High-Performance Patterns: Find Your Personal High-Performance Pattern
At Microsoft, it’s a high-performance culture. There are high-expectations as well as regular one-on-ones, ongoing feedback, training and development opportunities, mentoring, performance reviews, and more.
To keep up with the game, you need a combination of learning proven practices for personal effectiveness, as well as high-performance team techniques.
The reality is. the more self-awareness you have, the more you can contribute to creating a high-performance team. For example, if you know your strengths, and you can figure out how to help the team see how they can leverage your unique strengths, you become a force multiplier.
When it comes to being your own force multiplier, sometimes the most important thing to do, is to first get out of your own way. It’s very easy to water down your results by going against your own grain, and not taking advantage of your unique experience, skills, and abilities.
That’s where personal high-performance patterns come in.
Imagine if you already have a recipe for getting great results, but it’s buried among all the ways you’ve twisted how you get results to try to adapt and fit in with what everybody else does? And imagine if that pattern is not just effective, but it’s incredibly effective at unleashing your potential you’ve already got, and it instantly amplifies your ability to get great results?
I’ve been reading the book, Patterns of High Performance: Discovering the Ways People Work Best. In it, Jerry L. Fletcher shares a process for finding your high-performance pattern. He also shares the high-performance patterns of others. He also shares deep insight into the great results he and his team have been able to unleash for individuals and teams. It’s a repeatable approach for getting high-performance results, whether it’s personal high-performance or team high-performance (which is heavily influenced by individuals all working in their high-performance patterns.)
As I was reading through the book, I was recalling several times where I got better than expected results. One story that came to mind is when I was building my first Security Guide in Microsoft patterns & practices to address application security in a deep way.
I did a lot of unusual things, in terms of sheer volume of experts I consulted with both inside and outside the company, the books that I combed looking for recurring patterns, the tests I ran in labs to reproduce problems and solutions. But together, these all these activities led to a unique combination of information that served as the backbone for the book.
The book was more than a book.
It was actually a deep knowledge platform filled with principles, patterns, and practices that others could build on and extend, and it helped create a language for application security that people regularly used in the halls. It also led to some interesting patents, as well as future work that helped change the application security game for line-of-business applications. And it was the first book to be downloaded 800,000 times within six months.
The results were extraordinary.
And the key to it wasn’t that I followed a formula from somebody else. It was that I was using my personal high-performance pattern.
Therein lies the key.
But how do you find your personal performance pattern?
Jerry Fletcher has a technique for that. I’ve tried to distill the steps into a simple to follow recipe:
High-Performance Unleashed: Find Your Personal High-Performance Pattern
The beauty of finding your personal high-performance pattern is that it’s all you, and you take it with you wherever you go.
It can be your edge for getting better than expected results in any situation, and it can be the key to producing outstanding results in a sustainable way.