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Quality
Speed
Growth
Talented People
High Performance Culture
What is quality?
Quality is work that you are proud of. It’s better than others can do because you put something into it that other people didn’t. You focused on it, and didn’t do other things that you consider a distraction, you sacrificed for it. You feel proud of it.
What is a high performance culture?
High performance culture is where the accepted standards in the organisation exceed others.
A high performance culture starts on the individual level of the leader.
A leader who provides a clear vision, recruits a high quality team, sets clear and high performance expectations, creates a certain environment that is clean, simple, fast and efficient, and provides training, support, coaching and care to the individuals.
A leader who understands that others are different. They are unique.
A leader expects a team to operate on standards that are below his own, but delighted when they exceed them. Part of his job is to bring his team up to his own standards, or as close as possible, by providing the example, expectations, vision, incentives, training, support, coaching and care.
They understand what problems you are prepared to tolerate.
A big part of the leaders job is to set an inspiring vision. One that is simple, people can buy into, and be a part of. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves, part of a movement. A vision that is rewarding, good, and where they will benefit on an individual level and have their needs and goals met.
Solving problems is a crucial job of a leader. In order to solve problems it is important to be able to notice and identify problems. There are unlimited problems and so it’s important to prioritise those that have the most impact and are the most important. In order to solve a problem it is important to focus on the end result of what you are trying to achieve after solving the problem. One of the key steps in solving problems is to deeply understand the problem. Define it. Counterintuitively, spend 90% of the time on going deep defining the problem, and the solution is usually obvious.
An open knowledgeable growing mind that is continually learning is important to be able to see the problems. It’s important for everything, not just problems. This kind of mind is able to identify what they need to learn, and how to learn and is also a writer.
Writing is one of the best ways to learn. It forces you to recall your knowledge, organise it, solidify your position, and to think clearly, to play with the subject matter, and to create something new with it. But getting to the end result, re-reading, and editing requires you to see your own perspective and think from different perspectives in new ways and enhance it.
That finished written piece is something new. It’s powerful. Writing is a form of thinking but it is more. It is thought. It is form of telepathy. By writing you speed up the thought processes. You can revisit this piece, and your thoughts, quicker than before, repeatedly, and arrive at new conclusions and angles.
Reading is important, not just to be able to absorb new ideas, but to be able to write, because it exposes you to great writers, who are also great thinkers. It strengthens your language, grammar, vocabulary like an arsenal.
Learning is important but the need to learn is also without limit. So it is important to focus on the most important things to learn.
One of the hardest things about learning is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You are exploring unchartered territory and it’s not clear what you might discover that will be useful.
You need to explore.
Understanding that learning is venturing into unchartered territory will open your mind, which is important.
Contrary to what most people think, we haven’t discovered the whole world. We have probably only discovered a very tiny amount of it. How would we know how much we have discovered?
Exploring unchartered territory needs a map, a plan, a guide. Some principles are:
– To learn from people who have gone where you are looking to go.
– To have some kind of feedback from others, or from the world. Learning from problems is a form of feedback.
– Following your interests and curiosity is likely to be an easier path, that you might enjoy, and be able to go further. It might also be a sign of where you, instinctively, know is likely to be fruitful.
– Make learning a priority
– Explore more. Learn more, and learn widely, if it doesn’t impact quality. The more ideas you can encounter, the greater.
– Ask questions that you don’t know the answer to, and then seek to discover the answer by writing about it.
