Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

It’s difficult to achieve exceptional results, but it’s much harder to sustain them. Having achieved the goal, we all tend to congratulate ourselves and move on to the next challenge. We become bored, lose interest and focus, and backslide. We stop doing the things that made the difference, mistakenly thinking that those processes are now stable.  They are not. All organizational processes are naturally unstable.

1. Prepare yourself and others for performance deterioration. Begin talking openly about this danger as a part of your goal achievement celebrations. Remind everyone of examples where you’ve scaled the summit and then fallen off a cliff. There will be plenty of these examples.

2. Keep monitoring all key processes. A performance dashboard is the perfect tool for this. You can see how you are doing at a glance each week or month. Any unraveling will become immediately apparent.

3. Make sure that a leader remains accountable. We all pay more attention when our names are on the board as the responsible leader. Others may become intoxicated with success, but the fear of embarrassment will keep the designated driver focused.

3. Create a crisis at the first sign of performance droop. Become distressed and let it show. People are exquisitely sensitive to how their leaders feel. Use this fact to your advantage.

How do you sustain exceptional performance?