What takes a team from high performance to Meta Performance™?

I want to get into that topic by telling you a story.

A few months ago, I was working with my coach when he gave me some feedback. I’d been wrestling with a leadership challenge I was facing. And he said: “Jason, I’ll tell you what your problem is.” I said: “What’s that?” And he said: “Jason, your problem is that you’re stingy.”

As soon as he said that, I got ticked; I was so defensive. I was so upset. I thought, You don’t know me. You don’t see what I give in terms of resources to charities and faith communities. You don’t know that I go to prisons and volunteer and work with people who are incarcerated. How dare he say that I’m stingy?

But in the coaching work, we have a saying that you want to look for the 10%, or even 2%, of what’s true of any kind of feedback.

So, he helped me settle down. Then he held a space for me to explore what could be true about that, what might be the 2%, where I am stingy.

I went home and did what I call a generosity audit. I looked at where I was withholding in my life, where I was being competitive, and where I was hoarding things in my life. I discovered that almost every single leadership challenge that was happening in my life was flowing from a place of me holding back, or where I was withholding certain things that I had that I can give to others, either clients or to my team, or even to myself.

This opened up a whole space of conversation for me, where I realized the question that I should be asking myself isn’t, ‘Am I generous enough?’. The question should be, ‘How generous am I?’. This has been a game changer for me, the Novus Global firm, and the way that we serve our clients.

What are the ways that you are being generous with your wealth? 

Let me introduce an acronym to you called ROCKETS. We believe that your wealth is like rocket fuel that propels your life forward. ROCKETS stand for:

• Relationships
• Opportunities
• Cash, of course
• Knowledge
• Energy
• Time
• Skills

These are all the different types of wealth that you have. You have skills, you have time, you have energy, you have knowledge, you have money, you have opportunities, you kind of gate protect, you have relationships.

The question is in terms of Meta Performing teams. You see, high performing teams are competitive; they try to beat each other. Meta Performing teams are generative, which means they try to serve each other.

The invitation I want to offer you is to explore what it would look like for you to increase your level of generosity to everyone you can. From your team and  your bosses, to the people who are mentoring/coaching you, to the people who follow you, the people who are less fortunate, to the people who are more fortunate to work, and is it possible that this could become the rocket fuel to your life? In order to fuel the rockets and the wealth in your life, you have to explore ways of being generous.

My coach tells me it’s not that he gives because he has, he has because he gives. I want to invite you to join me in this adventure of generosity. At Novus Global we don’t just want to be great coaches. We want to be good people. We believe that nobility is a competitive advantage, that being noble actually helps you create wealth and helps you know how to steward wealth better. That makes not only your life better, but also other people’s lives. So that’s the question. How generous can you be? 

Because I promise you as you begin to do that and you invite your teams into doing that, you will rise from high performance to Meta Performance™.