The recipe for top performance is complex, dynamic, and always unique to a specific leader. In essence, it is about balancing individual and collective awareness and responsibility—combined with elements like concentration, being purposeful, effectiveness, efficiency, focus, balance, and mentality.

If you are eager to learn and develop as a person, there are several pathways towards achieving your goals. One key factor can be a targeted, tailor-made coaching process: in essence, this is a feedback mechanism between coach and coachee, in which the process of learning and development is advanced through rich and detailed interactions.

Performance coaching comprises a suite of techniques that aim to bring about continuous improvement in a leader.

At NGL, we work with motivated leaders to help them excel and identify their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The start is always a full personal leadership assessment directed at understanding the underpinnings of performance: identifying key results and key actions, assessing the people skills, and determining the essential technical skills needed for you to achieve key results. All aimed at guiding the leader to achieve their goals and live the organization’s purpose.

Let’s talk about… how to coach a leader’s performance

Some prerequisites for top performance

What is often overlooked when setting performance objectives is how important they are for a business’s day-to-day operations. It is the underlying everyday dynamics between the leader and the people involved that lays the foundation for success. Some key elements of these dynamics are:

• Trust. The most important prerequisite is trust in the leader and in the objectives set. By truly owning the purpose, a leader can create a continuous motivation dynamic.
• Continuous feedback. There is feedback, and then there is real Well thought out, informed, empathic, authoritative. The more specific, the better. Let your team know what they’re doing well and what they can do better to meet expectations.
• Work quality. Recognize and improve the quality of the work. A clear definition of work quality will form the foundation of your team’s and organization’s strengths.
• Capture impact. Boost productivity by capturing results—rather than activities or attitudes. Such tangible impact will help promote constructive feedback and encourage better performance.
• Active listening. Collaboration and true listening are key to engagement. Listen to your colleagues and show your interest by asking open-ended questions and being sincere in your attention to their projects or concerns.

How to achieve high performance

Over their many years as board-level executives, NGL’s coaches have come across many tips and methods to apply performance objectives. The basic key insights are:

• Finances. The lower the cost of business operations, the lower the price can be for customers. Cost is a fundamental element of competitive position, and therefore an attractive performance objective to almost every business model out there.
• Quality. It’s all about “doing things right.” Quality is how a company maintains consistency in meeting customer expectations. It’s frequently the aspect that is most visible to customers, so it can make or break a company’s product or service.
• Speed. Time is integral to a customer’s decision-making process: the faster they can receive a product or service, the more likely they are to purchase it. The speed at which a company meets customers’ needs can boost sales, but also reduce reliance on inventories and mitigate other risks such as forecasting errors or costly inputs.
• Dependability. When a company meets its promises and upholds its commitments, it is perceived as dependable. In turn, this increases trust with customers and saves time and money in operations. Dependability has a value beyond price.
• Flexibility. The ability to alter operations in response to changes, when defined as a performance objective, can help speed up response time, save costs and promote dependability. Examples are increasing production volume to meet a sudden rise in demand or introducing new services to accommodate shifting customer preferences.