Individuals are responsible for their own performance, however, as a leader or manager the performance of the team is ultimately ours. It is up to a manager to challenge their team sufficiently, and if the leader has failed to challenge the team sufficiently – performance will be anything but high performing. If we fail to create opportunities to challenge for extended periods, passivity can and will set in. Inertia becomes the greatest challenge to getting things done.

   To be a high performance team, the team must be challenged to perform at a high performance level. In our workshops, one of the activities is a “Board Meeting”, an exercise involving instruction of a martial art technique in which the participants are taught to break a board with their hand. Imagine it is you. The moment your hand bursts through the board and your colleagues are heard cheering and supporting you – there are hardly words to describe the feeling of accomplishment. And then it happens – you begin asking yourself, “if I could do this, what else is possible?”. You have just elevated your performance. To raise that which is expected of yourself, and others, and will raise their (and yours) level of achievement.

   As an organization offering this type of training, we know from experience that the participant is capable of breaking the board. After all, we have worked with children as young as twelve years of age who have broken the board. However, it requires the employee being challenged in order to elevate their performance – much like the manager challenging their employees to perform at a greater level.

   The “Board Breaking” or similar type of activities help us redefine our potential. Whether that opportunity arrives in the guise of the “Board Meeting” or some other challenge that we as leaders create. A task that we might have thought impossible, but now with our help as the leader, and with our encouragement we can begin setting and achieving new levels of performance.

   Raise the level of expectation, and you will raise the level of one’s results.