This episode is part of a series of Side Mirrors focusing on the origin story of Aquilae's vision of Fulfilling Performance. I share where the idea came from and how it informs Aquilae's mission of Enabling Fulfilling Performance.
I look forward to hearing what resonates with you.
This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae.
Aquilae's mission is to enable Fulfilling Performance in the auto finance and mobility industry. We use our Fulfilling Performance framework to help you identify what steps you need to take to realise Fulfilling Performance in your business. Contact me directly if you’d like to know more.
For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Episode recorded on 30 April 2022
This episode is part of a series of Side Mirrors focusing on the origin story of Aquilae's vision of Fulfilling Performance. I share where the idea came from and how it informs Aquilae's mission of Enabling Fulfilling Performance.
I look forward to hearing what resonates with you.
This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae.
Aquilae's mission is to enable Fulfilling Performance in the auto finance and mobility industry. We use our Fulfilling Performance framework to help you identify what steps you need to take to realise Fulfilling Performance in your business. Contact me directly if you’d like to know more.
For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Episode recorded on 30 April 2022
I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.
Sherene Redelinghuys:I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand
Daniel van Treeck:Prague in the Czech Republic
Osman:Cairo in Egypt
Holger Drott:Auckland, New Zealand
Shannon Faulkner:London, England.
Andy:Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry, looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy Follows Hello, listeners, welcome to the third and final side mirror about Fulfilling Performance. If you haven't listened to the first two side mirrors on this topic, I recommend you go back and do that. In those episodes, I explain the meaning and the origin of Fulfilling Performance and how it came to provide the vision and the mission for Aquilae. Having accepted our mission to Enable Fulfilling Performance, we needed to come up with a methodology to do that. And in this episode, I'm going to share with you how we devised the Fulfilling Performance framework and how you can use it as a lens through which to view the performance of individuals, teams, and organisations. To use a medical analogy. If the presenting symptom is underperformance, the framework helps you to diagnose the underlying cause. If you're a visual person, and you'd like to look at the framework, as you listen to this, you'll find it on our website@aquilae.co.uk under the heading the Aquilae performance model. In the second of these three episodes, I asked you to think about a time in your career when you were performing at a high level and to answer some questions. The objective of that exercise was to illustrate that there's more to an individual's performance than their own capability and to highlight the other levers that play a fundamental role. I'd like to break down how we can use this information to identify and remove the barriers to fulfilling performance for ourselves, our teams, and across our organisations and to put in place people, processes and technology that will increase levels of fulfilling performance. First of all, I'd like to ask you to think of performance as an output, or an outcome or a result. If we want to improve performance, we need to focus on the inputs, or the actions that drive that performance. When we step on the bathroom scales, the figure that they reveal is an output. It's the result of the inputs of calories and exercise from the previous days and weeks. And if we want to change the finger on the scales, we address the inputs that impact that figure. For us at Aquilae the inputs that have an impact on the levels of fulfilling performance experienced by an individual, team or organisation can all be categorised under four distinct headings. And those headings are Capability, Clarity, Culture, and Purpose. And at this point, in my explanation, those words capability, clarity, culture, and purpose are nothing more than labels. And the trouble with labels is that they are just single words that are working very hard to convey a lot of complex ideas. So those four little words can mean different things to different people. And with that in mind, we crafted four questions to accompany them and to better describe exactly what we mean by each label. And those were the questions that I asked you to reflect on, in part two of this side mirror. So to save you going back, I'll repeat them briefly here. By capability we mean how well equipped are you in terms of knowledge, skills, experience, mindset and resources to perform in your role? By clarity we mean how clear are you about what you're supposed to be doing and how you're doing against that expectation? By culture we mean how is the behaviour of the people around you at work and at home, supporting you to perform at a high level? And by purpose we mean how much does it mean to you what you're doing? We refer to capability, clarity, culture and purpose as the fundamental contributors to fulfilling performance. You take those four ingredients, you apply effort, and you get your result. How close your result gets to achieving the vision of fulfilling performance as described in the previous two episodes will depend on the level of capability, clarity, culture and purpose and the quality of your effort. I say the quality of your effort because if you think about it effort has certain characteristics that need to be met to give you the results that you're looking for. At Aquilae,we refer to those characteristics as duration, intensity, efficacy, and alignment. If you've got the website open, you'll see them represented in the model. Simply put, you need to apply your effort to the right task, and keep it up for the appropriate length of time at the required intensity and as skillfully as possible. Let me give you some sporting examples to help illustrate the different qualities of effort. An archer could do a perfect job of shooting an arrow. But if they're shooting in the wrong direction, if the arrow's not aligned with the target, the result will be a miss. This is why the alignment of our effort is so important to performance. A marathon runner could run at a record breaking pace and stop just before the finish. This is why we need to pay attention to the duration of our effort. If a weightlifter only applies 99%, or even applies as much as 99% of the effort required to shift the weight, it'll still be going nowhere, which is why the intensity of our effort has to be sufficient for the task. And before a swimmer learns to be skillful in applying their effort, the results will be inefficient with lots of splashing around and not much forward progress. So this is an example of how the skillful application of effort has an impact on performance. And we use the term efficacy to describe this particular quality of effort in our framework. Let me see if I can make all this conceptual thinking more practical for you. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we want you to be able to use this Fulfilling Performance framework as a lens through which to view performance and identify and remove barriers to fulfilling performance. And we want you to be able do that for yourself for your teams, and across your organisation and to put in place people, processes and technology that will increase levels of fulfilling performance. Let's connect the theory with what happens in practice. Let's imagine someone on your team is underperforming. They may be consistently performing at a level below your expectation, or there may have been one or two significant events that have caused issues. You decide to have a conversation with them about it and their explanation features I'm guessing, one or more of the following explanations. They might say I couldn't because dot dot dot, and then something related to a lack of capability of some kind. Or they might say, I didn't realise that dot dot dot, and then something indicating a lack of clarity. Or it happened because he, she or they dot dot dot and then something about why other people haven't done their part or have sabotaged the outcome, which could be down to a lack of clarity or capability on their part. But it could also be indicative of an issue with the culture. And a final example, people don't often come straight out with I didn't want to do it. And so their explanation will be some kind of excuse that is code for my heart really isn't in this I just I just don't want. I'm offering that as an example of where purpose is not being leveraged to drive fulfilling performance for an individual. I'm sure those examples will resonate with you and you can see how the common explanations for under performance can act as a signpost directing us to which of the fundamental contributors may be lacking and therefore acting as a barrier to fulfilling performance. Next time you're faced with performance that's below your expectations. I'm asking you to pause please and view that situation through the lens of the Aquilae Fulfilling Performance Framework. Ask yourself the four questions in relation to the specific situation and use your answers to determine the factors most likely to be having the greatest impact on the outcome. Let me give you a quick example. So you've got a good salesperson. They've performed well for years and they've started, he's started missing his target month after month. So before you do anything too drastic, ask yourself how well equipped is he to perform at a high level? How clear is he about what he's supposed to be doing and how he's doing against it? How is the behaviour of the people around him supporting him to perform at high level? And how much does it mean to him what he's doing? Has there been any change in one or more of those fundamental contributors that is now impacting his performance. Of course, there may be things that you're not aware of. So it makes sense to have the conversation with the individual, explore these areas, and see if between you something emerges that could be accounting for the change in results, that you're getting the change in performance. I'm conscious that we've covered a lot of ground. And I'll thank you again for staying with me. That was just one simple example to illustrate how to use the framework as a diagnostic tool to get to the root cause of underperformance. To keep it simple, I use the example of one person underperforming, but you can equally use the approach to consider a team or an organisation, and of course, your own performance, and that might be a good place to start to practice. Once you've identified the barriers to fulfilling performance, you can prioritise your attention and your resources towards removing them, removing those barriers. The framework acts as a starting point, giving you a lens through which to view underperformance and helping you to highlight underlying issues. You can then implement actions and initiatives to address those issues. If you'd like help to identify the underlying issues, and to implement actions to address them, the team at Aquilae can do that we work across the spectrum of people, processes and technology topics in the mobility industry. Whether you're implementing a subscription product, or refining your internal processes, or identifying and adopting a new technology platform or developing your leadership team or the people within it, we're here to help. You can find out more about that@aquilae.co.uk. I hope you'll continue to reflect on and digest this model or paradigm of the inputs that drive the output that is fulfilling performance, and how when we optimise the fundamental contributors of capability, clarity, culture and purpose, and we apply the appropriate quality of effort, we enable fulfilling performance. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to Episode 62 of Career-view Mirror with me, Andy Follows. This episode is the third in a series of three short side mirrors focused on the topic of Fulfilling Performance. As you know, we publish these episodes to celebrate my guests careers, listen to their stories, and learn from their experiences. On this occasion, I've shared some of my own story, and some of our thinking at Aquilae and I hope that something in that may have resonated with you. Our next episode will be a regular Career-view Mirror interview. And you can look forward to more of those and more side mirrors in the coming weeks. This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by Aquilae. Aquilae's mission is to Enable Fulfilling Performance in the Auto Finance and Mobility industry. I hope if you've listened to these three side mirrors you completely understand now what I mean by Enable Fulfilling Performance. We use our Fulfilling Performance Framework to help you identify what steps you need to take to realise fulfilling performance in your business. Contact me directly if you'd like to know more about that. My email is andy@aquilae.co.uk. And remember, folks, if you know people who would benefit from hearing these stories, please show them how to find us. Thanks for listening.
Osman:No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.
Paul Harris:You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and get it.
Sherene Redelinghuys:Don't rely on others. You have to do it yourself. You have to take control.
Rupert Pontin:If you've got an idea, if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself, but you just haven't quite got there, do it.
Tom Stepanchak:Take a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.