Transform Your Efforts into Success with The Performance Paradox by Eduardo Briceño

Turning the Power of Mindset Into Action. Dive into ‘The Performance Paradox’ by Eduardo Briceño, a groundbreaking exploration of how shifting from a performance-focused mindset to a learning-centric approach can dramatically enhance personal and organizational growth.

Continue reading to discover the transformative insights of ‘The Performance Paradox’ and how they can redefine your path to success.

Genres

Mindfulness, Happiness, Personal Development, Education, Career Success, Self-help, Business, Psychology, Leadership, Non-fiction, Educational, Professional Growth, Organizational Development, Mindset

Introduction: Learn how to work smarter, not harder

The Performance Paradox (2023) offers a refreshing new approach to maintaining a healthy career. It identifies the chronic problem of being stuck in an endless cycle of high-level effort with no reward, and it offers a way to find more meaning and satisfaction in your work.

If you believe that the key to success is hard work, you can be forgiven. It’s a maxim that has been with us for a long, long time. But what if it’s been misleading us all along? A lot of us are working harder than ever, with little to show for it aside from a recurring case of burnout.

You can call it the performance paradox. And in the sections ahead we’ll pick apart this chronic problem and look at a new way of approaching work. We’ll shift the focus away from performance and show how a learning component can make all the difference in giving you and your career a more satisfying sense of purpose. In other words, we’ll look at how you can start working smarter, instead of harder.

Enter the Learning Zone

How do we become better at our job? How do we improve, grow and enhance our skills? These are the questions that lie at the heart of the performance paradox. Many of us have heard that all you need to do to succeed is work harder, work faster – be more efficient. But as you may have come to learn, hard work doesn’t necessarily produce better results. In fact, it can lead to what the author refers to as “chronic performance.” It’s like you’re stuck on a never ending treadmill, and all that constant effort is having a detrimental impact on your skills, confidence, and overall well-being.

This is the performance paradox. The results are telling us that despite working harder and faster, and focusing solely on flawless execution, we are not improving. Things aren’t getting easier or better. And we’re certainly not growing as individuals. The solution? We need to balance and integrate performance with learning.

Think of it as two zones: the Performance Zone and the Learning Zone. The key to breaking free from the cycle of chronic performance is to engage in both zones. As important as it is to perform well, if you actually want to get better at your job, it’s crucial to spend time in the Learning Zone. That’s where you can embrace challenges, seek feedback, and learn from mistakes to thrive in our complex and fast-changing world.

In other words, while the Performance Zone focuses on flawless execution, the Learning Zone is about inquiry, experimentation, and reflection. Integrating both zones is essential to unlocking growth.

This kind of integration is well-known in the sports world. If you’ve seen the movie King Richard, you may be familiar with how Venus and Serena Williams became two of the top tennis players in the world. They didn’t become champions by performing and playing as many matches as they could. They did it by practicing away from the competition. They did it in the Learning Zone, developing and honing their skills.

Another important concept to understand upfront is having a growth mindset. Even people who seemingly understand the idea of the performance paradox can struggle with the concept of a growth mindset. People still believe that intelligence and talent are fixed, and that you’re stuck with whatever you have right now. So we spend all our energy proving what we already know rather than learning new things.

A growth mindset is all about understanding and believing that you can continue to grow and learn new skills and talents – no matter where you are in your career. For you to break free of the performance paradox, you must develop a growth mindset and believe you can change. It can’t be understated: prioritizing continuous development is key to both individual and organizational success.

But there are rules to the Learning Zone as well. To illustrate, let’s look at one more sports analogy. To become a world class golfer, performing at a high level and playing tournaments is important. But players grow and get better by spending time in the Learning Zone, hitting buckets of balls at the driving range. But they don’t just mindlessly hit one ball after another. In the Learning Zone, athletes are getting regular feedback from coaches, making adjustments, learning new techniques, and perfecting their approach. These same principles apply to any job. It’s about focused, purposeful practice. That’s what happens in the Learning Zone.

We’ll dig deeper into the finer details in the sections ahead, where we’ll learn about the best strategies for helping individuals and organizations grow, adapt and flourish.

Learning while doing

Now that we know about the differences between the Performance Zone and the Learning Zone, let’s look at how we can bring them together.

Here’s an important distinction: You may have heard that one of the best ways to get good at something is to learn by doing. But is that really true? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the best approach is to learn while doing?

When we integrate the Performance Zone with the Learning Zone, that’s what’s happening. We’re learning while doing. This is an important concept because most of us aren’t professional athletes who can afford to spend hours off the court practicing with a coach. We need to learn on the job.

Learning while doing requires the right conditions. You need to be able to reflect on the results, while at the same time being able to engage in a cycle of trying, observing, and adjusting.

Here’s a good example. Many years ago, the business strategist Traca Savadogo was working a part-time at Starbucks. Since she was also a full-time college student, Traca often came to work tired – sometimes getting to work before sunrise. The morning rush was often the most difficult, and Traca would struggle to remember the coffee orders that were being shouted out at a rapid pace. So, one day, Traca asked the cashiers to start writing the orders on the cup instead of shouting them out.

The effect was immediate. Not only could Traca rest easy about remembering order details, her Starbucks branch suddenly became a quieter, more peaceful, and more pleasant place to be. But the practice didn’t automatically catch on everywhere else. Some branches were straightforward in their response, saying “that’s not how we do things here.”

Traca’s approach is a perfect example of integrating the two zones. She was still committed to performance, and doing the best possible job. But she was curious, with a desire to improve and find new, better, more innovative ways of getting that job done. Importantly, so were the other people on her team. At her branch, the team was willing to try new things, reflect on the results, give feedback, make adjustments, and work together to figure out the best way to implement changes. Eventually, of course, Traca’s model was adopted by Starbucks everywhere.

This example also highlights some of the essential Learning Zone strategies, like learning big by experimenting small, and working smarter not harder. But what’s just as important is that there was a working atmosphere and culture that was open to learning while doing.

A lot of work environments are ruled by a fear of mistakes. But mistakes are not inherently good or bad. Some mistakes are sloppy mistakes, and these are the result of being off your game. Poor performance. Other mistakes can be aha-moment mistakes, they can reveal a problem in the system that needs fixing. Either way, mistakes can lead to insights, so long as you have the growth mindset and are willing to reflect and find out how they contribute to learning and improving. Making room for mistakes as being part of the regular work process is how you go about fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and success.

The characteristics of growth

In these last two sections we’ll take brief looks at the kind of qualities that help make the best individuals, teams and leaders. Then we’ll conclude with a few words on how you can make the most of your transformation.

So let’s start with the individual. The author has a model that he refers to as the Growth Propellor. These are five elements that, when combined, can help you to excel in both performance and learning.

These five elements are identity, purpose, beliefs, habits, and community. Now, a lot of people identify themselves as more than one thing. You might be a husband, a father, a manager, and a musician. Whatever your personal identity may be, the key here is to align it with being a learner. You must identify as someone who grows, evolves and changes over time. You do not have a static identity.

Purpose is much the same. Your purpose is not predetermined. So what is it at this moment? What matters to you? What are your core interests? Why do they matter, and how can your purpose benefit others?

Identity and purpose are at the center of the Growth Propellor, and branching out from there are beliefs, habits and communities. In quick summation, your belief that you can change and that you can succeed and improve is essential – as are establishing productive habits that will keep you moving forward. These habits might include journaling, which allows you to reflect on a daily basis and stay motivated and focused on what needs to be done.

Finally, it helps to surround yourself with a good, strong, positive community of people who also believe in growth and learning. Getting thoughtful feedback and constructive outside perspectives can be priceless in your continuing development.

When we pivot away from individuals to creating a learning organization, it’s important to promote growth, agility, impact, and resilience. Learning organizations do this by moving away from performance-only evaluation systems, and setting up built-in systems for on-going development and learning for all employees. This means that the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes are all being considered as opportunities for fostering growth in employees. Within that system, there must be a structure that supports risk-taking and experimentation. This can only happen if the organization prioritizes and promotes a sense of belonging, trust, collaboration, diversity, and inclusion.

Of course, learning organizations need leaders who also promote the qualities and characteristics of growth. These leaders need to establish the structures that allow for learning while doing and to encourage the growth mindset throughout the organization. This means incentivising and rewarding growth, as well as encouraging an overall culture of learning. Such a culture is based on trust and a willingness to empower team members to come up with ideas and experiment with new solutions.

But that’s not all. A true culture of learning must start from the top. Leaders need to lead by example, and illustrate how growth continues to happen at all stages of a career. As the author puts it, “great leaders are great learners” themselves. They care for their team’s development as well as their own.

Making the most of it

In this final section, we’re going to look at some tips for how you can not just perform at your best, but also how to amplify your effort to maximum impact.

Clarity can’t be underestimated. A lot of time and effort is often spent on identifying and distributing tasks, while the bigger picture remains obscured. So remember to start by clearly identifying the highest-level goals before getting into the nitty-gritty of how you’re going to break down the tasks. Avoiding the performance paradox happens by ensuring that all efforts are directed towards the right objectives.

When you keep the big picture goals in primary focus, it can help you to identify inefficiencies in the current system as well as possible ways to pivot, adapt and change for the better.

Founded in Lima, Peru, Laboratoria is a non-profit organization that aims to empower and help young women to enter the tech industry. They’re also a learning organization that uses continuous improvement as their default setting.

Like a lot of businesses, Laboratoria was faced with many challenges during the 2020 pandemic. But they also used the chaotic time to question their current systems. When meetings began moving to Zoom, the organization’s leaders weren’t just biding their time, waiting for things to return to “normal.” They recognized that Zoom could work to their advantage and help them expand their reach. The technology allowed them to recruit more women in more remote locations than ever before. This ability to adapt, grow and benefit from change, only happens when you’re clear about your goals and have established a system of continuous improvement within your organization.

Embracing both the Learning and Performance Zones can lead to transformative outcomes. This extends beyond personal development. When your goals are properly focused on improving the lives of others, your efforts can have a broader impact on communities and society.

The most successful individuals and organizations are going to be the ones who answer the call to meet the many challenges facing the world. Given how rapidly changing this world is, embracing continuous learning is without a doubt a fundamental skill of the twenty-first century. Without it, there’s little chance of becoming part of the solution.

Conclusion

To achieve personal and collective growth, we need to engage in the Learning Zone. For this to happen, the right conditions must be in place. Organizations and teams must work with a foundation of trust and purpose, creating a culture of psychological safety and promoting frequent feedback. Leaders must foster this environment and support both learning and performance. Start with clarity and establish northstar goals that can bring about positive changes in communities and society. With identity, purpose, and effectiveness, we can embrace the Learning Zone as a fundamental skill in navigating the complexities of the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Eduardo Briceño