The Collapse of Results and Performance
'Big Carrot Small Carrot’ (Unknown Source)
It’s hard to believe that we are coming up to our 4-year anniversary since starting In Your Corner. What started with two of us, is now seven (soon to be eight – stay tuned), and we have been fortunate to work with some amazing clients who really stand to make a big impact on the world. We have had the opportunity to see, in action, a wide range of individuals, organisations and industries and through this you get to see common challenges, patterns and opportunities that exist.
One of the common observations we see is that there is a lack of distinction on key areas of organisational language and without these distinctions, things become collapsed, confused and ultimately impact the organisation’s performance. Examples of things that are often collapsed include leadership and management, context and content and transformation vs improvement. But one of the most regular collapses we observe is the lack of distinction between results and performance.
In the world of business, sport, and life in general, we often confuse results with performance and largely use or interchange the words as if they are the same thing. At IYC, we believe they are not the same and when we fail to distinguish the two, we risk misunderstanding success, focusing on things that are out of our control, and falling short on commitments to others and ourselves.
This confusion can lead to what we call the ‘Collapse of Results and Performance’ and we observe this when the scoreboard says one thing, but underneath that, there is no clarity on what is causing the results.
Results vs Performance: What’s the Difference?
Results are short-term outputs: revenue, profit, wins, deals closed, or targets hit, whereas performance is how well we execute the processes, practices and behaviours that drive those results. The key distinction between the two: Results are what happened. Performance is how it happened.
It’s possible to generate great results from poor performance, usually due to luck, timing, or external factors, just as it’s possible to perform strongly and still get poor results, perhaps due to uncontrollable events or short-term volatility.
This is often easiest to observe on the sports field because the distinction between results vs performance split is brutally clear. Picture a football team that wins a match 1-0 thanks to a fluke goal and a last-minute penalty save. They were outplayed for 90 minutes, barely maintained possession, and failed to create meaningful chances. The scoreboard says “win,” but the performance was insufficient. The reason this distinction is clearer in sports is that over a season, poor performance catches up. One lucky win doesn’t mean the team is championship material and unless performance improves, the results will likely dry up.
This same scenario is happening in business all the time, its just so much harder to see. Imagine an asset infrastructure company exceeds its annual revenue targets. The results are impressive. But dig below the results and you may find that same company achieved those results due to reducing their long-term investment spending, doesn’t have a plan for their aging infrastructure, they are ignoring their growing capability gap, and projects are well behind schedule. The result may have been great, but there’s no sustainable practices underneath the success and at some point, this is going to have a big impact on results.
Considering it the other way, envision the organisation who has established a clear and aligned aspiration for the future, a detailed strategy and engaged workforce. The organisation has created consistent and effective performance practices that are geared towards the future, there is high integrity to doing what they say they will do, and the teams are constantly learning and adapting. But this organisation has had to go through significant change to align itself to the future and they are in their infancy of the transformation. Their performance is incredibly strong, but it is not yet showing in results.
When we conflate results with performance, the massive watch out is that we reward luck and punish effort. This leads to short-term thinking, poor habits, and a toxic culture where only the scoreboard matters. When this occurs, organisations become reactive to any movements in results and ultimately are left managing the circumstances as they arise rather than proactively planning and improving the performance of the organisation in service of achieving long term aspirations and results.
We are lucky to observe great leaders and what we see them doing is looking beyond the numbers. What is common in these leaders is the questions they are challenging their teams with, like; Are we building strong practices? Are we learning, adapting, and executing with integrity? They put their focus here even when the scoreboard disagrees.
At IYC, we deeply believe that focus on performance practices drives sustainable results. It sounds easy but it’s bloody hard. The place to start is getting distinct between the two and asking yourselves the question – what are the performance practices we need to make the biggest long-term impact on our results?