🚀 My Mental Hack To Overachieve Targets
If you are an employee of a company you will have performance targets to achieve. And chances are the larger the company you work for the more detailed your individual targets will be. Whether the targets are to grow $X in new business, retain $Y of an existing business, or deliver Z in operational KPIs or financial savings you are going to have targets to achieve.
Sometimes these targets feel high or even difficult to achieve. They can also feel too rigid, not accounting for specific situations you may be facing in your role, in your department or in your country. Seasonality can also affect your performance against your targets. And of course, life under lockdown amid a Covid 19 worldwide pandemic brings a whole new set of challenges that can knock you off course.
When I started my career in the corporate world, I used to ask myself this question anytime I was struggling to achieve a performance target that looked particularly challenging:
How am I going to achieve my target this month?
What this question did was to get me to think about short term tactics to help me reach that target. And actioning these short term tactics did help me achieve it most of the time. I was achieving good performance, not bad, not average but also not amazing, just good. And every couple of months I was stressing myself out about reaching my targets again!
And what I learned from this was the questions we ask ourselves are powerful. They stimulate trains of thought that lead to actions. If we ask ourselves small questions they lead to small actions and short term thinking. It is the bigger questions that lead to transformative action, and transformative action is what leads to sustained success and excellence.
Thanks to a remark from one of my mentors, I started asking myself a different question.
What do I need to change in the way I work so that I am consistently exceeding my targets and feeling always in control?
It was only when I started asking myself this question that I was able to achieve a high and sustained individual performance in the roles I was doing!
This question led me to do certain key things, such as:
- I started building buffers for every target to account for seasonality, unforeseeable events, being on holiday, and bad luck.
- I identified the strengths and weaknesses of my peers (in the company and outside) - who was really good at what and how they were doing it. I humbly asked for advice and learned from them.
- I also identified what my peers were not doing, and why. I paid close attention to activities they did not do “because it is too much extra work for small returns“. Then I re-engineered the processes enabling these activities so they produced more value in less time and for less effort. And I shared that knowledge with my colleagues.
- I analysed my stakeholder and client relationships. Which relationships could be better? Where were the specific areas of improvement? And I took action. Sustained high performance goes hand in hand with strong relationships with the team, stakeholders, and clients.
This experience taught me a blueprint to become a consistent top performer that I recommend to anyone wanting to achieve the same in their career:
To consistently deliver more value than what is expected of you. Every day.
Thank you for reading! If this resonated with you please let me know. I am really interested in your feedback. Also if there are any relevant books/articles you think I should read please let me know.
