Interference and the Performance Wheel

Interference is the villain when it comes to performance. At InsideOut Development, we see this on a very regular basis — so much so that we have created entire modules within each of our programs dedicated to recognizing interference and removing it before it becomes an obstacle to success or impacts performance. 

Interference: The Impediment of Performance

What do we mean by the term “interference”? Interference is anything that blocks progress and keeps someone from performing to their highest capabilities.

Because this term can encompass a variety of hindrances, distractions, and interruptions within an individual's life, we’ve broken interferences down into two categories: external interferences and internal interferences.

External Interferences

An external interference is something within your environment that is blocking your progress, but it is also something outside of your control. Examples of external interferences in the workplace include things such as:

• Deadline changes
• Interruptions from colleagues
• Competing priorities 
• Information overload

While some forms of external interference are beyond any one person’s control, managers who are invested in creating a culture of coaching should be willing to listen to their coachees’ concerns and do their best to eliminate what external interference they can.

Sometimes this is as simple as updating a work policy or improving a communication or process protocol, as judgmental communication — both verbal and nonverbal — from other people is often the root cause of external interference.

When improvement in communication doesn’t eliminate external interference, one of the most important things you can do is plan around the bits of interference that you either think or know may be a problem, and then adapt as you go.

An important thing to remember is to avoid letting external interferences create more internal interferences.

Internal Interferences

An internal interference is something that is blocking your progress by affecting your mental and/or emotional states. Examples of internal interferences could include:

• Unproductive internal dialogue
• Obstructing others or playing the “blame game”
• Insecurity or self-doubt
• Feelings of fear, frustration, or being overwhelmed

While internal interferences can be caused by external interferences — for example, frustration at traffic not moving fast enough or confusion and mistakes made due to poor communication — we don’t always need an external interference to be thwarted by an internal interference.

After all, we don’t always need an external push to engage in self-critical dialogue or a reason to blame ourselves for something out of our control.

Controlling What We Can Control

So if we can’t control external interferences, how can we control internal interferences? Or is that even possible?

Because of the pervasive nature of interferences in our everyday lives, and the impact they have on performance, one of the components of creating a coaching culture within your organization is to remove the interferences that are under your control.

Overcoming internal interference isn’t easy, but by using the Performance Wheel, we can learn the ways in which interferences can come into our path, which is the first step to keeping them from impeding our performance.

But before we can remove internal interferences, we need to know where they are coming from.

Routes of Travel for Internal Interferences

There are three major avenues that internal interferences travel along: Knowledge, Fire, and Faith. If something is going to negatively impact performance, it will usually come along one of those highways.

Knowledge, or the first street internal interference tries to use, acts as an interference when you don’t have the knowledge you need or lack the skills required to accomplish a task. By adjusting your focus, you can block interference by learning a new skill or gaining knowledge that is vital to the task you’re attempting to accomplish.

Fire refers to the passion you may (or may not) have for accomplishing a particular task or achieving a higher metric of performance. Your application of focus will need to differ a little from the method we described above regarding focus and knowledge. 

Instead of focusing on the entire process, hone in on the part of the task that does invite your passion, such as a specific step or the part where you can cross it off your “to-do” list. This Fire will ignite interferences in your way so you can move past them.

Like Fire, interference within Faith is something almost everyone has experienced. The problem with Faith is that it very easily mixes itself in with our perception of reality. We believe something to be true, so it must be true. When these interferences occur, focusing not on reality but on what you can do to change that reality is key.

Overcoming Internal Interference Through Focus

The simplest and most accessible way to get rid of internal interference is through Focus — through changing what we pay attention to and how we pay attention.

Often, an organization’s leadership can push people into interference simply by overwhelming them with too much too frequently, repeated knowledge, or by the way we cascade goals or assign tasks.

Something as simple as tying a goal to compensation, particularly in a tight economy, can create huge interference for the employee who’s struggling to support a family and make ends meet.

It stands to reason that if we can chunk down the challenge into tasks that feel doable and then create a singular Focus on one or more critical variables of the task, we’re far more likely to build a high-performance environment.

As with individual performance, the principle of focused attention delivers results at all levels of team and organizational performance by increasing decision velocity — the speed and accuracy of decisions that drive performance.

Focusing on a few critical variables of performance shifts attention away from interferences such as complaining, backbiting, and turf wars. Through this shift in attention, Faith and Fire are unleashed, the use of Knowledge can be facilitated, and the business is transformed into a true “learning organization,” one with a culture of coaching as the foundation.

Using the GROW^® Model to Manage Interference

There is another more subtle but thoroughly devastating form of interference that needs to be mentioned, particularly because it is less likely to be immediately recognized: focused effort toward the accomplishment of a goal.

The problem occurs when your Focus and the Goal are actually a distraction from what really matters.

How often do you put your focus on a project or goal that doesn’t help you get any closer to your actual vision? Maybe the original concept of the goal was in the right place, but things got sidetracked. Or maybe the goal never fulfilled the necessary objective in the first place, but you didn’t realize it at the time.

The GROW Model, when used correctly, is intended to avoid this type of interference by ensuring your focus is on the goals that help move you forward in the direction you want — and need — to move by helping you follow the proper sequence in problem-solving.

Interference is a genuine threat to higher performance, but it is not an insurmountable one. The Performance Wheel and GROW Model provide a roadmap to overcoming interference every time it shows up.

Want to see how the GROW Model can help level up performance in your organization? Connect with a member of our coaching staff now.