How the work happens is as important as What work happens.

How you interact with your team is as important as what you’re asking from them. In the same way that how you drive your car is as important as the drive itself. 

If I want to drive from Marseille to Paris—a trip of 770 km—there’s more to it than simply driving for 8 hours. I need to have a car that’s been serviced regularly so it won’t break down. I need to make sure I put the right fuel in it, that the tyres are at the right pressure—too high and the risk of flat tyre increases and if too low, fuel economy and handling decreases. I need to drive differently in dense city traffic when I’m leaving Marseille and arriving in Paris than when I’m driving at 130km/h on the motorway for 5 hours. Different hazards are more likely in city traffic than on the autoroute. I drive in top gear at 130km/h on the motorway and might not get out of 3rd gear or past 30 km/h in the city. I stop for a break and a stretch every 3 hours to maintain my ability to concentrate for the next 3 hours. 

This might all sound obvious: isn’t this just ‘driving properly’?

You think it obvious because you understand the optimum states for car maintenance, driving in the city, and driving on a motorway, and for you as a driver. You adapt how you drive, and you prepare the car for the drive to ensure the optimum driving experience and driving outcome (getting to Paris without accident, breakdown, as fast as possible with the least stress).

So too as a manager, you have an understanding of the optimum states for people and team. And probably most of the time your team gets to where it’s going because of it. 

If you haven’t maintained your car properly, or you don’t ‘drive properly’, or you’re too tired to drive, you will likely have a breakdown or worse, an accident.

The thing with people is that they absorb a lot of non-optimum handling, and their breakdown states generally degrade gradually rather than all at once. Your team often won’t show that you’re wearing them out until it’s too late.

But like anything, you will get the best experience if you treat things according to their optimum state, and if you don’t you risk breakdown or an accident. 

A ‘people breakdown’ not only stops the work happening but it damages the person, the people, the relationships, and the total possible future performance of the team. In face—depending on where you work—as a manager you may be legally liable for the psychological safety of your team.

Much of management and leadership training contains strategies and techniques for building people performance, but rarely do we focus on the first principles of it. Start from the foundational knowledge and the strategies and techniques flow easily. Without starting from there, people performance techniques you’ve learned can dissipate—forgetfully, for lack of time or mastery.

For us as leaders, the No. 1 people performance strategy is to understand what the optimum state for people is, and to consciously train ourselves to behave consistently with that, and actively create an environment that sustains that. Actively working to keep your teams’ working conditions optimum: that is the job.

Treat people like (adult) people and you will get the best results. Treat your people better than you treat your car! 

Obvious right? Looks easy, is hard.

To paraphrase famed management thinker Chris Argyris, “people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.”

We all have moments when we leave someone wounded by something we’ve done, said, not done, or not said. And most often we haven’t done it intentionally. This unintentional damage is as destructive as intentional damage. The result is still the same—lost capacity for high performance.

One of our critical jobs as managers is to constantly be creating a work environment that generates this optimum state. The performance of your team and your program depend on it.

So what is the Optimum State for People (at work)?

To feel cared about, and to make progress.

That’s it. There’s a lot rolled up in these two things, but that’s it.