3 Things People Get Wrong About Their Performance

And how to fix it all with ease. 

What separates high-performing professionals from the rest? And why have you not always performed at the level you expect from yourself?

At Kolbe Corp, we guide organizations and individuals on performance every day (and we’ve been doing it for fifty years and counting). Here’s 3 things most people get wrong about their performance:

1. They Think They Already Have Clarity on Their Strengths

Most people don’t know that there are 3 parts of the mind.

So, when people think of their strengths, they tend to focus only on:

1. Their Cognitive Strengths: This is what you know – your skills, experience, and intelligence. 
2. Their Affective Strengths: This is how you feel – your personality, what motivates you, and what you like or dislike.

Yet these first two areas alone don’t predict who will excel at work. Enter the third crucial area:

Your Conative Strengths: These focus on how you naturally execute – how you solve problems and make decisions when free to be yourself.

Grasping this third part of the mind helps people make choices that work for them. It can solve the puzzle of why a smart person might struggle or why a motivated team may underperform. And you don’t actually have clarity on your strengths until you know these. (Don’t worry; you can measure your instinctive strengths by taking the Kolbe A™ Index.

2. They Commit Their Energy to the Wrong Things 

It’s not enough to have clarity on your strengths; you actually have to commit to them if you want long-term high-level performance.

This goes beyond being dedicated; it’s about making wise daily choices and focusing on what deserves your best effort. Here’s the thing – mental energy is finite. So even taking action in ways that are natural to you can deplete this precious resource.

You have so many decisions to make each day about what deserves your best effort. The challenge is to decide the best use of your unique conative strengths for any situation. If you find yourself working against what’s most natural for you all day, it will waste your time, and potentially the time of those around you. Even worse, it will waste that precious energy.

Perhaps more important than choosing what to work on is deciding what to say “no” to. Do what you love and focus on what’s most impactful by delegating out what you don’t. You’ll be amazed at the amount of energy is freed up by this, and how effortless performance becomes.

3. They Collaborate with Confusion

Collaborating with others can be difficult under the best conditions. When you aren’t aware of how those around you naturally operate, it can sometimes feel downright impossible.

But nothing great is done without help, so you’re going to need to understand the cognitive, affective, and conative strengths of those around you if you want optimal performance.

This will help you know how to cater to their needs, how to set them up for success, when to work alone, and who could provide you the assistance you need for a specific task. Identifying each person’s natural approach and the strengths needed for a particular project helps optimize team performance, so it’s a non-negotiable for performing as a leader.

Get clarity on your instinctive strengths, commit to them, and then collaborate with others’ strengths in mind. Before long, you’ll find that everything you do feels more natural, and that performance feels effortless. If you’re ready to find out what happens when you stop working against those strengths and start aligning your actions with your needs, the best place to start is by taking the Kolbe A™ Index.