4 Keys To Improve Your Performance

Leadership should be looked at as a practice that needs continuous learning, and leaders should focus on improving their skills to avoid failure.

- Jose Costa

If you are in any kind of management position today, then you probably spend a great deal of time thinking about employee performance. Improving performance is a common topic among business leaders. But what often gets overlooked or ignored is the fact that ‘poor leadership’ is one of the main causes of this continual and costly problem.

In my work as an executive within several Fortune 500 companies, I have noticed that there simply is not enough emphasis on teaching managers ‘how’ to improve performance in their employees. W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne note in their Harvard Business Review article, “Managers don’t intend to be poor leaders...they lack a clear understanding of just what changes it would take to bring out the best in everyone and achieve high impact.”

Through my own experience, research, and observation of the best leaders I have encountered, I have developed a framework for improving leadership capacity. I call it ‘Leading With Edge’ and I have summarised its four keys below. Each is both a quality of excellent leaders and a tool for becoming a better one.

Gaining and sharing knowledge

Gaining knowledge–ask, listen, and be curious

Knowledge is crucial in today’s ever-changing business environment, but few know how to effectively gain it. The key is to cultivate humility and start from a place of admitting you do not have all the answers, so you can seek them from those around you. This will help you ask good questions, truly listen, and be authentically curious.