Escape From Excellence

Here’s a simple fact: Most people don’t have a clue about what their Dynamic Essence is. For all the development programs, competency modeling, 360 feedback, action planning, performance reviews, and more, they remain in the dark about the real deal, their real core, their best asset. This is because, as we have said elsewhere, business leaders have not known about the difference between excellence and mastery, and have never had a path made just for them to escape excellence and reach mastery. The tools they have had only create and measure excellence, and so ultimately serve the Excellence Trap.

To escape from excellence, it is crucial to discover, release, express, and sustain your Dynamic Essence. Consider:

Dynamic essence is the ultimate driver of performance. It is the ultimate driver of innovation, of alignment, of productivity. And to not leverage and apply it is exactly what makes sustainable peak performance, innovation, alignment, and productivity so difficult.

Dynamic Essence is the ultimate source of competitive advantage. It is the ultimate differentiator. Experience, skills, benefits, etc. are old news. Instead, the masterful application of Dynamic Essence is where it’s at.

Dynamic Essence is the ultimate test of strategy. Any decision or action that goes against or fails to leverage the dynamic essence of a leader (or team, business, or brand) is a lost opportunity. It perpetuates the excellence trap and reduces results to an increment, not an explosion.

 Leaders who leverage Dynamic Essence at all times are in Mastery. They define peak performance for the rest of us.

Are we in a recession? Or a merely slowdown? Will it be deep, or shallow? Protracted or brief?

I don’t know, x 4.

But I do know that any leader should be thinking about how to sustain performance, and even how to defy the odds by achieveing greatness, while our employees are distracted either by fear of layoff’s, or wondering how to stay focused after surviving a layoff. The popular strategy for most people, leaders and associates alike, is denial, but as we’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, denial is one of the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence and doesn’t work.

Usually, people confronting the challenges of a recession fear either losing their jobs, or keeping their jobs! The opportunity for leadership is to help people to understand that they will flourish either way, and to give them both the tools to do it and the confidence to know it. Working toward a culture of mastery can accomplish this.

Try this: Give your people an experience of escaping the excellence trap and tasting mastery. If it can transform fearand distraction into alignment, innovation, passion, productivity, and confidence (and it can), it will be one of the greatest gifts you can give your people, and one of wisest investments you can make in your business. You can start here. If every person is coming from their greatest strenghts and core identity, and by definition with great passion and productivity, bringing this to their work, several positive result follow:

- people will put fear aside and focus on the job at hand

- innovation will increase as ideas flow from sustained full engagement

- produtivity will increase as focus and passion increase, so more can be accomplished with fewer people

- survivors will continue without a hiccup

- laid off staff will stand out in the marketplace as self-possessed winners

- the business will gain (and spread) a reputation as a great employer in good times and bad

Ultimately, the usual troika of fear-denial, time management, and resentment will be replaced by a turbo-charged workforce. Typical management blather about how “this makes us stronger” will be replaced by inspiring leadership and an inspired, focused, and aligned workforce reality that has tasted mastery.

Let’s talk about the crucial idea of the Falling Point. This is where the rubber meets the road, or really more like where the poop hits the fan. This explains just how and when the Excellence Trap gets us.

When we surpass the built-in limit of any of the Virtues of Excellence, which inevitably occurs, we reach the Falling Point. When this happens, our lifelong upward arc gradually takes a new direction, and at first we don’t even notice. This is the great irony of being excellent; eventually it bites us, and we don’t know why. But, like a subatomic particle or distant star, we can’t see it directly; we can only “see” it by its effects.

These effects include all the costs and challenges that we observe confronting those hardworking, well- intentioned, capable, successful, and excellent people we mentioned earlier: struggling to achieve the extra 5%, sustain peak performance and innovation, while confronting merely incremental change, marginal outcomes, limited advantage, and inconsistent inspiration, focus, and alignment with values and goals.

The Falling Point is sort of like the point of diminishing returns, except that it is really more like the point of incurring and accruing hidden and unnecessary costs. Big difference.

The moment we reach the Falling Point, on any one of the Virtues, the Corruptions of Excellence set in and the Costs of Excellence come racing behind. This explains why good people aren’t enjoying a life of mastery. And this is precisely what forces the choice between 1. falling back into mediocrity or 2. ascending to mastery, if you’re even fortunate enough to make the choice; most driven people just stick it out in excellence, not knowing what hit them, until the costs become too high. In the meantime, they ride the roller coaster, play the odds, and try to beat the clock, all the while wasting time with the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence.

But take heart, every master was there once. Then they escaped from excellence.

 Remeber this: We don’t cross the Falling Point because we have failed in any way. Quite the opposite. We only cross it if we are excellent! And that is how excellence traps us, every time.

I live for Leadership Mastery, and I invite you to experience it. But what is it?

Let’s start with mastery itself, and what it is not. Mastery isn’t the pinnacle of excellence. You don’t reach it by being most excellent, in Ted-speak. That will only keep you out of mastery. Mastery is different from excellence not in degree, but in kind. Every master knows this; but nobody else seems to be in on the secret. As Charlie Parker said, “Learn all this stuff (to be excellent) and then forget it (to be a master).”

So what is it? Mastery is when performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. That bears repeating. In mastery, performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. It accounts for how the best athletes, performers, artists, sages, and even warriors can blow our minds with what they do, inspire us, and serve as iconic frames of reference, while making it look easy, with grace and style. It is what differentiates the best from the rest, decisively.

 But what is Leadership Mastery? This used to be a tough question because, unlike athletes, performers, etc., leaders have not had a vision or path to mastery. So most have been trapped in excellence. The only exception would be if a leader had achieved mastery in another field and translated it somehow to his or her own leadership in an organization. This is extremely rare because most people, if they are masters in a field (for example golf, acting, painting, music, thinking, or inventing) stick to that field; it is their identity.

Like all mastery, Leadership Mastery is defined by exponentially increased performance and dramatically reduced costs. In organizational leadership we see more innovation, alignment, efficiency, sustainability, focus, capacity, integrity, return, growth, and vision, and less struggle for that extra increment of performance, as well as dramatically less of the financial and human costs that characterize the merely excellent organization. The masterful leader aligns more, inspires more, gets it right more often, sees more, creates more, and keeps himself or herself whole in mind, body and spirit in a way that is remarkable to all who observe, follow, or compete with them. They soar high, while appearing relaxed and ready for more. Leaders in Mastery put incremental growth and marginal change, achieved at a high cost, behind them once and for all. And so do their teams, organizations, and partners.

It’s not magic, not a put on. It’s not superhuman. It’s not the result of cutting a deal at the crossroads. But it is rare. And it is teachable and reachable because leaders now have a path to mastery. This blog, my keynote speaking, workshops, and work with clients all focus on doing exactly this. If you are tired of seeing excellent people and organizations pay a high price for incremantal growth and marginal change, you’ve already taken the first step. So welcome!