What’s Limiting Your Performance?
Five factors beyond your talent and effort
We all want to do good, even our best, work. I used to think the quality of my work was a simple, egotistical product of my talent and effort — oh, the folly. I’ve found that work quality, whether of mine or my team, is as much a function of where it’s done, as who’s doing it.
In 1839, a little known botanist, Carl Sprengel, proposed the “limiting factor” theory that explains why plant growth is limited by the lack of a single factor — like water, sunlight, or a soil nutrient. Sprengel’s theory explains, for example, why the rainforest floor is surprisingly free of dense foliage. The rainforest has plenty of nutrient-rich soil and water. But sunlight is limited by the shadow cast by the canopies of the tallest trees that dominate the forest. The limiting factor is sunlight and, thus, small shrubs can’t grow on the dark forest floor.
Sprengel’s theory of the minimum limiting factor was later popularized and expanded by Justin von Liebig to other disciplines like biochemistry, resource management, manufacturing, and even marketing. Interestingly, I think it governs the limits on our work performance, too.
Sure, talent and effort are significant factors, but they are not the only ones that limit high performance. I’ve found these factors are just as important and often overlooked:
- Competing — Your competitors make you better and so do your teammates. Working against, and with, the best will have you playing up to their level. But be the happy warrior with competitors, and don’t tolerate slackers, jerks, or pessimists on your team. Jerks (or assholes, as Bob Sutton calls them) are especially pernicious, feeding on your humiliation and resulting poor performance.
- Listening — Allow yourself to be mentored, especially by the toughest coaches. The best bosses can be great coaches, as long as they’re fair, honest, and transparent. Oh, and no abusive assholes here, either. The late, great Bill Campbell trailblazed the idea of the executive coach. And Facebook has been using such one-on-one management coaching, at scale.
- Learning — You can’t grow if you don’t learn from everyone and everything. Otto von Bismarck, the 19th Century Prussian leader once said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Closer to home, my father and grandfather, humbled by the life and death of medical practice, beat into us kids, “School never ends. You’re a student your entire life.”
- Measuring — Clear, unambiguous metrics calibrate you to the look and feel of success. For example, venture capitalist Karan Mehandru defines monthly SaaS churn more precisely as “discretionary churn” to include only those customers that are able to leave your service. For example, it’s a rosy distortion to include those customers that can’t churn in a month because, say, they’re locked into annual contracts. So, if your customers cancel $4,000 of service out of a monthly total of $100,000, that’s 4% churn. But if only 25% are able to leave the service, that’s 16% churn ($4,000/($100,000*0.25)) — much more alarming. The 4% number is a self-deceptive illusion.
- Failing — If you’re not experiencing any failure, you’re not taking enough risk. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, harshly but rightly, in Antifragile: “a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information.” Because success is celebrated but failure is studied, there are few lessons in success. By avoiding failure, you avoid the information inherent in its stresses and lessons.
Although we may be proud of them, our innate talents and hard work are hardly sufficient for our best performance. The key factors holding us back are, too often, in our external environment of competitors, teammates, coaches, contemporaries, metrics, and experiences. If these limiting factors are in short supply, seek them out — like leaves searching for sunlight.
