Hills, Skills, and Wills: How to Improve Yours (and Others) Performance

Every day people and organizations try to improve their performance. Businesses focus on getting their employees to do their jobs better and/or faster. Likewise, we do the same. We try to make more money, improve our golf swing, lose a few pounds, spend more time with our children, or some other venture. Sometimes companies refer to these actions as “strategic initiatives” while in our personal lives, we may simply refer to them as trying to turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately, many of our attempts to improve performance fail. We spend hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of dollars trying to change our (or others) performance from where it is, to where we want it to be, only to find that after all was said, spent, and done, there was little to no change that actually took place. Company profits continue to decline, we continue to gain weight, or a host of other changes never take place. Why do we so often fail? Have you heard the expressions, “If you fail to aim, you aim to fail” or “Knowing is half the battle”? In every situation where performance is failing short or failing to change, there are three words that can explain the reason; Hills, Skills, and Wills. Every gap in performance is caused by one or more of these and the reason(s) companies and individuals frequently fail to bridge their performance gaps is because they don’t know which one is causing the gap and/or they aim poorly and implement solutions that target the wrong one.