Modelling top performers to improve team performance
Updated: Apr 23
Modelling top performance, sometimes called modelling experts and expertise, is the duplication of #topperformer talent and results.
Modern corporations have a reputation for attention to capital allocation and asset management. However, among their ‘human resources’ top performers (experts) have skills and capabilities (expertise) that often remain an untapped resource in terms of developing commercial effectiveness and productivity. Corporations do not have a track record for replicating the talent of top performing managers and front line staff that have direct impact on revenue, cost, productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.
Modelling Experts and Expertise uses the intersection of neuroscience, applied cognitive psychology, symbolic, implicit and analytic modelling techniques to discover the deep structure of how top performers produce their outstanding results. Further one can identify the critical subset of behaviours and skills that drive outcomes - the 20% that deliver the 80%. Custom-designed training and coaching programs can teach these effective strategies to average performers, improving their results and enriching their organisations.
Why Model? The world is filled with human beings manifesting an endless variety of behaviours and abilities. These human abilities are as diverse as being able to effectively negotiate, tell a joke, lead a large group, or operate a dragline. Many human beings are repositories of abilities in which they are expert, or "exemplars."
Depending on the complexity of the job, researchers have found that this expert performance is worth between a 19% and 120% productivity increase. We’ve seen instances where it is worth 600% to 1,000% productivity increase. Hard to believe? Remember the stories you’ve heard about sales person who sells 10 times more, or software developer who can produce error free code 10 times faster, than their peers.
Models have been developed for skills as diverse as accelerated language acquisition, sharp shooting, rock climbing, safe driving, and horse whispering to commercial patterns for communication, influence, excavator operation, front-line leadership, CEO leadership, creativity, and negotiation, to name a few.
What is Modelling Modelling can be thought of as cloning expertise. Note – it is about replicating the dna of the talent of an expert – not cloning the top performer. In the field of neuroscience modelling has two meanings. It can involve a suitably trained adult individual using an analysis free learning state to model experts in order to learn a new skill for him self or her self. It can also involve a qualified trainer and practitioner modelling exemplars in order to create useful descriptions of their abilities so others can learn them.
Whichever it is - the purpose of modelling is to transfer the ability of experts (i.e. top performers) to someone who needs or wants the ability of the experts in a manner that quickly develops unconscious competence. Done effectively, modelling can deliver significant performance improvement quickly.
Modelling, then, is the process of creating useful "maps" (descriptions of the structure of experience) of human abilities. Such maps are useful because they allow us to understand the experiential structure that makes it possible for a person to manifest a particular ability. Such maps are useful because they can make it possible for anyone to have that experience or ability by making that map their own.
Modelling is a process, i.e. it is something that happens over a period of time and, at the very least, involves:
Observing some experts who are achieving something (getting multiple descriptions); and
Establishing a map or sequence (a model) of what they are doing.
This is the bare bones of modelling; there is a lot more sophistication to it, although the models themselves are often simple. To start with there is more than one type of modelling. Second, there are a number of stages to the modelling process and third, a variety of skills are required to perform each stage.
What Results are Possible? Onirik has conducted many modelling projects with clients. For one client Onirik observed and modelled a number of the organisation’s top performing front-line sales teams, including the best performing salesperson with an average close ratio around 90%. Our consultants then transferred the model to sales managers and front-line teams.
Prior to our intervention the average close ratio was less than 15%. Four weeks after adopting the high performance models the average conversion ratio of their growing teams of new sales people had increased to over 70% and was still improving.