Imagine an environment where success is not just a hopeful possibility, but a sustained inevitability because everything that surrounds you is geared toward achieving world-class performance.

In an environment like this, you understand how to reach your goals because you helped to shape them and are therefore motivated to achieve them. You know how to be successful and how long it might take. You have all the tools you need, and they support every step of your performance. You are aware that success won’t always come easily and that it will be peppered with challenges, but you are prepared and excited about this.

You are guided by a compelling vision that inspires you to excel every day and keeps you focused even when times are tough. Talented people around you offer strong support when you need it, as well as constructive challenge when things are too comfortable or easy. You seek and receive feedback regularly to improve your performance, and you notice that others expect and demand it from you.

This is the type of environment — a high-performance environment — that will help you to be the very best that you can, not just occasionally but consistently. Now ask yourself: Do the people in my organization feel like this about the performance environment they experience?

My work with elite athletes, senior executives, and elite fighting force personnel has provided me with valuable insights into the factors that underpin high performance that’s both inevitable and sustainable. I’ve learned that you can do great things to help individuals and teams to develop and grow, but if the environment they operate in remains unchanged, they will soon regress to where they started.

The crucial lesson is that the performance environment an organization creates is just as important as the people who work within that environment. This is what drove me to identify the key components of a high-performance environment (HPE), to determine how they interact, and to create an HPE model that forms the foundation for diagnosing and pinpointing organizations’ strengths and weaknesses.

This article describes the characteristics of an HPE in which people can thrive. It discusses the four key components of such an environment: leadership, performance enablers, people, and focus. It outlines behaviors and processes that you should consider establishing to ensure that your organization is creating a high-performance environment for its people.

1. Leadership

Leaders struggle with the complexities of modern business, but their primary role is profoundly simple: They must create conditions in which people can thrive. In other words, leaders are accountable for developing high-performance environments for their teams.

Three key leadership behaviors are required in order to create an environment in which high performance is inevitable and sustainable: vision, challenge, and support.

• Leaders must develop and communicate a compelling vision. Employees should be able to connect emotionally with a strong, meaningful vision; during tough economic times, this will be vital to an organization’s survival strategy. People need to understand what’s expected from them and how it contributes to achieving the vision. Helping them to do so enables you to secure their commitment and engagement.
• Leaders must also challenge their people to ensure that they remain focused on delivering high performance. A low level of challenge might make for an easy life, but it eventually creates an environment that’s too cosy and comfortable and is unable to sustain high levels of performance.
• Leaders must provide support: coaching, feedback, advice, and recognition.

The importance of setting a vision and challenging your people is widely understood, but the support element is too often absent or inadequate. A performance environment in which levels of challenge are high but levels of support are low is likely to be stressful, generating a high potential for employee burnout.

This situation is often exacerbated during tough times, when support may be in especially short supply because there are simply too many fires to extinguish. Coaching, for example, is often superseded by a command-and-control approach to leadership at such times. What leaders neglect at their peril, though, is the need for a strategy to retain and develop their top talent. Performance coaching helps leaders to support their best people so that the organization is well placed to emerge from difficult times with its competitive advantage intact. It also helps companies to minimize recruitment costs in the long term.

Organizations intent on creating a high-performance environment will probably already have 360-degree leadership feedback processes in place. But are these processes measuring the right aspects of leadership? Too many companies measure the functional and transactional dimensions of leaders’ roles without addressing the vision, challenge, and support behaviors that drive the environment to which they aspire.

2. Performance Enablers

As well as providing employees with vision, challenge, and support, leaders need to ensure that their people have the necessary tools to do their jobs to the best of their ability. These “performance enablers” are information, instruments, and incentives.

Information People require information and communication from the organization about how to do their jobs effectively. For example, they need clear goals which they have helped to set, which are specific to their role, and which stretch them appropriately.

People also want to understand their responsibilities and the behaviors required to fulfill them. Once they are aware of this, they will want to know how their role is evaluated and what they can do to progress within the organization. All of these factors give employees a sense of structure within the performance environment.

While goals and role clarity provide employees with direction and structure, people also need regular feedback to help them to improve and develop. An environment where people are open to both giving and receiving developmental feedback is one in which high performance can happen.

Motivational feedback (praise) is critical, too. People need to know when they’ve done a good job so that they can feel valued for their contribution.

Instruments
Appropriate tools help your people to perform effectively. Instruments include infrastructure investments, such as sophisticated IT networks and video conferencing facilities to improve communications channels. They also include processes such as effective performance review systems, which provide employees with a systematic route to gather feedback and improve performance.

Incentives
Leaders must provide incentives so that their people are motivated to perform to the best of their ability. Of course, we all know that compelling salaries, bonuses, and benefits can help organizations to attract, motivate, and retain talent and can positively impact individual and companywide performance. But pay is only one dimension of this performance enabler.

Other incentives include strong relationships with managers; these are valued by employees, and they’re vital for open, honest, and frequent communication. People also want opportunities for development and a chance not just to have their say, but also to be heard by senior leaders. These are fundamental incentives that go above and beyond traditional pay and bonuses.