Navigating the Path to Excellence: Analyzing the 5 Common Skills of High Performers

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No matter your field, certain factors often separate the high performers from the rest. What's become clear after several years of working with peak performers across industries is that rising to the top really boils down to how you do a core set of critical skills.

Performance Under Pressure

High performers often face high levels of pressure and stress in their roles. If you are operating in a domain where the outcome matters, chances are you are dealing with needing to perform better under pressure. In today's corporate environment, pressure is part and parcel of your everyday life. If you're a coach or an athlete, though the pressure may ebb and flow based on the opponent you face, the constant evaluation and public scrutiny means that the pressure never fully lets up.

These pressure moments also seem to be the ones by which we define careers, success and failure, and even ourselves as performers. We remember athletes who hit the big shot or sank the big putt. We revere executives who rescue organizations from the deep. Performing under pressure is almost a necessary condition for being considered an all-time great.

The best performers, regardless of their specialty focus, figure out how to use pressure to their advantage. Rather than crumbling under pressure, they come up clutch and rise to the occasion.

Teamwork

Even in "individual" sports, the performers are surrounded by a team - coaches, trainers, physical therapists, psychologists, and more. There's really no such thing as an elite performer in a vacuum.

Nearly every endeavor we can think of that's highly competitive requires the seamless integration of at least one if not multiple, teams. Sending an astronaut to the moon requires teamwork on the rocket and on the ground, and great teamwork between the two teams. High-level sports require teamwork on two sides of the ball and teamwork between coaches and athletes. Getting a business off the ground requires teamwork within and between the functions of a company. 

The necessity of operating in a team means that you have to figure out how to get the most out of the people around you for you to become the best you can be. And, research consistently demonstrates that teamwork has an ample effect on performance (Schmutz, Meier, & Manser, 2019; Sanyal & Hisam, 2018). If you want to be at the top of your game, you have to be a good teammate.

That's because teamwork, at its core, is about creating an environment in which high performance can emerge. Teamwork behaviors, like backing up your teammate and lending support, create a context in which people can do their best work because they know they have support. Often, the best performers create this context by taking a specific role on the team: leader.

Leadership

The best performers take on the role of leader for several reasons. First, they can demonstrate what elite behavior looks like, which can elevate the performance of the rest of the team. Second, leaders often have greater control and influence over decisions, plans, goals, and the culture, which they can use to tilt the conditions toward their own high performance. Finally, the best performers often rise to the top of whatever hierarchy they're a part of, whether they like it or not. 

Might as well take it head-on.

Incidentally, choosing to take on a leadership role before you've reached your peak can also help you raise your game. If you are recognized as a leader, you're forced to behave like one, which means you're often held to higher standards and have higher expectations. These expectations and standards raise the bar for what's permissible and nudge habits and routines in the right direction. 

If you want to be great at what you do, it requires you to lead.

Decision-Making

In the corporate world, around 70% of leadership's time is spent on making decisions. That means that the average F500 company spends about $250 million a year worth of leadership time on one function (you can learn more here). Before you can determine where you're headed and start building a product, you need to ask the right questions, synthesize data, and arrive at the right conclusion.

In sports, the best players are responsible for making and executing decisions. Quarterback is commonly called the most challenging position in sports, in no small part due to the tremendous amount of decision-making responsibility they have. In golf, before you can even hit the shot, you have to select the right club. 

Much of what we view as performance is downstream from good decisions. For you to consistently be at the top of your game, you need to get good at asking yourself the right questions and develop a process for arriving at the best possible answer, in a timeframe that's conducive to execution - sometimes, just a fraction of a second.

Self-Regulation

The research suggests that what separates the best from the rest really boils down to 1 factor: self-regulation.

Self-regulation is the ability to monitor and manage your thinking, feelings, physiology, and behavior. It's underpinned by executive function, which neuroscience regularly recognizes as key to peak performance. 

To get the most out of yourself under pressure, you have to be able to solve problems in your mind, switch between tasks, control and direct your thinking and feelings, and stay disciplined in the pursuit of your goals.

Self-regulation cuts across the span of the other 4 factors, too. You need good self-regulatory abilities to optimize as a teammate, learn new skills, and control your performance under pressure. Without the ability to self-regulate, mastering the rest becomes a significant uphill battle.

Peak performance is straightforward and simple, but not easy. By setting goals and progressing in these 5 domains, you can more effectively track your path to the top.