The Law of High Performance

The key to increasing the level of performance from your team members doesn’t lie in a system or process, but in understanding the psychology of human behaviour.objectives and SMART goals

Yerkes–Dodson's so called law of performance was described over 100 years ago by two psychologists: Robert Mearns Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson. This “law” states that a person’s level of sense of challenge rises, so does their performance, but only to a point. When someone takes on more than they can handle their performance starts to drop.

The key to high performance is not just help your employees to become high performers but to also help them to sustain their optimum levels of performance for longer, even when things start to get really tough.

So how can the manager use this law to help their people perform well? By setting goals as part of your positive performance management that stretch but do not strain. This is the basis of the SMART goal concept, where the “S” in SMART stands for stretching. SMART goal setting is a vital part of a high performance culture.

The power of SMART goals to harness ambition and create a sense of purpose has been proven time and again by researchers. The most famous of these research studies being the study by Locke and Latham in 1984. Locke and Latham found that if they gave loggers specific, challenging goals then this had an immediately and dramatic positive effect on the loggers performance compared with those who were simply instructed to “do their best”.

But ensuring your team members know what is specifically expected of them is only a part of the solution. Managers can build a sense of challenge into the goals they set people by making sure the goals are:

1. Aligned to both an individual’s personal strengths and motivations and to the organisation’s strategy and goals.
2. Always up for review – the world around us changes fast and so the goals you set your people may need revising too.

In a study spanning more than 6 years, psychologists J. Robert Baum and Edwin A. Locke found that business growth was driven by giving employees stretching goals but also, crucially, by helping the employees believe that they could achieve these goals. Regular dialogue between the manager and the team member is the best way to do this and we shall be looking at this in a separate blog.