Photo by Petr Slovacek on unsplash
I am currently reading the book “No rules rules” from Reed Hastings, the cofounder of Netflix and Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD Business School
Although everything might not be strictly applicable to any sort of industries (Netflix is primarily doing some creative work), I love the way they were able to go against the mainstream ideas about management, with a combination of creativity, experimentation, and transparency, to make their organization more agile, more innovative and better able to constantly reinvent itself.
Amongst other interesting things that I’ll share in later posts, here is one that drew my attention:
In 2 different studies referred to in the book to evaluate the impact of bonuses on performance, participants were offered different amount of financial bonuses to perform different tasks.
- When the task were only requiring mechanical skills (like pressing a key as fast as possible), the results were as expected: the higher the bonus, the higher the performance.
- But when the tasks involved cognitive skills (add numbers or fit puzzle pieces into a frame), the results were more surprising: not only the offer of a medium bonus didn’t improve the performance compared to a low bonus, but the offer of a high bonus led to a lower performance.
The reason, they say, is that if you are too much concerned by the outcome of your performance (will you get the bonus?), you are not in a cognitive space where ideas and innovative possibilities live.
I would also add that when you focus too much on the outcome of your performance, you are distracted from what matters in the moment, “here and now”.
This applies to any domain in life:
- As a coach, if you are too focused on your performance, you are not serving the client powerfully.
- As a leader, if you are constantly concerned about your future in your position or in your company, you are not bringing your best self.
- As an athlete: if you focus too much on winning or on “what if X happen”, you are less focused on the task at hand and your performance decreases.
- As a public speaker : if your attention is too much on what people may think, you disconnect from your audience.
Now it’s important to distinguish focusing on the outcome (which takes some of your focus and mental space away from the task at hand and from creative solutions) from willing an committing to the outcome, which is of course necessary.
The bottom line is :
Commit, Focus on the process, and the Outcome will take care of itself.
Take care,
Evan Bernache 