The Three Points of the Performance Triangle

I was talking recently with the COO of a business that's doing it tough – or should I say yet another business that’s doing it tough. Sales are slow, margins are thin, and they're paddling furiously to keep their heads above water. He described what he called the three points of the performance triangle: capability, mindset and process. Then he made an admission you don't often hear from someone in his chair. “We're okay on the first two,” he said. “We fall over on process.” 

That conversation sent me back over nearly 25 years of my own work. 

For most of my career I've worked with businesses on leadership, strategy and personal effectiveness. In the early years I worked with business owners and leaders and later with the leaders and their teams.  But when I mapped my work against his triangle, I noticed something uncomfortable. Leadership builds capability and shapes mindset. Personal effectiveness raises capability. Strategy sits above the whole system, pointing at the horizon. None of it touches process. 

Now for many of the leaders I worked with, that didn’t matter. Their processes were pretty good, it was their leadership and strategy that needed sharpening. But there were always those few who got the leadership bit, developed good strategies and still didn’t get the results they wanted.  

What I missed was process, and that’s because you can’t get to it from a workshop (I did try several times, but it was always too abstract). It wasn’t until we developed the Active Manager Program that we had a structure and a methodology that focused almost entirely on process – in this case, management behavior. 

The translation problem 

Process doesn't take care of itself. Research on strategy execution found that only 55% of middle managers could name even one of their company's top five priorities. That tells you that the strategy has little relevance to what they do on a daily basis. The strategy doesn't cascade down by itself — someone has to convert it into what a manager does on a Wednesday afternoon, and in most organizations, nobody does. 

That's why our work migrated from thirty thousand feet down to ground level: from business owners, to owners and their teams, and finally to the middle layer — the people who aren't writing the strategy and aren't doing the high-level leadership, but who determine whether anything actually happens. At that level, effectiveness comes down to the triangle: the capability to manage themselves and others, the right mindset, and a process they work inside. 

Capability first, mindset follows 

We start with capability, for a simple reason: people are already achieving the best results they can with the capability they have. If the results aren't sufficient, the capability has to change. So we teach managers to manage themselves, others, teams and processes. 

The mindset follows. I used to tell people that results are a product of what we do, and what we do is a product of how we think — so if you want different results, change your thinking. That's still true, but it's only half the loop. Changing what you do also changes what you think. A manager practices a new skill, gets a different result, and starts to think differently about themselves. They begin behaving at the next level up, and their thinking rises to meet the behavior.  

Sometimes you have to act as if, and let the thinking follow. There's the spark of an idea, but only through application does it become a flame.  

The neglected point 

Which leaves process — the point organizations neglect because it's not as glamorous as L&D or culture. I once worked with an engineering firm that had a perfectly good process and couldn't understand why their people would follow it to the letter one day and do it differently the next. Another client bled margin through the daily variability in how departments managed hand-offs. Neither business lacked capability or attitude. They lacked process consciousness — the discipline of doing the few things that matter, the same way, every day. 

Find your three to five 

And it really is a few things. The research here is remarkably convergent: across execution consulting, lean manufacturing, healthcare safety and Gallup's engagement studies, the same short list of daily leader behaviors keeps showing up — the team huddle, the structured one-on-one, the visible scorecard, front-line presence, recognition and accountability. Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement. The manager's daily behavior is the single biggest lever in the business, and the lever has only three to five moving parts. 

So here's the prescription. Find your three to five: the things that, done every day, would move your business. Write them down. Then track them honestly for ten working days — did each one happen, yes or no. Most leaders won't survive the first week, and that's the point. The data tells a truth that memory hides. 

Count it 

I do this myself. My big four currently live on a scrap of card I tore off an AirTag packet — one big call (one I’m reluctant about), Forbes comment, update my HubSpot tasks, at least an hour on business development.  

The card is a good first step. But I can ignore a card, and some days I do. What a card can't do is count how many times I actually did my big four and put that number next to my results. That's why we built our own system: our AI coach asks for the three to five each morning, records the honest yes-or-no each evening, and shows me the pattern — compliance on one axis, results on the other. The correlation is my coach: if I want better results, these are the activities I need to do more consistently.  

Your strategy is already written. Your people are already capable. Whether any of it happens comes down to the point that nobody wants to build. 

Ten days. Yes or no. Let’s get to work.