Discretionary Performance: Moving Beyond Ordinary to Extraordinary
The term discretionary income describes the money you have left over every month after paying your taxes and all of your bills. At work we have something called discretionary performance. This is the performance we have left over after our regular work duties have been taken care of, and can be accessed ONLY if we are truly committed to an idea, team, or organization.
And yet, whenever you bring two or more people together in the workplace to accomplish a task or accomplish a goal, people end up working in one of two ways. One erodes discretionary performance and one cultivates it.
The first is as a workgroup and is best characterized as a collection of people who share a common objective, task or in some cases overhead. With workgroups there isn’t a common or compelling vision or mission and results in ten people producing eight units of productivity. No discretionary performance here.
The second way people can work together is with people working as a team. Teams are a community of individuals with a commitment to something larger than the task at hand. “Comm.”, the preface to words like community, communication, and communion means “to be one with”. When you are one with someone, some ideal, or some value, you create a connection and synergy where the total output is greater than the sum of all of the parts. Wherever you find unification and synergy, you experience ten people producing twelve units of productivity.
Discretionary performance takes root in this fertile soil. Why? It takes root because it’s safe to bring all of our talents, skills, hope’s, and aspirations to the team and to leverage them to achieve the extraordinary. When you think of whether you are more of a team or a workgroup you’ll run into a dilemma though – you can’t sit on the fence and be both – you are either one or the other.
In Jim Collins book, Good To Great, he proposed that there are three traits that all teams need to have in order to move to greatness, and I believe are essential for cultivating discretionary performance. They are:
1. Communication / Dialogue:
This type of communication and dialogue is about a CLEAR purpose that’s larger than all of us. It embraces ideas such as creating extraordinary products or services, continuously growing and learning, embracing what’s possible versus what’s probable, and making a meaningful contribution to the communities you serve.
When our conversations don’t have these aspects as the foundation, we create situations where our own self-interests take precedence and winning for one person makes it difficult for others to win. Our conversations become about WIN / LOSE, not WIN / WIN, and WIN / LOSE is always a losing proposition and is the death knell for discretionary performance.
2. Disagreement:
While disagreement might seem contradictory to communication and dialogue, disagreement is a positive aspect of growth. Not the type of disagreement rooted in being right and or proving someone wrong – that should be eschewed at all cost. The type of disagreement that is healthy and productive balances advocacy with inquiry and has a bias for listening to understand versus listening to respond. Disagreement can lead to a greater sense of shared understanding along with a greater appreciation for the strategically diverse viewpoints each team member brings to the team.
3. WIIFM:
Managers and leaders need to acknowledge that people act in ways that serve their own best interest, and that understanding how team members answer the question “what’s in it for me? is not a selfish question, but rather our human nature and survival instincts showing up in the world of work. Knowing what motivates a team member to act with the best interest of the overall team in mind is essential for achieving discretionary performance – without this context and understanding teams are relegated to ordinary and not extraordinary performance.
If you want to cultivate greater discretionary performance, here are three questions for your next team meeting. They are:
What did we achieve last week that we believe was extraordinary?
How did we (through our thinking, processes, practices, and or procedures) create or hinder the achievement of the extraordinary?
What do we need to keep doing, stop doing, and or start doing in order to achieve the truly extraordinary?
