Opinions on organisational performance are plentiful and cheap; sound understanding of how high performance is actually delivered is scarce. This paper extends the NSC High Performance Model to the harder question — not how performance is reached, but how it is sustained.
Opinion is plentiful, understanding is scarce
Substantial commentary is available on organisational performance from social platforms and in the general media. Many pundits and influencers have put forward their view of how successful organisations outperform their competitors. Little empirical or applied research is offered in support.
Even in organisations that do outperform their competitors, a detailed understanding of how the higher performance was achieved is rare. That gap is the subject of this paper.
Where the model came from
NSC Group published its High Impact High Performance whitepaper in 2021, updated in 2022, presenting our eclectic High Performance Model and the empirical and applied research behind it.
Further research culminated in The Leader, Communication & High Performance, where we argued that leadership has a substantial and enduring impact on employee engagement and performance by directly influencing deep human emotive states of vulnerability, whole-heartedness and trust through the leader's ability to resonate with employees.
Drafting that paper challenged us. Delivering organisational high performance proved more complex and more multidimensional than we had allowed for, and it can be escalated and achieved in shorter timeframes where leader communication and emotional intelligence are taken seriously. It also led us to add a sixth Principle of Enterprise Leadership: resonant with others.
Hidden in plain sight
Our hypothesis in this paper is that sustainability in high performance is hidden in plain sight. What sustains performance is not a further initiative layered on top of the last one; it is the disciplined, habitual practice of what the organisation already knows it should be doing.