Taking personal ownership
It starts with you, deciding that this is something that you want to do and really committing to it personally. Top-down exhortations to improve business performance don't tend to sustain. But people who role-model high performance habits often tend to start a chain reaction in their teams and eventually their wider organisation.
Circles of influence
Know the drivers of business performance you can have an influence over and focus on them. Gracefully accept the things you can't and don't fixate on them (but be prepared to give constructive feedback if someone asks you "what's holding you back that you can't influence?").
Leverage, goal clarity and sequencing ("this, then that")
When you know what you could do within your circle of influence, the key question is what you should do with the resources you have. The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) indicates that (directionally) 20% of input effort creates 80% of outcome benefit. How can you be more focused on the goals you want to pursue to drive the outcomes you want to see? Even then, you may be overwhelmed by what needs to be done. Breaking down goals and sequencing them helps. Think of this as using the achievement of one goal to make others easier (like in 10-pin bowling, striking the first pin helps topple the others).
Goals versus actions
Many people and organisations believe the work is done when goals are defined. But defining a goal is one thing, working out how you are going to achieve it is another thing. And doing what you said you were going to do is yet another thing. Achievement of goals usually requires persistent pursuit of a series of actions, often repetitively, when you don't want to do it, or things go wrong unexpectedly.
Creating a better environment
Willpower and grit are great, but it's usually more sustainable to explore changing your environment to maximise the chances of the right things happening (e.g. if you're trying to get fit and lose weight, getting your sports kit ready the night before is good, having kitchen cupboards full of biscuits, crisps and sweets is bad). This also goes for the company you keep. Having people around you who will encourage you and keep you on the straight and narrow will maximise chances of success. This includes having access to coaching support.
Building helpful habits
We all have habits, which can either help us achieve what we want (or not). It's really useful to think deeply about what is really happening day in day out when it comes to following the actions we've said we're going to do. Let's just say that you've committed to do a brief team session at 9am every day to check in and review team performance, but it's not happening.
Habits have a repeatable "cue-craving-response-reward" pattern* and this helps us figure out how we can change them to make them work for us.
Aggregation of marginal gains ("compound interest" of continuous improvement)
Most performance improvement over time comes from cumulative small gains rather than massive leaps forward. Similar to compound interest in investment, regular small percentage improvements add up to significant improvements if sustained. For example, just 1% improvement every day leads to a doubling of performance in 69 days (2.2 months).
Measuring & tracking progress, understanding what's helping & what's hindering
Given what we've said so far, being able to link goals to actions to measures and then track progress is pretty important. It's helpful to do this simply and visually (think graphs) on a suitable frequency depending on the underlying measure. The really useful thing is understanding what are the factors driving improvement (can you have/do more of this), and what are the causes when things aren't improving, which takes us on to...
Problem solving
The first thing to think about is defining the the problem (e.g. despite making 10 cold calls a day, we aren't meeting our goal of 5 converted sales per week). Then understanding the background / root causes to narrow the problem down (e.g. customers don't want unsolicited cold calls, they want helpful emails that explain well crafted services they can easily try out). Then developing and testing solutions and putting the most effective into action - again, measuring the impact.
Self-control, personal resilience and staying the course
Often the path of least resistance is to go with the flow, allow interruptions, respond to whatever the boss has asked for today etc. It's much harder, but also much more valuable, to do the opposite e.g.
Constructively challenge herd instincts with data and reasoning
Maintain focus through distractions
Commit to doing something you said you would do, even though it's difficult and you don't feel like it
Have a constructive, challenging discussion about what we're saying no to if we say yes to something else (and what that means for results)
* Recommended reading: "Atomic Habits" by James Clear