Let’s focus on those star performers in your group. Can you imagine what your group would accomplish if you created models of their optimal performance? You know WHO they are. They are easy to spot and are usually the ones who tackle each day, with its opportunities and challenges, by exhibiting consistent energy and engagement, providing significant returns to your organization.

Our research and practice indicates that for complex, knowledge-based work, the difference between moderate and star performers exceeds 50 performers. It is important to realize that the dramatic differences in the data are between best performers and good performers and not between best performers and poor performers.

“Hold on!” you might be thinking. “My group has great processes and systems, and our workforce is committed and our performance excellent.”

While you might be correct, the challenge is to at least take a serious look at the variance between your good, solid performers and your stars. Indeed, I bet that a closer look would likely reveal some significant upside potential and that diagnosis would show some significant holes in the entire spectrum of work systems that directly impact your individual performers and teams.

Experience and research tells us that you need to align six distinct work systems in order to enable exemplary performance. These systems are

1. expectations and feedback

2. rewards, recognition, and consequences

3. motivation and preferences

4. skills and knowledge

5. capacity and job fit

6. environments, systems, and resources.

Perhaps Geary A. Rummler and Alan P. Brache characterized this classic battle best in Improving Performance : “If you pit a good performer against a bad system,” they wrote, “the system will win almost every time. We spend too much of our time ‘fixing’ people who are not broken, and not enough time fixing organization systems that are broken.

Find out how others identify their star performers—and then how do they ascertain what contributes to their stellar success? What do they do once have gathered this information? As we blog together, we’ll use the feedback you provide and integrate it with research collected through years of studying performance.

For more on how to shift the performance curve, check out Paul’s previous blog article in this series.