Peak Performance : Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees

This book outperforms the competition with employees' positive emotional energy. It takes a fired-up workforce to deliver consistently higher levels of performance than its competition. What fuels the fire? Emotional commitment to company success, says Jon Katzenbach. Drawing on an in-depth study of twenty-five enterprises - including Marriott International, The Home Depot, Hewlett-Packard, Southwest Airlines, and the U.S. Marine Corps - the author found distinct patterns in how companies engage their employees to capitalize on emotional energy.At the heart of "Peak Performance" lies Katzenbach's identification of five balanced motivational paths: the Mission, Values, and Pride Path, the Process and Metrics Path, the Entrepreneurial Spirit Path, the Individual Achievement Path, and the Recognition and Celebration Path. He contends that these paths create a framework of options for managers about where and how to generate emotional energy and how to channel that energy to achieve higher performance. Essential to each path is leadership's commitment to strike a balance between enterprise performance and worker fulfillment. Through its detailed case studies, "Peak Performance" highlights the various sources of emotional energy unique to each organization and the discipline companies need to follow their chosen paths. The book concludes with guidelines for managers seeking to reshape their practices to achieve better performance from their own workforces and gain the resulting competitive edge.