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GETTING TO GRIPS WITH PERFORMANCE By James Sale, Motivational Maps Ltd The subject of performance is one of the most important of our lives and of our business. The reasons are not dif?cult to understand. At one level, we are constantly judging how people perform, consciously or subconsciously. This may be easy to get when we consider a leader or manager at work: we think, of course, the annual appraisal and performance review – that’s the way things are. But it’s much more pervasive than that. We go into a restaurant and long before we begin to think how the chef has performed with the meal, we are making assessments about the décor and especially how we are treated. In some instances how we are served is more important; if the staff makes us feel important and welcome we may well go back even if the cuisine is not as good as elsewhere. Further, if the post arrives at 3.00pm and usually we get it at 11.00am we think the performance is poor. More seriously, if when we get home our wifehusbandpartner doesn’t treat us in the way that we consider worthy of us, we become very discontented. Usually, when this happens over a prolonged period of time, we don’t say: “Darling, your performance as my partner has been poor.” Instead, we scream over some issue or other, or simply leave and ?nd somebody else. Even with our children, we expect them to perform as children should perform. In fact it could be said that the parent who has no expectation of performance from their child is rearing a monster. Thus, at every level, whether we think about it or not, we are deciding when we interact with somebody else: are they performing for us? What then is performance? In our model, Performance has three dimensions: MotivationSkills Direction 7