Peak Performance Starts With a Smile
When it comes to peak performance, it doesn’t get much better than long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge. He won the Olympic marathon in 2016 and 2020 and set a world record at the Berlin Marathon in 2022 with an almost inhuman time of 2:01:09.
What’s the secret of Kipchoge’s success? It’s partly that he trains incredibly hard, of course. But it’s also that he smiles while he runs. Periodically grinning at the world around him — and making the world grin back — during the back half of a long run helps Kipchoge to bring his heart and soul to the race, and ultimately run much faster and more efficiently than he would if he simply focused on pushing through the pain barrier.
I thought about Kipchoge recently while considering the current trend in executive leadership programs to focus on maximizing performance and grinding out more productivity. That’s the equivalent of training relentlessly — but all too often, it comes at the expense of the joy and fulfillment we need to elevate our leadership.
Productivity alone is not enough
The trouble with the way most executive coaching programs think about productivity is that their linear approach takes away the joy. They forget about the importance of smiling while doing.
That’s understandable on some levels. Performance and productivity are about driving transformation in organizational and personal processes to extract more value from the system: you want your factory to manufacture the most possible widgets on any given day, or to tick off the most tasks from your to-do list in any given hour.
Transformation, here, is seen as a way to unlock performance potential. It’s about the grind — getting more done with the finite resources available to you and your team. To be truly productive, though, we also need to transform the way we think about the kinds of value we’re trying to produce, and the way we go about achieving that.
If we don’t do that, we risk chasing productivity to such an extent that we neglect all the other human potentials that are intertwined with it. That sucks out the joy, and leads to us simply burning out. We live in an uncertain world, and rushing ahead faster or working in the same ways more efficiently isn’t enough to give us the combination of results we need.
Perhaps that’s why we’re currently seeing so many CEOs leaving their jobs. Over 1,400 top executives stepped down between January to September this year — an almost 50% bump from the 969 exits during the same period a year earlier, and the highest CEO quit-rate on record.
To break that pattern, it isn’t enough to push for “more” and “faster.” We need to find ways to be smarter, wiser, and happier. We need to be more capable of changing and adapting — more capable of connecting with others — and less judgmental and more joyful in the way we engage with the world.
Refocus on responsibility
To achieve productivity, in other words, it isn’t enough to simply focus on process. We also need to remember why we’re building those processes in the first place — and why we need to change them when times change.
Oftentimes, when we lose our sense of joy in our work, it’s because we’ve lost our sense of purpose — or convinced ourselves that productivity is our purpose, instead of being a means to an end.
To put things back on track, we can’t neglect the need to be performant and productive. But we do need to ensure we’re pointing in the right direction before we start sprinting ahead — and that we’re constantly reassessing our original plans to make sure they’re still carrying us to the places we need to be.
That often means finding ways to reemphasize responsible impact, so that our goals and drives align with universal human values. We might feel like hard-nosed businesspeople, but the truth is that we take more joy in our work when we’re having a positive impact in the world. And of course, that joy enhances the leadership experience and thus the longevity of our tenure as CEOs.
So how can leaders refocus their attention on the combination that matters, and find their way to peak responsibility? Here are five simple strategies every leader may consider:
- Put your attention in the right place. Your attention is driven by your intentions, so remember your core humanity and let it spark good intentions that help remind you where your attention may be directed.
- Seek lasting significance, not temporary success. Responsible productivity isn’t about checking off more items on today’s to-do list — it’s about building for lasting impact that achieves enduring good for everyone.
- Think about the relationship between the parts and the whole system. To identify the areas where you can have lasting impact, you need to think about the whole ecosystem of which you’re part. Every action affects the whole system, and you need to understand those connections in order to get results.
- Seek intangible as well as tangible benefits. Responsibility comes with remembering that money or personal success isn’t the end goal. Seek deeper fulfillment and joy and you’ll be drawn into more responsible patterns of thinking and behaving.
- Focus on “we,” not “me.” Life can be bruising, and it’s easy to slip into insular and selfish ways of thinking. Responsibility comes when you reconnect with the love inside, and — by rediscovering that neglected space — find your way to a more courageous and authentic self that engages openly with and prioritizes others.
Put all this together and what do you have? Well, you have a roadmap for more responsible impact, yes. By putting these things together we can evolve our knowledge maturity – the thing that’s going to help us to be not just more productive but also more fulfilled, which will drive more responsible impact in the world.
But you also have a reason to smile.
The paradox of focusing solely on productivity is that if you grind yourself down in pursuit of optimal efficiency, you’ll burn out and fail to achieve your full potential. If you remember Kipchoge, and find your path back to taking joy in the hard tasks you’ve set for yourself, then those tasks won’t be so hard after all. You’ll ultimately achieve far more — and be far more productive and successful along the way.
