What Is Your Performance Actually Protecting?

In the last issue, I looked at what happens when a strength quietly becomes something a person feels they can no longer set down. If you missed it, you can read When Strength Becomes an Obligation when you subscribe. I want to go a layer deeper now, into the performance itself.

Most conversations about performance sometimes stop at the behavior we can see. Someone works excessively, and the conversation turns to time management. A top performer who ends up working in a slow-paced environment can be perceived as “not following the pace.”

Delegation becomes difficult, and the recommendation is leadership training. Perfectionism appears, and the advice is to lower expectations.

Any of those interventions may help, but I still want to know something deeper before deciding where the real work belongs. Transformation is not a simple coaching or training program. It’s deeper.

What would it mean to this person if they were no longer the one who could handle everything?

That question often opens a very different conversation than the first. For one person, stepping back may raise fears of becoming irrelevant. For another, receiving help may feel uncomfortably close to incompetence. Someone else may discover that achievement has done more than produce results; it has also provided a sense of worth, stability, significance, or belonging that nothing else in their life currently offers.

The visible behaviors we often see cannot tell us which explanation is accurate. We move too quickly from observation to interpretation. Two leaders may display almost identical behavior while protecting entirely different parts of themselves (root issues), and understanding the behavior matters far less than understanding what that behavior actually means to the person living inside it.

These outward behaviors alone cannot tell us which explanation is accurate, which is why I remain cautious about labels that move too quickly from observation to interpretation. Two leaders may display almost identical behavior while protecting entirely different parts of themselves, and understanding the behavior matters far less than understanding what it means to the person living inside it.

This is part of the deeper work within Project SPICES Re+Calibration™. Rather than treating visible behavior as the problem, the work goes to the root, the innermost system, which is too often ignored even though it matters most to every human being. It begins by asking what the behavior has been protecting, compensating for, or managing on the person's behalf, and because the same behavior can serve entirely different purposes in different people, the work looks different for every person.

That is also why Project SPICES™ relies on a blend of ingredients matched to the individual rather than one formula applied to everyone.

That distinction between what a behavior looks like and what it is actually protecting leads directly to a question I think deserves its own issue, which is who a person is beneath every label they carry.

More soon.

Dr. Sarai Koo

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Book and Workbook: Organizational Misalignment: 155 Leadership Behaviors That Damage Trust, Culture, and Performance

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For Fun: Modern Day Game of Thrones: Creating Ineffective Agencies