How To Achieve Constant Learning By Breaking Free From Chronic Performance

Are you stuck in chronic performance?

You are if you:

• Are always racing to check tasks off a list.
• Spending most of your time trying to minimize mistakes.
• Suppressing your uncertainties, impressions, or questions to try to appear like you always know what you’re doing. 

Being stuck in chronic performance can have a devastating impact on your skills, confidence, job, and personal life.

 

Fortunately, reading Eduardo Briceño’s bold and highly applicable book, The Performance Paradox, will help you break free of chronic performance. Because getting trapped in the Performance Paradox where you only focus only on performing, your performance will suffer.

 

“The Performance Paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we want to improve our performance, we have to do something other than just perform,” explains Briceño. “No matter how hard we work, if we only do things as best we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, we get stuck at our current levels of understanding, skills, and capabilities.”

 

Furthermore, he adds, “Working harder doesn’t always achieve better results. All too often, it just leaves us exhausted. For leaders, this translates into employee burnout, ‘quiet quitting,’ subpar performance, and more.”

 

Filled with relatable case studies from top-performing individuals and companies—including Tim Cook, Starbucks, and Microsoft—Briceño lays out crisp, clear tactics for constant learning that will take your team to the next level and create a culture of high performance.

 

To be constantly learning Briceño says your organization needs to add the Learning Zone into your company’s DNA. The Learning Zone is when we leap beyond the known, which is the way to discover new insights and improve our skills. We can combine the two (Performance Zone and Learning Zone), like salt and pepper, but doing so is different than focusing only on getting things done. Additionally, “when integrating the Learning Zone, you have to make sure that growth behaviors are respected, valued, and rewarded,” adds Briceño.

 

Among the many techniques Briceño teaches, the book also offers four tips for helping your team continuously advance their skills, even when it feels like there’s no time to problem solve:

1. Why most managers often misuse praise—and what you should do instead to help your team improve.
2. Unlocking the power of mistakes: Four kinds of slipups and how leaders and their teams can learn from each one.
3. The dreaded F-word: How to make sure your team doesn’t fear (or rely on) feedback.
4. Common habits that suppress individuals and teams from improving. 

Keep in mind that learning organizations are those that prioritize the development of – people – everyone comes to work every day in part to grow, and to support one another in doing so. Leaders inspire their staff to ask questions, share creative ideas that may seem unconventional, and discover different ways of seeing the world—and they lead the way.

 

For example, transitioning from the Performance Zone to Learning Zone means moving from:

• performing activities and goals to improvement activities and goals.
• a focus on what you have mastered to "we don’t know."
• avoiding mistakes to expecting mistakes.
• achieving immediate results to accepting future growth and results.

 

Eduardo Briceño

 

Briceno shares these additional insights with us:

 

Question: How can we overcome the Performance Paradox and unlock growth?

 

Briceño: We need to strive to not only get things done, but to do so in a way that will lead to learning and improvement. In order to do that, we can’t always do things the same way we did the prior day. We need to make tweaks and try new ways of working. We also need to ask questions, experiment, solicit feedback, reflect on surprises or mistakes, learn from others, and habituate other Learning Zone strategies.

 

Question: How does one strike the ideal balance between spending effort in the Performance Zone versus the Learning Zone?  

 

Briceño: This depends on the situation. Each of us can regularly reflect on how well the habits we’re engaged in are working and what adjustments we want to try.

 

For example, a world-class, professional basketball player will spend several hours each day devoted to the Learning Zone, such as by practicing specific moves, increasing their strength, or analyzing film. On the other hand, firefighters in the middle of a multi-day battle against a large fire would be fully in the Performance Zone, sometimes combining it with the Learning Zone if trying something unproven seems like the best bet for maximizing short-term performance.

 

For most people in most situations, the greatest opportunity for improvement is in shifting the way we engage in the Performance Zone so that most of the time we are executing not with a sole focus on task completion, but with a dual goal of getting things done while generating insights along the way. Most of us can spend 80% or more of our time learning while doing—it leads to higher performance.

 

Question: How best should leaders help ensure their employees spend enough time in the Learning Zone?  

 

Briceño: The three most important things leaders can do are: 

Framing: Leaders can ensure that they and the people they lead are clear on what is valued, what work is about, and how to go about it. Is working to change and evolve ourselves part of what we should do every day? If so, what behaviors do we want to engage in to accomplish this? 

Are we clear on the distinction between the Learning Zone and the Performance Zone, and are we aligned on when and how we want to engage in each, and in learning while doing?

 

Should we strive to never make any mistakes? When mistakes do happen, how should we interpret and respond to them? Why? 

This is all part of framing: it’s about clarifying our assumptions and making them explicit so that they become shared ways of thinking and acting.

 

When leaders are not deliberate about building shared mental models, people end up having different ideas of what things mean—such as feedback, imperfection, or mistakes—what is valued, and how to behave at work. Confusion and conflict emerge. Instead, we can clarify how we want people to think and act, frequently communicate it, and take opportunities to celebrate great manifestations and reflect on opportunities for improvement—reminding people that’s what world-class performers do to get even better. 

Setting up systems and habits: Often, we set up systems for the Performance Zone, such as weekly meetings with a set agenda or dashboards with key metrics. These are great, but are we also setting up systems and habits for the Learning Zone? 

Does the weekly meeting agenda include a section that fosters insights, such as inviting questions for one another or sharing key lessons learned recently? Do our processes include after-action or mid-action project reviews?

 

If we want to foster a culture of feedback, do we want to focus on giving or on soliciting feedback? When and how? Is experimentation important and, if so, how do we go about it? For example, do we first conduct significant research and use focus groups to inform the experiment, or do we move quickly to learning while doing? Different contexts call for different approaches.

 

Modeling learning: Leaders often engage in learning behaviors but do so in private when others aren’t watching. Many feel they’re expected to make decisions with certainty and to always project confidence in being sure of the right answer. 

But if our colleagues don’t see us engaging in the Learning Zone, or if they don’t notice it because we’re not making it explicit, then the actions they perceive will speak louder than our words. Others will emulate the behaviors they notice and the sense they make of them. If they perceive us as know-it-alls, then they’ll act like know-it-alls, too.

 

Leaders can model learning by sharing what they’re working to improve, frequently soliciting feedback—and showing that they’re reflecting and acting on that feedback—and sharing their wonderings, mistakes, and what they’re learning along the way—while projecting confidence that those behaviors best position us to achieve our goals. If we want others to engage in these behaviors, we need to lead the way and explain why these behaviors are important.

 

Question: If mistakes are good for learning but bad for performance, how should people approach them?

 

Briceño: We need to get clear about different kinds of mistakes. Stretch mistakes are those we make in situations where we’re leaping into the unknown and need to expect to make mistakes (these are the most valuable kinds of mistakes we should habituate). We want to try to avoid sloppy mistakes or high-stakes mistakes—those that would have big consequences—but when we make any kind of mistake, we can reflect on what we can learn, which can lead to precious aha moments and takeaways about what to do differently moving forward.

 

Question: What inspired you to write your book?  

 

Briceño: In working with Stanford professor Carol Dweck and other champions of learning, I came to realize that I had gotten stuck in chronic performance for much of my personal and professional life. I came to see how my habits were preventing me from making substantial progress toward the things I cared most about. I also noticed how much of the world around me had been similarly trapped.

 

I began incorporating these insights into the workshops I led with leaders and professionals. I noticed how this led to powerful revelations and discussions that shifted the way people collaborated, worked, and lived. I wanted these revelations to be widely accessible, so I did a TEDx talk introducing the topic, which has now been viewed over 4 million times.

 

I wrote this book to delve deeper and to continue making these ideas and strategies more accessible. The book is a way for anyone to understand the performance paradox, identify opportunities to better pursue their goals, and learn about effective strategies and systems that top-performing individuals, teams, and organizations use to get better at getting better.

 

Question: Do you believe your book is more suited for leaders or for individuals being led, and why?

 

Briceño: The book is designed for both groups of people and for organizations to provide as a resource to all of their stakeholders.

 

Part 1 of the book is called “Driving Individual Growth.” Composed of Chapters 1 through 7, it introduces the foundational ideas and key strategies that any individual can use to overcome the performance paradox.

 

Part 2—Chapters 8 through 12—is called “Overcoming the Performance Paradox in Teams and Organizations,” and is geared toward leaders, with the understanding that anyone can lead from where they sit.

 

Part 3, “From Individual Transformation to Global Impact,” helps anyone from individual contributors to senior executives think about what to do in the Performance Zone and how to drive results.

 

When leaders read the book, Part 1 helps them grapple with the core ideas and strategies for themselves as individuals, which is a prerequisite for framing, setting up systems and habits, and modeling the way.

 

On the other hand, individual contributors benefit from Part 2 because it enables them to become more aware of language, systems and habits, and the dynamics of influence, which equips them to expand their ability to contribute to a culture of learning, performance, and impact.

 

The result is a book that can be useful to any individual or leader, but also to organizations that want all of their stakeholders to develop shared mental models, language, and strategies to pursue their goals.

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Add this must-read, thought-provoking book to your books to read list for 2023. You’ll discover how to balance learning and performing to bolster your personal and your team’s success.

 

Eduardo Briceño is a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world’s leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance.

 

Earlier in his career, Briceño was the co-founder and CEO of Mindset Works, the first company to offer growth mindset development services. 

 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.