3 Things That Separate Top Performers in Companies from the Rest

According to studies conducted by ‘‘change anything lab’’, where they studied the most influential and respected employees in more than 50 companies and dozens of industries, they discovered that best performers differ from the rest in 3 things:

1- Top Performers Know their jobs extremely well.

Each job has some fundamentals that you need to learn and master if you want to be a top performer.

Top Performers make sure that they are mastering the different aspects of their jobs. They keep improving and educating themselves consistently to make sure that they are good at the technical aspects of their jobs.

2- They Focus on the right things.

Remember when I mentioned in my book ‘‘What’s Next?’’ that if you want to climb the career ladder fast, then you should focus on the things that your top management are focusing on?

I also mentioned that you have to use and focus on the same business terms and ratios that they use so that you give them the impression that you are speaking the same language and are aligned with them.

Top performers contribute to tasks that are essential to the organization’s success.

If a company is having trouble with one of its products, top performers find a way to help resolve this problem. If the management mentioned that they are focusing on specific expansion goals in the next coming fiscal year, top performers make sure that the major activities that they do contribute directly and clearly to these goals.

To know what to focus on and what are the important strategic goals for your company and the top management, you have to be interested in understanding more about your organization and where it is going. You have to understand its vision and mission and long-term as well as short-term goals.

One small tip from my side, each big company, has a quarterly webcast where the top executives and the CEO announce the quarter results, the challenges, and if the company is going to meet the yearly goals or not. Most employees skip watching these webcasts because they are busy and on top of that, these webcasts are not mandatory. Do not do that. Do not skip these webcasts.

Watching them will give you great insights and will adjust your way of thinking regarding what to focus on and what to neglect. Not only this, but by watching the top executives speaking and if you focused carefully on their body language and voice tonality instead of only the words, you can discover a lot of things about where the company is really heading, and you can predict a critical situation, a crisis or even possible layoffs before they are announced.

After knowing what to focus on and the critical goals for your organization, you have to do your best to get assignments and tasks related to these goals and focus areas.

3- Top Performers Build a reputation for being helpful.

You may think that being supportive and helpful to others is a waste of time. This is the wrong assumption.

Top performers build a solid reputation that they are the go-to people. And because of this, they have a huge network and connections inside the company and are known across the organization.

They are motivated to help others, and that’s why they build good relations with them and a great external brand.

Now, is there anything that you want to add to this list? Write it down in the comments section below.