The Three Laws of Performance

Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

Steve Zaffron, Dave Logan

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118043127, 9780470195598
• eBook ISBN: 9781118170731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A proven system for rallying all of an organizations' employees around a new vision and ideas for making the vision stick

When something at work isn't going smoothly, managers struggle with what part of the problem to tackle first. Do they start with cost reduction? Or should they go for process improvements first? The authors—who have helped hundreds of companies and individuals change and improve—say spend time and money adjusting the systems in which people operate, rather than targeting people and their performance directly. The authors show that it's in fact possible to change everything at once—with a focus on making such transformations permanent and repeatable.

• Brand-new Introduction written for the paperback edition
• Filled with illustrative examples from Northrup Grumman, BHP-Billiton, Reebok, Harvard Business School, and many others
• Two experts in the field show how to make major transformations happen

The book outlines a process for engaging all employees to buy-in to an improved vision of an organization's new and improved future.

Part I
The Three Laws in Action

Chapter 1
Transforming an Impossible Situation

Two hours northwest of Johannesburg, just off the Platinum Highway, is an abandoned archeological dig with a sign that bears the words, “Cradle of Humanity.” The communities nearby are home to the platinum mining operations of Lonmin Plc., the world's third-largest producer of the precious metal. These nine communities and five squatter camps, of approximately three hundred thousand people, are also where we find many people who fought—and are still fighting—for Nelson Mandela's vision of a new South Africa. In this most unlikely of places, less than ten years after the end of apartheid, a conversation took place that shows the power of the First Law of Performance—the subject of this chapter.

Antoinette Grib, a white South African senior manager of Lonmin, was speaking to a group of about one hundred people when an elderly community member stood up, interrupted, and insisted on saying something to her. The woman, Selinah Makgale, began: “Antoinette, I have an issue with you.”

Grib's shock was obvious. She said, “But I don't even know you.”

Makgale continued, “Yes, I don't know you personally, but you are a white South African woman, and I have an issue with white South African women. When I was thirteen years old, my parents told me that I needed to be the housekeeper for the white Afrikaans that owned the farm we worked on. It was payment for us working the farm. I was like a slave, not earning a cent. The woman, she was very, very bad to me. Getting through that year was tough. I've been hating white South African women ever since.”

Makgale paused, then continued, “I'm sorry, even though I don't know you, I've been sitting here for days hating you and all the other South African women. You probably weren't even born when all this happened.”

Grib smiled and said, “No, I wasn't.”

After another thoughtful moment, Makgale finished with: “Please accept my apology—you and all the other white South African women here. I apologize to you all for making you a faceless group and hating you.”

Some people became serious, others looked like they were remembering the past. Some shook their heads. All were visibly touched by Makgale's courage and intent to close a chapter from the past.

The senior manager took the next step, saying,

Selinah, I see that I represent something to you with my blond hair and my blue eyes that caused so much pain in your life all those years ago. I ask your forgiveness for the mistakes my people made…. I think we're fortunate to live in a country now, since 1994, where we can move forward and we can live together. I offer you my support in getting this issue completely resolved. If you want, I will go with you to visit the woman who treated you so poorly and see if there are some amends that can be made. We can try that.

Both women started to cry—one elderly, poor, and black, and one young, wealthy, and white. Makgale replied, “Yes, I am willing to do that. Thank you very much. I hope our future can grow better than before.” The group cheered.

If these two individuals worked together every day, what difference would this exchange have made in their performance?

What if conversations like this were common, in your company, family, and life?

In part because interactions like this one are frequent around Lonmin, relationships with the community are unusually positive. Inside Lonmin, conversations don't have the same noise of gossip and distraction that are business as usual in the world. People act with greater focus, more collaboration, less distraction.

Lonmin elevates its performance.

This book is about performance, and the Three Laws that govern it. In the pages that follow, we will ask you to think in new ways, to examine old assumptions, and explore new ways of approaching old situations. If you do, our promise to you is breakthrough performance in your organization and your life.

At times, we'll invite you to think, inquire, reflect, and, in some cases, consider discussing topics with other people. It's fine to skip through these sections and return to them later when convenient. But dealing with these sections at some point will produce benefits for you.

It's useful, to start, for you to pick an area in your business or life that would benefit from a breakthrough in performance. What you pick may not immediately look to you like a performance challenge—it may look like something else, such as complaints you have with your company's culture, or difficulties in implementing new initiatives, or just plain conflicts in relationships at work or in life.

It may be something as simple as a commitment that never gets realized, like a New Year's resolution that you make over and over to no avail. But if you ask yourself, “Why do I care about this issue being resolved?” you'll find that this issue is something that gets in the way of producing results and accomplishment—that is, performance. To the degree that the issue you choose is one that really matters to you, you'll get that much more out of the sections that follow.

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The First Law of Performance

How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

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The First Law answers the question, “Why do people do what they do?” Although there are countless books, theories, and models on this topic, most provide explanations but don't directly alter performance. The First Law, on the other hand, gives the leverage that the rest of this book will capitalize on. Consider that when we do something, it always makes complete sense to us. On the other hand, when others do something, we often question, “Why are they doing that? It doesn't make any sense!” But if we got into the world of the person, and looked at how the situation occurred to him, we would experience that the same actions that we were questioning were completely and absolutely the perfect and correct thing for him to do, given how the situation is occurring to the person. Each person assumes that the way things occur for him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person. Not realizing this can make another's actions seem out of place.

So what exactly does occur mean? We mean something beyond perception and subjective experience. We mean the reality that arises within and from your perspective on the situation. In fact, your perspective is itself part of the way in which the world occurs to you. “How a situation occurs” includes your view of the past (why things are the way they are) and the future (where all this is going).

Although there certainly are facts about how and why things are the way they are, the facts of the matter are much less important to us than the way those facts occur to us. The First Law rejects the commonsense view of actions—that people do what they do in a situation because of a common understanding of the facts.

What gives the First Law the potential to alter performance is its relationship to the other two laws. At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we will show in the next two chapters that “the way a situation occurs” to people, and their correlated performance, can be altered through a certain use of language.

Given the different positions that well-informed, intelligent people often take on a situation, there is a significant difference between the objective facts of the matter and the way those facts occur to each of us. Again, we are not saying that there isn't a “real world.” We are merely pointing out that our actions relate to how the world occurs to us, not to the way that it actually is.

When people relate to each other as if each is dealing with the same set of facts, they have fallen into the reality illusion. To see the reality illusion at work, think of a person you aren't happy with at the moment—perhaps someone you've been resenting for years. In your own mind, think of words that describe that person.

You might say, “self-centered,” “doesn't listen,” “opinionated,” and “irrational.” You might be willing to swear on a stack of bibles that those words are accurate. But notice that you've described how the person occurs to you. As human beings, we can almost never see the occurring as an occurring. What we see is just the way it is.

Consider: How would that person describe you? Or in the terms we are using here, how do you occur for him? Perhaps “opinionated,” “angry,” and “resentful.” Perhaps some other way. When you look at it, often you see that we have very little experience of how we occur for others.

We're not suggesting that either of you is right or wrong, but rather pointing out the reality illusion at work. None of us sees things as they are. We see how things occur to us.

Before the exchange between the two women in South Africa, Antoinette Grib occurred to Selinah Makgale as untrustworthy, provoking anger and resentment.

What happened in this exchange is that Makgale identified and altered how Grib occurred to her. As she did, her actions toward the senior manager shifted, from cold anger to possible friendship. The First Law says that how a situation, or in this case a person, occurs goes hand in hand with action. The actions included an embrace and a promise of future action.

Consider the issues in your life, those parts of your life that aren't working. Consider issues at work and at home. Think about the performance challenge you identified earlier. You will take a big step toward transforming them—not merely trying to change them—if you see that you aren't seeing them as they are. The reality illusion will try to convince you that you are. But just as it is for the rest of us, what looks like reality is only how reality occurs to you.

This First Law, then, says that there are two elements: performance and how a situation occurs. These two are perfectly matched, always, with no exceptions.

The First Law and the Future

Another employee of Lonmin is Laolang Phiri, who lives in the nearby community of Marikana.

Laolang, muscular and of average height, looks like a running back for a college football team. He has bright eyes and a proud bearing. His open spirit stands in sharp contrast to his local origins—a shantytown where, even today, 40 percent of the population in his community are unemployed and 80 percent live in shacks.

When most mining companies opened their mines decades ago, they began a practice still standard today: recruiting employees from other countries—Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zambia. It's commonplace for these foreign workers to leave their families f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Further Praise for The Three Laws of Performance
• A Warren Bennis Book
• Books in the Warren Bennis Signature Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editor's Note
• Foreword
• Authors's Note
• Introduction: The Power of Rewriting the Future
• Part I: The Three Laws in Action
• Part II: Rewriting the Future of Leadership
• Part III: Mastering the Game of Performance
• Epilogue to the Paperback Edition
• Appendix : The Three Laws of Performance and the Leadership Corollaries
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement