Creating and sustaining high performance in organizations is a critical business challenge. Firms face competitive pressure to get things done faster and more efficiently. The best practice for making a workforce a success comes from a participative design process. Leading High Performance drives participants to think and act in ways that will contribute to establishing and sustaining high performance. Building on the three “Ps”—people, process, and perspective—the course activities incorporate the systems thinking necessary to integrate disciplines of performance improvement, customer focus, learning, and change.

• All levels of leaders and managers who seek the tools and knowledge to help shift their organizations from ordinary to extraordinary.
• Executives committed to leading the continuous journey toward high performance.

Participants will:

• Be prepared to outperform their competitors in customer service and satisfaction, product quality, innovation, and productivity.
• Develop ways of thinking and acting that enable personal and team excellence.
• Explore the key relationships among quality, customer focus, personal engagement, and learning.
• Gain new knowledge and the necessary skills to make a measurable, unique difference within their businesses.

• Framework and Concepts Supporting the High-Performing Organization

– Creating and determining the characteristics of the high-performance organization
– Leadership as an engagement and distributive process
– Systems thinking: a framework for achieving customer focus and companywide improvement
– The learning/teaching perspective as central to sustaining high performance
– Understanding change as the dynamic of high performance


• Designing and Implementing a Performance-Improvement Process

– Comparative analyses of high-performance initiatives: quality, customer focus, and process efficiency
– Designing high-performance teams
– Sustaining high-performance momentum
– Structuring a performance-improvement process for your organization


• The Dual Focus: Providers and Receivers of High Performance

– Defining the provider/receiver relationship
– Linking employee and customer development
– Factors that enable personal and team excellence

• Senior Vice President, Finance/CFO
• Acquisition Management Specialist
• Operations Manager/Senior Vice President
• Director of Safety and Standardization
• Manager, Operations Control
• Director, Human Resources
• Sales Manager
• Manager, Aerospace Program Systems

Industry-Specific Application: Throughout the program, participants will be encouraged to actively assess the needs of their work environments on several dimensions such as capabilities, competencies, teamwork, empowerment, systems thinking, and leadership, and to relate specific course applications to the challenges within their own firms.

Q. Can you achieve a high-performance organization just through benchmarking?

A. Benchmarking reveals part of the picture, but it's not sufficient in itself. People drive the metrics. One of the features that makes Creating and Sustaining the High-Performing Organization unique is our emphasis on leadership and the human element in creating value.

Jack S. Goodwin
Independent consultant and executive educator.

Alexander B. Horniman
Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Business Administration and Senior Fellow, Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, The Darden School, University of Virginia.

Robert D. Landel
Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration, The Darden School, University of Virginia.