The 3 Laws of Performance- Law #2

Three Laws of Performance

The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide. 

In this blog, we will be discussing the second law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.  Our previous discussion of the first law of performance can be found here.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur for them.”

The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”

What does this mean?

From our previous article, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts.  The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds from person to person.

The occurring world is given by what we say, to ourselves and to others.  Each person says, using language, different things which cause situations to occur differently to from person to person.

Here is an example.  Two members of the same sales team with equal amounts of training are selling the same product and have the same sales goals to reach.  The task of selling their product is greatly influenced by how the task occurs to them.  How the task occurs to them is shaped by their language, and more specifically, what they say about the task to themselves or others.

Making sales and reaching sales goals could occur as hard work and very difficult to one salesman. This is because he may say to himself or others, “nobody really wants this product.” This certainly would cause this task to occur, hence be experienced as, as hard and difficult.

On the other hand, the same task could occur as easy and fun for the other salesperson. This could be because the language he uses that creates the way the job occurs for him could be something like, “people cannot do without this product.” It is very likely that this salesperson will sell more and outperform the other.

One salesperson is more effective than the other because their performance is shaped by how the task occurs to them, which was created by their language/speaking.

In summary

The way to impact performance is to first distinguish the language already there and used regarding a certain situation.  The next is to generate different language to create a new occurring regarding the task or situation.

How to Powerfully Deal With a Loss, Setback or Failure

How to Powerfully Deal With a Loss, Setback or Failure

Losses, setbacks and failures are a part of business

So what is the best way to deal with them?

We have all had situations where we have failed. In this post, I am going to go into how to not only deal with a loss or failure, and the emotional states that come along with it, but how to make sure you grow as a leader from of that experience as well.

When we fail, we often do a few things, and everyone has their own flavor.  We may have pity parties for ourselves and even invite others. We have tantrums. We kick, berate and beat ourselves up. We may also get sad and down.  Familiar? Keep reading.

First, none of these approaches are getting you anywhere. They only make you feel bad- so stop doing them.

But how? 

With each one of these, it is common to think how we “it should have gone a different way, I should have done XYZ differently, if only…” We go on and on to (often) ourselves and (sometimes) others about how something or someone is some flavor of wrong in the face of the failure- including ourselves and/or others. Then we dominate others around us by staying upset, pissed off, sad or down.

We also think that we have to beat ourselves up and be unhappy, otherwise, we may not learn or do better in the future. In other words, we think that kicking ourselves will actually make the lesson sink in. Again, not true.

When you fail, it is not the failure that makes you upset, but the thoughts that you have about yourself and about the failure that is so upsetting. These thoughts comes from you and you actually have a choice to entertain these thoughts or not. Again, your choice, but up until now, you have been choosing to do it- I recommend skipping it. 

What TO DO

Here is what TO DO to deal with a failure. First, do not indulge in beating yourself up and kicking yourself, pity partying or being upset. It will not get you anywhere, except expend energy, make you miserable and actually make learning harder.  What you want to do is take an HONEST and OBJECTIVE look at what caused the failure.  Create a great lesson learned ten time more valuable than winning would have been.  Here, you want to look at yourself, because putting the reason somewhere else gives you no access to improving. 

You want to look at physical and mental aspects that had you fail. Did you make a mistake in the sales conversation? Take a sales class.  Did something fall through the cracks because you were too busy?  Get more productive and develop a better system.  Did one of your employees drop the ball?  Take your management to the next level.  See what I mean? 

In Closing

In examining the failure, the idea is to get to a place where you will never fail for the same reason ever again. Use every failure to learn and grow, not be miserable.

The 3 Laws of Performance- Law #1

Three Laws of Performance

The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide. 

In this blog, we will be discussing the first law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”

Another way of stating this is how people act or behave correlates to how people, things or situations occur to them.

What does this mean? 

Our action always make complete sense to us, however, we are often confused, frustrated or annoyed by the actions of others.  But the people taking these actions are somehow not confused, frustrated or annoyed like we are.  How is that? The circumstances in which they are acting occur to them differently than they do to you and they are acting accordingly to how the circumstances occur to them. 

We as humans confuse the actual facts of a situation with how the situation occurs to us.  There is a distinction between the facts and how the facts occur to us.  This is how there can be a car accident with 20 witnesses and 18 different stories of what happened. It occurred to each person differently. A fact is that one car involved in the accident was going 40 miles per hour.  To one observer, the car could have occurred as going very fast, while that same car could have been going rather slow to another because one observer was a five year old and the other was a race car driver.

How does this apply?

The same situations occur differently to different people, giving different actions. 

Lets take a party for example.  One person could be sitting in a corner and another could be in the center of the room talking with everyone. Why the different behavior?

The easy answer is because one likes parties and the other does not, or one is shy and the other is not.  However, it is the different occurring for each person that gives liking or not liking parties, or being or not being shy. The occurring for the person in the corner could be that, “big groups are uncomfortable and risky” while the occurring for the socialite could be that, “new people are great!”  After seeing the distinct ways the same situation occurs for two different people, it is simple to understand the distinct sets of actions.

The occurring is what gives the actions, being perfectly correlated with each other. 

It is now easier to understand the different things people do, the ways they behave and their performances are all given by the way the situation occurs to them in a business or organizational setting as well.

If people are doing things to your disliking, that are confusing or are frustrating, it is because the situation at hand occurs for them differently that it does for you.