When Capability is High, What Limits Performance?

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For my clients, the biggest thing at the moment is capacity.

Their people's ability to deliver consistently, produce quality work and make good decisions while the pressure around them continues to increase.

It is one of the reasons Level Up is resonating.

Look at what organisations are asking their leaders to navigate right now. Everything from AI adoption to economic uncertainty, psychosocial risk, change fatigue, talent retention, transformation. The usual operational challenges have not disappeared while all of this arrives either.  And when two or more arrive at the same time, they interact and amplify each other, creating what is called Polycrisis, or what weather experts call a perfect storm.

But, ultimately, we have capable people facing increasingly difficult conditions.

Which raises an interesting question.

What does a highly capable leader need in order to access that capability when the pressure is really on?

I reckon we have historically put a lot of effort into competence.

Strategy. Finance. Technical skills. Management training. Qualifications.

All valuable, certainly, yet most senior leaders I work with already know how to do their jobs.

The challenge is whether their best performance remains available when the meeting becomes difficult, somebody resigns, the numbers move in the wrong direction, a restructure lands badly or a team suddenly becomes anxious and reactive.

There is some fascinating neuroscience around this.

Under acute stress, the prefrontal cortex, which supports complex judgement, strategic thinking and creative problem-solving, becomes less available as our threat systems become more active. Our thinking can narrow at exactly the moment we need it to broaden.

Which is why Emotional Intelligence is the first of the five edges we develop in Level Up.

We learn to recognise our emotional state, regulate ourselves and remain able to think clearly while everyone around us may be becoming increasingly reactive.

Then we build the other four edges:

·      Burnout Intelligence, understanding and protecting capacity before performance declines.

·      Relational Intelligence, keeping people connected and trusting under pressure, without the leader absorbing and taking home overwhelm that isn’t theirs.

·      Adaptive Capability, responding and pivoting when circumstances change direction.

·      True ‘Alpha’ Presence, becoming the steady influence people naturally turn towards when uncertainty rises.

Together, these create something I think organisations are going to value enormously over the next few years.

Being Ready.

We may have very little control over which headwind arrives next. We can have far more influence over the condition and capacity of the people we expect to lead us through it.

Over the next few newsletters, I am going to unpack each of these five edges and some of the research sitting behind them.

If capacity is becoming a conversation in your organisation, I would love to compare notes.