Move

Chapter 11Building CapacityPerformance Management and Delegating for Development

What Everybody Is Thinking

If I do an excellent job and deliver against my objectives, I'm a top performer.

The vast majority of people in corporations think that high performance = doing their job well. Many do not realize that high performance is found outside the boundaries of one's job description. A job description is valid only for a moment in time. Then the world changes. High performers realize that they have to break through the limits of their job description and do things over and above it to meet evolving business needs and to develop themselves.

But for the majority of people, if no one has ever given them coaching or the idea that it is important to build their own capability, their tendency will be to keep doing the same work as it was defined for them in the beginning.

Why this happens is so interesting to me, and it has to do largely with a shift that must occur in our self-awareness after finishing school and starting work. Here is what I am referring to. In school, an advancing curriculum is given to you every year. You start school as a small child and learn how to count and sing and finger paint, and then if you master those tasks, you move on to the next year, and you learn how to read and write and do math. Each year after completing the work given to you, you advance to the next grade, where you're given a harder, more challenging set of things to learn.

Your teacher and ...