High-performance environments: Karl Aherne sets out five critical areas of focus when creating high performance.

AuthorAherne, Karl
PositionGENY

Success is all about creating the right environment to drive performance. Creating a high-performance environment is crucial, with near-endless choices and decisions. Above all, high performance is about outcomes, not output. If you don't have a measurable outcome then you're doing something wrong. Five critical areas worth focusing on are:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

1 THE MACRO ENVIRONMENT It's essential to identify the best physical location that will provide your start-up with every advantage possible.

2 COLLABORATIVE WORKSPACE Your workspace should empower and help you to drive your business forward. The environment should be highly challenging but supportive. Anything else will be either too adversarial, ambivalent or too soft. What you're looking for are "critical friends" who will tell you when you stink. Get the pain upfront and early. Suck it up, it's better in the long run.

3 PEER REVIEW It's sometimes said that the best entrepreneurs have some form of attention deficit disorder. This is one reason why many high-growth entrepreneurs set milestones. Often, the entrepreneur's mind is constantly moving onto the next thing so it's important to stay focused and deliver. At Wayra Ireland, one of Telefonica's start-up accelerators, we've developed an effective way of helping entrepreneurs drive momentum. At its most basic, we start with a long-term vision, then break it down into smaller milestones based on key challenges. At the fortnightly objectives sprint, Wayra's cohort of start-ups each take a turn to present to the group on how they performed against their objectives set two weeks previously. There are usually three or four objectives that are specific and challenging. Once the start-up founder has explained to the group to what degree they have delivered on their objectives, the other start-ups score them between zero and ten. The...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT