focus on ours and our team members innate strengths, the more we get accidental success and great results.

But the more we try to pull out things that are just not there, the more we get a lot of pain and we get a lot of frustration.

And what that means is that as leaders, by focusing on our team's weaknesses, we don't get to see the level of excellence and motivation that we hope to see in world-class teams.

Therefore, when it comes to the idea of how to get the greatest results, I came up with the framework called Perfect Performance, where knowing each individual's talents and strengths is the core of understanding your people.

As leaders, the more we are able to understand who your people are, why they do certain things and what specific tasks they really enjoy doing, the more we get closer to our ultimate goal of being world class.

(4:00) STORY OF OSTRICH, EAGLE AND PENGUIN:
When it comes to Perfect Performance, there's a story that I enjoy sharing.

It is a story of three animals - an eagle, an ostrich, and a penguin.

While they are in fact all birds, if I ask an eagle to run, he'll find it a lot of difficulty.  

Perhaps he can run for a short period of time but it's not his innate strength.

And it's worse if I ask an ostrich to swim or even a penguin to fly.

An eagle running, an ostrich swimming, or even a penguin flying is crazy, because it's not where their strengths lie.

This situation highlights that when we set someone up to perform a task that's not suited to his or her strengths, we set them up for failure.

Each person has a unique set of strengths that makes them effective, and when an individual plays to their strengths, they get energised when doing that work. 

Once you understand that, where you previously will find a lot of frustration and a lot of pain, you will able to get the greatest amount of performance from that individual.

So why am I sharing this with others now?

In the many years that I've been coaching clients, I realized that even though this paradigm may seem actually very logical, it is something that most managers and MNC leaders, or even business owners, do not subscribe to.

What they do subscribe to, which is actually is the norm, is that if I'm able to fix all the weaknesses of my team member, I'm able to get the greatest performance.

But that's totally not true.

Because if you are able to fix the weaknesses of people, then the maximum you get probably will be average performance.

In contrast, once I've coached leaders to understand and focus on the strengths of their individual team members, then we're able to see a glimmer of hope and results, or the glimmer of excellence that they previously have never ever seen in each team member.  

(6:12) FOUR GREATEST CHALLENGES OF TEAM PERFORMANCE:
Part of my coaching discusses the 4 greatest challenges of team performance, which is key, because if leaders do not understand these challenges which is - Dominance, Deployment, Development and Directness - the leader will not get the maximum potential out of each team member.

Regardless of a team member's high levels of contribution, as long as they are not contributing from their areas of strength, or not in an environment where it nurtures their strengths, your business will not be able to perform at its peak.

The first challenge you will want to understand is, identifying the areas of Dominance.

To understand dominance, you must ask what are the strengths of my individual team members.

What are they really good at?

What do they feel most alive doing?

And that's basically trying to understand what their talents are, and leverage the talents of each individual.

Moving on to the second challenge, Deployment.

As leaders, we want to know that you have deployed each team member in a place or position where they feel most suited to reach highest levels of performance, or what we call world-class standards.

Improper deployment would mean that your team members are given a task or taught a method that's not playing to their strengths.

The third challenge every leader wants to understand would be Development.

How can a leader develop every individual based on where they actually want to be developed, instead of where the leader perceives that they should be developed.

What we have come to understand is that most leaders tend to do the latter.

They develop people based on the areas of weaknesses because they are motivated to close those gaps.

Now what we want to do is to change them to identify and develop areas of talent in a manner that they can contribute back to the organization.

But why do we want to change that?

Because when people are developing those areas that they want to rather than those areas that they need to, that's where real productivity and engagement happens.

The final challenge is very important but it's actually often overlooked - Directness.

This is essentially seeing how fast you address an issue within your team.

Let's say an issue arises in the course of work, some leaders will choose to address it once a year in a performance review, while others may choose to bring it up a long time later when there is a perfectly appropriate time to do that one-on-one.

But the truth is that in order to be world-class, team members should be aware of that issue, whether positive or negative, as quickly as possible so that they can have that rectification to be made and work towards a new paradigm.

Moving forward when we work with our clients, the kind of benefits they actually experience in achieving Perfect Performance is alignment, attainment, and balance between both great results and great relationships.

So how we have helped our clients, is in understanding deeply towards how to crush these 4 challenges in any organization or situation.

We empower leaders to have the knowledge and the skills to draw nothing but the best from each individual team member.

And when you know a team member well, you know how to engage them, and keep them engaged towards superb performance.

(10:18) CLOSING:
I want to share this with more people so that they too can experience what attaining Perfect Performance can be like, as an individual, as well as for the team, because I believe that building on their strengths is the way to reach success.

If you are an MNC leader or business owner, click on the link in the description, and schedule a complimentary coaching session with my team.

Truthfully, my greatest vision is to share my knowledge and wisdom for the future of the workplace, because I hope to see a world where every person can live their best life at work.

Join me in the next entry of the Leaders Journal, where I'll be sharing with you how to drive high performance with strengths-based leadership.

Thank you for listening.

This is Coach Jason Ho, and I'll see you at the next journal entry.

(key words: leadership, leadershiptips, performance, perfectperformance, strengths)