7 Business Habits That Drive High Performance summary

Some teams know better than others what they need to do to win. A soccer team knows, at least in theory, what actions they need to perform in order to win their next match. They need to pass the ball, defend against the attacking team, and score goals. But in the business world, some teams are unsure of what they need to do to succeed. Why? Because they don’t have a strategy. 

It’s useful to think of your company strategy as a pair of goalposts. These goalposts show your employees in which direction they need to aim to reach their target and beat the opposition. High-performance businesses give their employees clear strategic goals.

It's common knowledge that you need good people in your organization, but most companies take this to mean that they need to recruit good people. Once they’ve hired talented staff, many businesses assume they've done everything they can to build a strong team. But high-performing businesses understand that developing human capital involves so much more than just recruitment. So how do you build a great workforce? 

As well as recruiting the best people, you also need to develop your new hires once they’re on board. This development could take the form of external training programs or temporarily posting people to other parts of the business so that they can learn more about the organization. 

You might remember the wonderful feeling of winning a prize at school and proudly bringing it home to show your parents. While you might consider the office and the playground to be a million miles away from each other, it turns out that there’s a lot that business leaders could learn from kindergarten teachers. 

A big lesson leaders should learn is that, however old you are, it feels great for someone in authority to tell you you’ve done well or give you some form of recognition. 

How much do you care about the people who work for you? As a leader, you might not have spent much time thinking about this question, but your employees probably have. And they likely have a more accurate idea of the answer. 

When everything is going smoothly, it's easy to say that you care about your employees. But when your relationship with your staff is under pressure, the truth usually comes out. This is when the employers who aren’t concerned with their staff’s well-being show their true colors – often with disastrous consequences.

Many businesses believe that being customer-centric means building an expensive website or implementing a slick sales process, but the highest-performing businesses know that being truly customer-focused comes down to something entirely different. It means being able to answer one simple question: Who is my core customer? 

This question is more complex than it might sound. If you’re going to have any chance of answering it accurately, you’ll need to ask yourself another question first. That is: What is it that makes my business different from my competitors’? Only by knowing this will you be able to recognize your core customer. Your core customer is the person who wants the very thing that your business provides and that your competition does not. Not only are these your most satisfied customers, but they’re also the ones who will come back to your company time and again.

Once your business has a functioning IT system, do you stick with that system religiously, or do you keep optimizing it? Most businesses have developed a way of using IT that works, but not many companies make a habit of improving their systems. Updating IT systems can be a challenge for older companies in particular. 

That’s because older companies are often trapped with a legacy of old operating systems, which are too costly to replace. Many banks, for instance, are still using IT systems whose core essentials were developed over four decades ago!