You found your start up and you have adopted some key partners to help get your momentum. After long hours, product development cycles and potentially months or years later, you’ve grown to 25, 50, 75+ employees. You’re feeling overjoyed with a product market fit that’s scaling, happy investors and more. But now you have more organizational complexity, more to communicate and faster cycles you need to execute. Here’s a quick overview to help spur thinking of how you can align the stage or your team / company operationally to maximize potential.

The key to peak performance is consistency. And, even the best consistently achieving-achievers of us out there need an extra boost. Building on positive psychology, sports psychology and mindfulness techniques, these are 5 things I do each day to help get that extra edge. I’ve advised premier athletes to global CEOs and these practices have all helped them get a bit more from their consistent success to realize peak performance.

We’ve all experienced our organization to have core values. Maybe some of us can remember the era of these being posted on walls or company or team swag. Most of us have probably developed them because we know we need them to hold our culture together. Beyond your mission and vision, these have the power to be much more commanding, however, then just a talent branding or engagement driver. Values can be key drivers and definers of high performance behaviors that will unlock the doors to what you want to see on your road to success, which will not always be linear.

As is widely researched by Patrick Lencioni in “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team” and many others, Trust is the core and foundation of a high performing team. In order to build trust, as a leader, teammate and colleague: communicate expectations clearly and often. The key to a high performing team however, is to also provide specific and frequent feedback to guide towards success along the way. The consistency of both expectations and feedback will help overcome challenges, disagreements and misalignment. The continual sync of what’s ahead, what needs to be done and how performance is tracking towards these items will bring clarity and closure, allowing the focus on collective outcomes and success to be realized.

It feels good to be rewarded: either giving yourself a treat when you’ve accomplished something or to someone else to recognize their achievements. To realize high growth and fully experience a high performance culture, sync your total compensation strategy to propel the high performance you want to see. You can do this on an individual, team or organizational level. It’s fairly straightforward: adopt a Pay for Performance philosophy to reward high performance. Rewarding high performance with various levers at your disposal will help you continue to maximize potential and engagement, especially as things heat up in the job market.

In this busy day and age, self awareness is essential to success. We need to be able to recognize our behaviours and adapt to different situations that we face on a daily basis. The key word here is impact: in order to have the most effective impact, we must be self aware so we can recognize what we need to to in order to get there.

So how does reflection figure into all of this? Reflection, even a few minutes a day staring out the window of a conference room, can help us continue to build self awareness. These moments will not only help us process the events that we experience daily - all kinds of events, but also provide us with data about ourselves that we can apply to future experiences. 

Arguably the most valuable tool we all have at our disposal is planning. By taking time to plan, we are acting on the things we want to do and things we want to get done. We are also empowering ourselves to move forward, building positive momentum which in turn builds on itself. Not only that, but by taking time consistently to plan, are are acknowledging reality, making adjustments based off of that in order to achieve success in the future. 

Have you ever ended up on a project or in a meeting and wondered "How did I get here?" or "Why is this the best use of my time?" Well, hindsight is 20:20, but, we can eliminate excess, unneeded meetings and projects and overall boost our efficiency with proper planning. By planning I mean the process of planning, not necessarily plans. You can have the most bullet proof plans, but the actual process of enacting those plans and re-adjusting them to what is right in front of you is what will help you achieve success. 

This time of year, we all sit down and take some time for setting New Years Resolutions. Maybe we also set work goals. But do you write them down and make a plan, committing to achieve them? Time and time again, studies show that you're 80% or more statistically likely to achieve your goals when you write them down.

Not only that, but if you craft a plan to commit to your goals, you're even more likely to achieve them. So why don't we? A study by Statistic Brain, analyzed New Year’s goals, and found that very few people achieve their goals. They claim that just 8% of people achieve their New Year’s goals, with a resounded 92% that end up in failure. The study encouraged people to write down their goals in a specific, measurable way in order to achieve success.

It's December: time to look back at our KPIs, and face the facts: we've either succeeded or we've missed the mark. Either way, what did we learn, to help propel us in the next project, our 2018 KPIs and next year overall? Using reflection and celebration, we can raise the bar to fuel future wins.

The Selfication blog sums up some research on this well: Teresa Amabile from The Harvard Business School studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. When she and her associates designed and analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in seven companies they found something very interesting: The efforts of tracking small achievements every day enhanced the workers motivation. Amabile explains that the practice of recording our progress helps us appreciate our small wins which in turn boosts our sense of confidence. We can then leverage that competence toward future, larger successes.

During November when in the US at least, we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, let's turn our attention to just that this month. What if we spent a few moments each day giving thanks? Well, great news for all of us – it turns out that giving thanks boosts our well being and motivates us! 

According to a recent study by Harvard Business School, gratitude can provide us with extra well being both inside and outside the workplace. According to a CNBC article featuring this research, "taking the time to be thankful and appreciative for things you have received, tangible or intangible, makes you feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improves your health, helps you deal with adversity and builds strong relationships — all crucial traits both in and out of the workplace." 

For months I’ve brainstormed post topics and toiled over which the first one should be. When I stopped worrying and started to write, I realized that taking the first step – just starting was the answer. The rest continued to come easily because I had just kick-started my momentum muscle. Though a small task, this kind of block can occur in all aspects of our personal and professional lives. We most often see it show up in big ways that create a lot of stress and setbacks.