What Drives ‘Em to Do What They Do? : Assessing the High-Performance Individual in the Workplace

Gregory Davis, 34, is a Federal Express courier with a glint in his eye and a lightness to his step. Davis, who has worked for the delivery service for four years, sprints through his workday like a broken field runner, meeting a series of deadlines that would drive most people mad.

He talks about his work routine much like an athlete might describe a workout: “Once I’ve unloaded 10 or 20 boxes at my first stop, it’s like a fluid motion from the next drop point to the next. It’s not like speed racing, just automatic. I try to have a 100% service level so the customer will be happy and not worry.”

Some workplace observers believe that, like Davis, a growing number of people enjoy what they do and do it exceptionally well. Is this the result of a select inborn gift, researchers ask, or a good fit between an individual and his task? Or is it an internal attitude that can be applied to any activity, from managing a large corporation to sweeping the kitchen floor?

Researchers tend to agree that most peak performers are not unusually gifted; rather, they are developed by the process of engaging intensely with their work.

Los Angeles management consultant Sherrie Connelly, assistant professor of public administration at the University of Southern California, recently completed a 10-year study of enjoyment in the workplace. Connelly interviewed 200 people about their work experiences--from entrepreneurs to human resource personnel, from service workers to artists.

She dubs the vital spark that people feel when they love what they do, “work spirit,” and likens individuals with this quality to the late Scottish runner Eric Liddell, subject of the film “Chariots of Fire” along with British runner Harold Abrahams. Liddell, she said, expressed a natural gift, a fluid talent for running that brought him joy and a higher meaning. In stark contrast, Abrahams was a study in striving--an individual who sought to win, to perfect his technique, to emulate others considered expert.

Seven Signs of Spirit

Connelly’s research identified seven signs of work spirit, some of which are confirmed by other investigators. First, was a sense of energy: “They speak of being on a roll or in a flow state,” she said. Second, those with work spirit maintain a positive state of mind. “This might be characterized by the adage, ‘If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade,’ ” she noted.

They also have a “sense of self” yet “a feeling of oneness” with something larger and a strong sense of purpose, often called “mission” by others in the field. They also tend to characterize their participation as creative and nurturing, Connelly said, a notion illustrated by one interview subject who said that for her, work was “love made visible.”

Different Sense of Time

Finally, those with work spirit move in a different sense of time, which Connelly describes as a “risking, sensing, living moment. This involves play, humor, aliveness and being absorbed totally in what one is doing. In fact, they are so involved that they are actually in a different state of consciousness while working.”

Berkeley psychologist Charles Garfield believes peak performance in the workplace is rooted in a pattern of attributes: a sense of mission that inspires action, self-management and team mastery, and the abilities to correct course and manage change.

At an aerospace company in Southern California, for example, Garfield visited a department that maintains the plant’s pipes, which reportedly had low absenteeism and low turnover. He asked the foreman why the workers were all wearing green surgical smocks.

“Because we are surgeons,” the foreman said. “The plant isn’t going to have any breakdowns as long as we’re working on its arteries. We take care of these pipes the way a doctor takes care of your heart.”

Missions like these are rooted in strong values, Garfield said. “Values are the leverage point for the whole internal impulse to excel, because they encompass not only what and how--but also, why.”

Self-management and team mastery go hand-in-hand, he said. “The one element that stands out most clearly among peak performers is their virtually unassailable belief in the likelihood of their own success.”

Garfield offers a colorful example of a spirited individual in his book, “Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business” (Morrow; $16.95). Early one morning in 1984, he was driving toward a toll booth on the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he heard loud music and saw a man dancing in the booth.

“What are you doing?” Garfield asked.

“I’m having a party,” the man said.

“What about the rest of these people,” Garfield inquired, noticing no movement in the other booths.

“At 8:30 every morning, live people get into their vertical coffins. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead, they re-emerge and go home.”

“Why is it different for you?” Garfield asked.

“I’m going to be a dancer someday,” the man said. “My bosses are in there (in the administration building), and they’re paying for my training.”

Such self-confidence is not arrogance, Garfield noted. “It stems from the human capacities peak performers cultivate in themselves. And, typically, their track records reinforce their beliefs.”

These same people know how to build teams and motivate others, he said. They have an unusual motto: “Power given is power gained.”

Peak performers are not people who never lose their way, Garfield said. “They are people who know how to find it again. They take setbacks as information, and mistakes that it is time to correct course. And they know how to act decisively when windows of opportunity present themselves.”

Regardless of their tasks, peak performers might be called managers of change. These people excel, he added, “not despite a buzzing, blooming world of abrupt change and novel situations, but because of it.”

They know how to anticipate change, adapt to it, and act, he said. “They maintain a willingness to learn and a tolerance for ambiguity.”

High performance, according to Michael J. Gelb, founder and director of the High Performance Learning Center in Washington, “is never what you think it is. It’s a long-term process of finding how to get better results with less effort.”

They Love Their Work

Gelb said high-performing individuals love their work and find in it an opportunity for self-expression. “They feel challenged by their jobs, and they feel part of a larger whole. They are idealistic, but politically aware. They also know how to bring out the best in others, like a coach rather than a star.”

He is concerned that the widespread talk about excellence has not resulted in much change in the workplace. “What passes for excellence is often nothing but polishing mediocrity. In most companies, the No. 1 principle of life holds sway: Play by the rules.

“This is trained into us very early in our homes and schools,” Gelb said. “We learn to respect only right answers, to avoid making mistakes at all costs. In order to permit this to change, to be in the learning mode at work, we must first know that our survival is secure.”

At one large East Coast corporation, Gelb said, the management sent out memos saying: “We value creativity.” “But they were just laying a new concept on top of their old system,” he noted. “Nothing really changed.”

The qualities of high performances and work spirit cannot be forced on people from the outside, several consultants said. Nor are they the result of working extra hard or imitating experts.

‘Well-Used, Not Overused’

“We need to know our skills and our values well enough to be able to sense where we belong in the workplace,” said USC’s Connelly. “And we need to care for ourselves in such a way that we are stretched but not overreaching, well-used but not overused.”

In his new book, “Thank God It’s Monday” (Jeremy P. Tarcher, $8.95), Los Angeles author Charles Cameron focuses on ways to discover optimal work.

“People who can’t change jobs but feel stuck where they are can do things to alter the quality of their experience,” he said. Calling his technique for transforming work “zenning it,” Cameron recommends exploring the Zen-like quality of “present focus.”

“Whenever the mind wanders, notice where it went and why,” he said. “Then put your concerns on hold and come back to the task.”

People can also make a game of work, he added, or find rhythms in their tasks and create rituals that lift them into “the right spirit.”

Enjoy the Process of Work

Tim Gallwey, a Los Angeles-based corporate consultant and author of “The Inner Game of Tennis,” concurs that an individual’s quality of experience at work depends upon his or her state of mind. “Our culture looks only at performance, at a task to accomplish something for an exchange of money. But this is only one purpose of work,” he said. “Another is to enjoy the process of work, independent of its results. Most of us feel something between misery and ecstasy at work, but our internal experience doesn’t have to go up and down with the stock market.”

Connelly pointed out, “People who dislike their work tend to blame external factors like boredom, bosses or money. Those who like their work, on the other hand, tend to believe they create their situation internally, through their own enthusiasm or through the meaning they bring to it.”

A number of business consultants who study current work styles and innovative companies believe that the peak performance can be harnessed by organizations to enhance enjoyment of work and boost productivity.

Former Army Delta Force director Frank Burns, a business consultant and founder of Metasystems Design Group, an electronic networking company in Arlington, Va., observed that high-performing organizations do not view change as a threat to survival. “It’s seen instead as a natural process that enables dreams and opportunities to unfold.”

The most creative business leaders apply their personal development to their organizations, he said. “We see a new generation of leaders emerging who possess a quality of spirit that they know to be the true source of high performance. They have the capacity to infect others with this spirit and so to release the high levels of human energy required for extraordinary achievement.”

Burns said some so-called innovative business styles often target long-term outcomes and invite risk. “But this does not qualify as high-performance. High-performing leaders combine future planning with open-endedness. This flow state leaves room for unforecasted opportunities.”

Gallwey calls this a “corporate learning culture” and cited an analogy from tennis. “Every manager is concerned with change, learning. But these days, running a corporation is like playing tennis in the wind. The ball just doesn’t go where you aim it.

“If you’re performance oriented, then the wind is an obstacle,” he said. “In the corporation, the more the variables change, the less the results are predictable. You seek to avoid the winds of change in safety, trying not to look incompetent. But playing in the wind is where the learning takes place.

“Rather than avoid it or fight it, we need to tell ourselves it’s just a windy season and then develop competency as learners,” he said. “In that way, any obstacle becomes an opportunity.”