High-performance Management

Are leaders born or made? Mostly they are made, and the good news is that leadership skills can be learnt through training, continuous practice and work-based experiences. The 2020 global pandemic forced companies to re-evaluate their operating models and to increase the pace of change, which has stimulated many leaders and owners of small businesses into making difficult decisions quickly amid uncertainty and motivating their teams to achieve what was previously thought impossible.

So, are we seeing the emergence of truly high-performance leadership or just a knee jerk reaction to a crisis by using intuitive skills?

High-performance leadership and management requires a new mindset that is sustainable and appropriate in all scenarios. This means a leadership style that creates a workplace environment and culture that releases the full potential of employees and builds their trust and confidence in top management. Take the motorsport industry as an example…

In a high-pressure workplace environment where all departments are working towards a fixed, immovable deadline (race day!), there needs to be a high degree of trust between everyone. This includes top level management, suppliers, and staff across all departments. A key component to this trust is communication.

Communication between employees and management, between suppliers, between departments, and between company and customers is crucial to maintaining standards and keeping the well-oiled machine running. Our most recent Business Knowledge Builder video explains further how we can use motorsport as a good example, and how the PRACTICE acronym can help you develop a workplace culture that adopts high-performance principles.

So, we know that the pace of change is accelerating exponentially, and organisations need to meet that challenge. Those who have recognised this are implementing a culture of continuous learning with the aim of developing their employees and helping them to grow in an environment of trust, and companies that care about employee growth experience higher productivity and greater employee retention.

High-performance leadership means meeting the challenge of creating a culture where high performance is the norm through setting high expectations and demanding objectives while ensuring employees can grow and feel empowered to contribute to the organisation’s mission.

To learn more about high-performance management, and how to develop your leadership styles, take a look at our Leadership and Management Development programme.