Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom What Sets High Performers Apart

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom What Sets High Performers Apart Were you born to succeed? Not necessarily. As it turns out, even if you’re mid-career and feel you’ve never shined in school or work, you can completely transform your ability to contribute. I recently had the opportunity to meet David Sturt, author of the book Great Work: How to Make a Difference People Love. As he describes in his piece for Forbes, last year Sturt’s firm the O.C. Tanner Institute conducted a fascinating study on high performance work. The organization studied 1.7 million people across all industries, positions, and pay-grades and illustrated that high-performance is less an outcome of traits, but more an outcome of activity. What sets high performers apart isn’t a set of innate traits like perseverance, ambition, or intelligence, although those certainly help. Rather, high performers simply do things differently at work. O.C. Tanner found five specific activities high performers do to drive better results. These are: Ask the right questions Instead of adopting prevailing assumptions, high-performers pause and ask provoking questions that open up new lines of thinking. These questions include: “Why does this take so long?” “Why can’t we…” “What if we could…” See how things work High performers look at business and work in ways others haven’t. They always want to understand what’s working and what isn’t â€" and why. High performers enjoy taking a creation apart, searching for clues, and teasing out value. For the full post, please see Intuits Fast Track blog.