How to change your process to reliably reproduce your top performers

You can’t! 🤷‍♀️

You can’t process-manage your way to excellence. That’s not a thing. Process is part of the work environment, and it’ll always suit some folks better than others.

Among others, changing the way your processes work can:

• Define how information flows within and across teams,
• Adjust the tempo and texture of working within your teams, which will advantage some of your folks’ working styles over others,
• Emphasize particular metrics, connections, and pathways…
• …and in so doing, most relevantly here, set a floor on performance.

At their most basic, having set processes is all about defining a floor—a minimum acceptable set of actions, tasks, reports, etc. that comprise “work” on your team. They’re about conformity, and your top performers are by definition behaving differently from the rest of your team.

Ask the folks that’s really outperforming what you can do to support them. Do those things. Offer (without requiring) the same to the rest of your reports, if you can.

Ask your top performers what’s getting in their way, if anything, and do all that’s in your power to get those cleared.

If someone on your team is going to truly excel, the best thing your processes can do for them is not get in the way.