Three Laws of Performance
The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide.
In this blog, we will be discussing the second law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization. Our previous discussion of the first law of performance can be found here.
The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur for them.”
The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”
What does this mean?
From our previous article, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts. The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds from person to person.
The occurring world is given by what we say, to ourselves and to others. Each person says, using language, different things which cause situations to occur differently to from person to person.
Here is an example. Two members of the same sales team with equal amounts of training are selling the same product and have the same sales goals to reach. The task of selling their product is greatly influenced by how the task occurs to them. How the task occurs to them is shaped by their language, and more specifically, what they say about the task to themselves or others.
Making sales and reaching sales goals could occur as hard work and very difficult to one salesman. This is because he may say to himself or others, “nobody really wants this product.” This certainly would cause this task to occur, hence be experienced as, as hard and difficult.
On the other hand, the same task could occur as easy and fun for the other salesperson. This could be because the language he uses that creates the way the job occurs for him could be something like, “people cannot do without this product.” It is very likely that this salesperson will sell more and outperform the other.
One salesperson is more effective than the other because their performance is shaped by how the task occurs to them, which was created by their language/speaking.
In summary
The way to impact performance is to first distinguish the language already there and used regarding a certain situation. The next is to generate different language to create a new occurring regarding the task or situation.