How to Create High Performance at Scale with Role Excellence Profiles

The following is adapted from Thrive.

Think of the top performers at your company. These employees are usually highly engaged in their work, aligned with the company’s priorities on a foundational level, and innovative in the ways they solve problems and create value.

A challenge for many leaders, however, is that they have significant variability in performance levels across their team of direct reports. This means that the top performers are often stuck picking up the slack of those with substandard performance. Leaders often rely on their best people to make extra sales, or increase production to account for deficits in other areas. This can create frustration, resentment, and worst of all, even apathy in top performing individuals, who often experience burnout. All of these things lead to erosion of performance, and ultimately, regrettable attrition.  

Consider what it would be like to have a company full of top performers: new employee onboarding and time to proficiency is compressed, incumbents have a clear blueprint for success in their role, and in creating massive customer value. Employees openly share best practices and inspire even greatness in each other. Engagement and performance across the team soars.  As a consulting firm focused on transforming workforce engagement and performance, this type of clarity, focus, leverage, and impact is what we do best. 

We leverage a powerful, outcomes-based approach called Role Excellence Profiles (REP)  to help leaders shift the performance in the majority of their workforce to create more value for their organization and for their clients. 

We’ve outlined a breakdown of the REP, process, application, and benefits,  so you can start learning from your top performers to replicate higher levels of performance at scale.

A Big-Picture Look at the REP

The Role Excellence approach focuses on identifying how your top performers approach their work and what they actually do to be so effective. These insights are then laid out in a performance map that is used to guide others to replicate those behaviors. Through interview, observation, and case-based analysis, exemplary performers reveal what is needed to accelerate the performance in their role.

Typically, the vast majority of business results are produced by a small percentage of the individuals in a given role. The REP enables you to unlock the potential of the rest of your workforce by:

• Codifying the primary accomplishments and outcomes produced by top performers in their role
• Capturing explicit indicators of success
• Identifying key actions top performers do to create undeniable value
• Highlighting accelerators of and barriers to higher levels of performance.

Having homed in on the factors necessary for achieving excellence in specific roles and enabling the organizational systems to focus on and drive the right behaviors, you’ll benefit from:

• More consistent and predictable performance
• Shorter time to proficiency in a role
• Streamlined training, saving time and money
• More time spent creating value for customers and your company
• Increased revenue and profits  

REPs should be performed only for roles that produce results that are critical to the success of the organization and support the strategy of the enterprise. The goal is not for people to be busier; rather, we want them to be more successful.

The REP Research Process: Analysis and Observation 

To start creating an REP, identify the most important qualitative and quantitative metrics for a critical role, then identify the individuals who consistently achieve these measures of success.

Next, have small group discussions with the selected individuals to learn their perspective on the most valuable outcomes they believe their role is responsible for producing (you only want to pick the absolute best of the best - the “top one-percent’ for these kinds of discussions. At this point, there is no value in learning from average or substandard performers). The average role is responsible for producing four to six outcomes (primary accomplishments). 

From there, perform 1:1 interviews with each of the designated individuals, while also conducting a case-based analysis to have individuals walk you through real examples of how they do their work and how they create value. These interactions are most effective when done in the natural work setting for the role, and can be enabled by remote technologies where it is not possible to be colocated during the conversation. The analysis, whenever possible, should include real-time observation.

High performers typically find ways to succeed no matter the state of the overall work system. Lack of feedback or easy access to resources won’t slow them down. They set up their own methods of performance measurement and find ways to get what they need to do the job. If they are overloaded or stretched too thin, they come up with an algorithm for prioritization in order to produce important results in a timely fashion. They know which requests to ignore, and which meetings to skip. These insights are critical to capture, so others in the organization can benefit from these approaches. 

We capture their mental models through these in-depth observations and analysis. Following this analysis, we map the accomplishments back to the behaviors, and then determine what an employee (novice through seasoned veteran) needs to know in order to replicate the appropriate behaviors and produce the same valuable results.

A Closer Look at the REP Document 

To create a formal or structured REP document, record the following key aspects of the role in question:

Accomplishment Details

• Primary accomplishment
• Importance
• Difficulty
• Indicators of success
• Interactions
• Tools/resources

Influences 

• Accelerators
• Barriers  

Tasks

• Key tasks
• Frequency (of the key tasks) 

Creation of the REP does more than document key attributes of top performers; it contains the details needed to design a well-targeted learning path, both to onboard new performers and to better equip average-performing incumbents.

When Should a Company Use The REP? 

Companies should use the REP every time excellent performance of a role or group of roles is critical to the success of a business unit and/ or the broader organization. Though everyone’s contributions matter, not all roles make a critical difference.

We know that an REP may be needed when a role:

• Is customer-facing
• Has high performance variability among role incumbents
• Significantly impacts the business results
• Exposes the organization to a high degree of risk
• Is critical to the successful rollout of a new business strategy or transformation
• Has high turnover resulting in significant impact to customers and/or onboarding costs

Knowing what top performers do to produce outcomes of value allows us to take a lean approach to learning and performance. Individuals focus on learning only the critical subject matter that helps them perform in ways that create maximum performance acceleration and impact in their role. 

Create a Culture of High Performance with REPs

The REP is one of the most powerful tools and processes you can leverage to shift performance in your organization. Creating clarity around what excellent performance looks like and using that new standard as the design point for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, coaching, performance management, and career mobility can have a significant impact on your organization’s top and bottom-line business results. 

For more advice on business transformation, you can find Thrive on Amazon.

Andrew Freedman is a lifelong advocate for maximizing human potential and creating positive change, personally and professionally. For over 25 years, he’s been a driving force in designing strategies that provide leaders a foundation to translate individual, team, and organizational talent into tangible business growth. As Managing Partner of SHIFT Consulting, he’s helped countless companies across diverse industries flourish through vibrant company cultures and a high performance mindset. Additionally, through his work as an affiliate faculty member of the University of Baltimore, Andrew’s continued goal is to use his insatiable passion for human performance to inspire new generations of business leaders with the art and science of creating and executing successful, people-focused business strategies.

Paul is President, Founder, and Chief Performance Architect at Exemplary Performance LLC. Designing high-performance work systems is Paul’s passion. Working across sectors (financial services, high technology, telecommunications, etc.) and functions (sales, product development, customer service, operations, management, etc.), Paul leverages his experience with Fortune 500 organizations to help clients achieve exceptional results by optimizing the performance of teams and individuals.