Performance is a common word, but one that people sometimes don’t really think about as they use it. A performance is something that you attend for entertainment, or perhaps you look for a car with high performance, and those uses have something to do with the way we use the word at the PEOPLE Academy, Inc.

A performance is the way someone does some action. Generally in a professional sense it means how someone does the actions involved in completing their defined job functions and that little extra that isn’t defined in the traditional sense. That means that both parties have to have a clear notion of what is expected to be achieved.

The phrase “what does good look like” is one way of defining what needs to be achieved. What does a good performance look like? What needs to be accomplished to have “good” results? What have those results looked like in the past? What do they look like now, and what do they look like moving forward?

This may seem pretty basic, but this is a shortfall that many companies have. Business owners and managers have one concept or idea about what good looks like and they know the driving force behind the reasons, but perhaps supervisors and team members don’t. They may have an idea about what is expected in their basic job function, but they may not have a handle on the “why” and the why is a huge part of motivation for the things we do.

Defining “what good looks like” is step one in the process. Having the tools to make it happen is the rest of the story.