At www.my12for12.com I just read a comment talking about ‘authentic performance’ – what an appealing and inspiring expression! There is so much talking about performance in organizations. Mostly individual work performance with reference to set targets is meant. How well does an individual work towards the targets set by a manager which helped to break it down from a strategy? The breaking down from strategy sounds so plausible – but it is not: It is the wrong direction where targets come from and it wraps the reality of how such targets are built into a nice, optimistic simplification. Frequently such targets are the result of a kind of ‘machinery’ that is much more driven by unintended complex interdependencies of abstract KPI and political plays that are based on reports that do not at all relfect the reality any more that we experience as individuals at work – and they do not reflect what the customer experiences or needs.

This performance talking and controlling has not much to do with what we feel what would be  great performance  – as felt by human beings on a great workday. And it does usually not well connect that type of ‘I am good, I feel proud of my work’ feeling with what would be an overall great performance for the whole organization. Sure, top management talks about margin, benefits, revenue and market growth and how great everybody’s contribution is in the company to get that (btw.: Everybody does a great job until you start to talk in a 1:1 conversation about individual performance and salary…). But usually  – and I do not say that from a vague feeling, but based on observed evidence and based on what you can read in (real) good case studies – usually they don’t even understand how individual performance is really linked to company performance.

They can’t track down how individual performance really leads to organizational performance versus how not. They know that the people and their skills and motivation are important, but they can’t really explain it within the world of thinking and managing that they know. Part of the evidence is that they do a lot of things that hinder individual performance to contribute to good overall results. Another evidence is that what they say, here translated into short form: That the increased individual performance of everybody would add up to best company performance – but that is not true. It is too simple and ignors the real factors of reat innovation and success.

Sometimes some must do less or stop to do what they do to make the whole more performant. Simple experiment to demonstrate one effect why I say that: An 8-person-sport-competition-rowing-boat does not perform if everybody rows as fast as she or he can. What I mean are sentences like: “In this phase of change towards a new strategy, we must all give our best, we must all make an extra effort….” Or: “We need to hire more people in order to grow” – true if a pure growth in employees was meant, but of course that’s not the point. Even agreed that they do not only mean pure volume of work, but also quality and coordination. At the end they are looking at the reports with sums, averages, counted volumes of work, at the cost and the revenue  – and not at an overall coordination capability, and not at customer value reports. The volume and cost and efforts done at individual level is not able to talk about organizational performance. Organizational performance comes out of the way how all is orchestrated, how well it works together towards a purpose. The question is how well it fits together and works together to provide customer value.

And the question is also, how much it allows individuals to bring in their authentic performance into the whole: Talents, skills, curiosity, creativity, cirtical thinking, their aspireations from deep in their hearts, their eagerness and what they like or dislike, their very personal goals about what they want to be. And there we are back with a phenomenon of life that we can all feel and understand, because we have experienced that as human beings: Succeeding in applying our talent towards a visibly great result. A result that we are proud of and a working process towards it that we enjoyed. But we also have experienced, that a traditional management system is not very able to use this in good ways: Managers (themselves human beings) are doing their best in many cases, but the system around them and its rules and ‘necessities’ do not support them in fostering individual’s ‘authentic performance’. This all natural ‘doing good work by bringing in my very individual talents and feelings’ is a key performance factor for an organization that traditional management thinking does not understand well enough in its importance and that is not part of the work design assumptions and that usually is underestimated in its power as well as the risk is underestimated of moving into a big failure if this can not breath any more.

Ask a top manager what he thinks about the claim that people should be happy with their work life. I bet they will say it is not about ensuring that people feel happy in the office, but about outcomes? It is not about making people feel well, but about what the figures say, to safeguard their jobs? And I would even agree, but only in a certain aspect: I agree that the word ‘happy’ is not a good description for what is meant. ‘Authentic performance’ is much better. ‘Pride’ was my favorite so far, ‘value’ is what (good) lean management names it. But probably one word to express it will always fail, because different people understand words differently and class them into very different world views. Interpretation can be so different and with this the meaning that a word transports for an individual…

What I mean and what is so important is: Can I be authentically with what I am as a very private person, also in my job? If I am creative, fast with ideas and open to look into all directions it will be a big heavy load and restriction for my performance to keep me buzy with learning how to be ‘organized’ and ‘disciplined’. Vice versa for somebody who loves to be organized rather than to allow all ideas and questions to mix up the so far given order.

The authentic me also is the very human part of me that chooses in private life what is realy an inspiring, rewarding activity that I love to spend my time with. We call these things ‘hobbies’, to make clear that this belongs to the fun part of life, to the non-productive. Now, of course here again we have a framing that puts a wall between us and the better future that we might create if we drop such thinking limits. These hobbies frequently are in a direct translation: Being busy with our biggest talents, with what we are really good in and what we can give in great volume and variety without that it feels like a pain or pure inavoidable evil that needs to be done.

For me personally, two of these ‘hobbies’ are reading novels and writing. For a decade I had been working in a large corporation with the unquestioned assumption, that for my job in that company reading novels and writing would not be useful (and nobody asked me for it, too). For a decade I frustrated myself with the thought that either I restart a completely new career as a writer or journalist, or I drop the idea that writing plays a significant role in my job or my life. Bad luck… or be courageous, turn around, guy, and start a completely new life: Quit your job.

That was my ‘depression-story’ for a decade – and I followed the unwritten rules of my society (at least one that I perceived as a rule) and started to write a novel in my free time. Challenging, but possible. Challenging above all because after my work days I found it frequently not so easy to get into the right, inspired mood to do good writing. On many days my job was not giving back energy and was not inspiring… So this ‘free-time-writing’ was the mode to not completely drop my ‘authentic me’ and my ‘authentic performance’ – until one day a workshop moderator with the task to teach us how to lead cultural change in organizations asked us, what were our beloved hobbies, strengths and passions – ‘please, also things that you only know from your private life’.

From that day on I wrote diaries about our workshop group and the experiences we went through, for many years. That was, with some detours, the origin of this blog. My life was enriched in an incredibly strong way during the years after – it made such an important difference for me.  And it brought so much value for the others in that new transformation journey that was our job and where our company needed our best performance.

That felt like real, authentic performance, like real good work to be proud of because I could apply what was ‘my authentic performance’ and I could live ‘my authentic me’ and because it made an important difference for all in the organization and even for our families: Meaningful work. That did not feel boring any more or just stressing – it was hard work that felt like real life. By that work I was feeling alive. My girlfriend once said at the time when we stated that: “He appears much more awake than before.” And indeed, what a good way to phrase it: My ‘authentic me’ had woken up from a deep, dreamless sleep, a dull, inactive ‘parking position’ and now I could see the flowers blossom around me, a fresh breeze around my nose that triggered new ideas and the bright sun warming my face.

Big organizations that are shaped by traditional design and management thinking (well, simply the culture and dynamics that you usually experience in a big corporation) are constantly asking us to do things that we don’t really like, that we are not good at, that go against our values and hurt our integrity. They make us do things because for some hidden reasons they ‘are necessary’ or ‘we must do it’ or ‘have no choice’ – but it does not feel like meaningful work that we could be proud of or that has a self-explaining, self-dectetable value in itself.

One consequent alternative to change this is to leave these corporations and to go an own way. Certainly a good choice full of opportunities. ‘My12for12’ seems to be a good method to get that done. The other possibility is to change the big corporations. Not simple too, but also a field full of unused possibilities and that needs as much courage and consequence to succeed. At the time where I got ‘woken up’ by that half sentence ‘…also things that you only know from private life’  I chose to go that way. Why? Hard to answer in an explicite, rational way (we would get lost in a very interesting discussion). I answer it like this: Because that way feels like my ‘authentic me’.