Evolution of Excellence: Transitioning from High Achiever to High Performer – with John Drury

In this special episode of The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, Jo is joined by John Drury who is a Business Mentor who helps business owners ensure their businesses serve their life. John is also Jo’s husband. 

In this conversation, Jo and John discuss the difference between being a high achiever vs a high performer, why high achievers can be the bottleneck in their business, and the skills needed to manage and lead people. 

John Drury had over 24 years of Senior Leadership experience in the Not-for-Profit sector, and 2 years as General Manager of a small business in Western Sydney, before launching his business mentoring consultancy in 2010. His ‘whole of life’ approach enables busy high achievers to better integrate work with all that is important in their lives. He is the author of the book ‘Integrate’. You can find out more about John (and buy a copy of his book) at his website. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Purple Co 
• Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook Group 

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Jo:

And welcome to another episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. It is I, Jo Muirhead, the host of said podcast. And today I’m gonna be interviewing, maybe interviewing my husband John. And his name is John Drury. Sometimes he’s known as John Muirhead. He doesn’t like it when he is known as John Muirhead. <Laugh>. We don’t have the same surname, and that’s quite okay, people. The world hasn’t ended. And we are the parents of the Smudge and the Smudge is our very much indulged caboodle, who I’ve just understood is not in either of our offices right now. So, John, before I get stuck into asking you all the questions I wanna ask you, can you just share with us a bit about who you’re and what you do to help people these days right now in this space?

John:

<Laugh>. Hello. Hi, everybody. And I’m Jo’s husband <laugh>

Jo:

Smart pants, <laugh>.

John:

I do a few things. But I work as a business mentor and basically I call myself that. So I have run a large organisation in the past. I’ve run small businesses and I bring that experience as well as some coaching, training and lots of reading and tools that I’ve got. I bring that to my clients. We were mostly small business clients, so five to 50 staff helping them basically grow their business, get their team growing and functioning well, and then working and helping them get some life back so that they they’re not caught up in their business 60 hours a week or more, but so that their business starts to serve their life. That is one of my mantras. And that’s a big part of what I do. And then I also mentor some high achievers, helping them think about how they become a consistently high performer rather than just bluffing their way through ’cause They’re pretty good at a lot of things.

Jo:

Yes. Thank you very much. Now, for those of you who are listening, going, oh, that’s, that’s Jo and Jo’s husband, Jo must be so lucky to have somebody of such calibre as her husband who can ask all those great coaching questions. And she must get great coaching advice all the time.

John:

<Laugh>

Jo:

A really good coach holds you accountable, and that can be really uncomfortable. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that right now. I love John as my husband, but he is an exceptional coach and mentor. And I have watched him work with businesses and humans for a long time, and he has this incredible ability to help people realise their own potential with incredible integrity. He holds up a mirror to make sure that we’re actually doing the things that we say we wanna do in a way that we say we wanna do, which is usually about honouring ourselves. And I guess I wanna talk about this concept today of high performance versus high achievement. Because we, as health professionals, you’ve worked with me, you’ve worked with some of my clients, you’ve worked with other businesses. We like to think of ourselves as a unique breed, and we will often use language like, I’m an overachiever, I’m a high performer, I’m an overachiever, I’m a high performer. And in the past, I’ve been one of those people until you started to help me understand that, that’s actually not where you wanna end up. So can you kind of help me understand, well help my audience understand <laugh>, what is a high achiever and what is a high performer?

John:

Okay. So my version, my answer to that question: high achievers are someone who’s used to being successful. They’re used to making things work and probably the education system suited them, or they got out of the education system and then found that they were actually good at stuff, whereas school told ’em they weren’t <laugh>. But they’ve learned they can do well. They can make things happen. The challenge. And they’re usually good at a lot of things. So the challenge with that is that they can rely on that ability and can start to bluff their way through. So in the midst of things they say, well, I’m not quite sure what we’re doing here, but they’ve learned that they can make it so they act certain, they act like they know what they’re doing, <laugh>, and they usually get through and usually do pretty well.

And so they’re winging it. And probably inside that feeds an imposter syndrome ’cause they think, well, I managed to get through that. I have no idea how I did that. Or I’m, I’m grateful that it worked, but I don’t. So the high achiever can rise to the occasion, trust their own ability, usually has good ability and can make things happen most of the time. But the challenge, and that’s in their work and around their life, when they put effort in, they usually get a result. The difference between a high achiever and a high performer in my view is that the high performer is there’s a consistency to it. So high achievers will rise to the occasion, make things happen, but then other things around their life are not necessarily organised or in place. So they’ve not got things in place to be consistent about that. And so to rise from high achiever to consistently high performing, you actually need to make sure your life is working together. All the aspects of your life. I call it integrating. I don’t believe in work-life balance. I wrote a book about that. You can see it right there behind me.

Jo:

For those of you who are not watching the video, John wrote a book called Integrate. We’ll put a link in the show notes. <Laugh>

John:

I have learned personally and in all of my working with people over many years now, that the things that undermine us, or sabotage or get in the way of our success usually come from the neglected areas of our personal life rather than from our competitors or from business conditions or, or whatever. So it’s a health issue or it’s a relationship breakdown. Or it’s a 14, 15 year old child that no longer wants to relate and is kind of running amuck. It’s ageing parents that we weren’t ready to be looking after. Maybe it’s that we had the business going well, but we’ve never had any wealth creation strategies. We’ve not thought about that until it’s too late. All sorts of things. So to be a consistently high performer, you actually have to be deliberate about things consistently. A high achiever can rise to the occasion and then move on to the next thing. But a lot of their life will be a bit chaotic. And some people think that’s normal. Some people like that. They think that’s okay. They plan their work. They are confident in their work, but the rest of their life kind of just happens. And that can be good, but it also can be disastrous.

Jo:

So having been the high achiever, it was very obvious to you and then became obvious to me that it was my crash and burn. I would rise, I would take charge. It would all be about me. I was the only person who could solve the problem. I was the only solution to the problem. We got through the problem, I solved, said problem, and then I crashed. And that’s just not sustainable. That’s not high performance.

John:

Yeah. Very hard to work with that person.

Jo:

Well, yeah. Because we’re chaotic and it’s like walking around on eggshells. It’s like, how’s she gonna be today?

John:

Well, yeah. That can be about mood or temperament and so forth, but also don’t follow any regular processes or patterns. And so to build a team, you need to have a lot of things consistent, to empower people to function. So you’ll tend to always be the bottleneck in your team if you’re a high achiever rather than a high performer. You won’t learn how to work through people, which is the key to leveraging an organisation or any business. So it’ll always spin around you and you’ll be the bottleneck. And there’ll always be a ceiling on your business or on your life.

Jo:

That’s so powerful. I wanna help people understand that bottleneck component. ’cause so many of us have come up from, we’ve been solo clinicians, so it has been all about us. And without any genuine leadership or management or operational training, we’ve built a team. We don’t really know what we’re doing, but the team still functions. But it’s all about us because the business is still all about us. And then we get tired, or we get burned out, or we get resentful, or we get frustrated and the team stops performing and we blame the team. But really we haven’t learned how to work through people. So you talked about this bottleneck, and don’t use me as the example necessarily, but what types of things have you seen where the owner or the leader in the business is the bottleneck? What sorts of things can you see in that business happening?

John:

Well, okay, a number of things. Communication all has to go through the business owner, then they complain about how many emails they are cc’d in <laugh>. But if something happens without their knowledge, they freak out. So they become the bottleneck. So that’s communication. Also decision making. People aren’t empowered to make decisions. They’re empowered, they’re given responsibility, but not much authority. And so that’s a recipe for frustration for an employee. If you’ve ever had a lot of responsibility, but no authority to actually make things happen or make a decision to change something. That’s incredibly frustrating. And it means that everything comes back to the owner every time. And I’ve had business owners complain to me, say, well, they come to me like they want to spend $300 on something. I said, well, have you ever told them that they are empowered to make a decision about how much money can they spend in their area? Have you ever talked through that? Have you got a decision making matrix in place to know which decisions need to come back to the boss and which ones don’t? No, they don’t even know what that is. So that’s two examples. Decision making and communication, but all sorts of things that if someone is a high achiever and everything’s built around them, they don’t necessarily have a clearly articulated vision that they’re accountable to or a strategy for that vision that they’re accountable to, so that the strategy could change. And depending on what they get excited about or what conference they went to last week or something. And so the team is always going, oh, what are we gonna get into now? And then if the strategy keeps changing, the teams start to go, they’re not gonna believe you. Like, oh, here’s your latest idea. See how long this one lasts. I’ve heard that over and over from team members. And so nothing consistent or nothing gets built long term. It’s all about responding and reacting and then falls back on the business owner. And then they complain that they can’t get good team members. I said, well, okay, let’s look at your team and let’s look at how to best manage them. And I teach them how to lead, basically. That’s what I do.

Jo:

You do teach people how to lead. And when people understand their responsibilities as leadership instead of micromanagement there’s a whole heap of releasing that goes on. So, help us understand some of the examples of a micromanager, ’cause none of us want to be one. And some people have heard that word and they’ve switched off right now, and they’ve gone, oh, that’s not me. Yeah, it probably is <laugh>, let’s be honest. If you like control, if you like certainty, it probably is. If you like significance. It probably is. So what sorts of things need to change in a person, in the leader of the business, for them to stop being that high achiever and become a high performer? What are some of the things that you deliberately work on with them?

John:

Okay. So to me it comes back to what I call self-respect. So you’ve gotta build your business around who you are, what your vision is, what your values are and what you’re good at. And then you need to be aware of what you’re not good at. And be okay with that ’cause none of us are good at everything. So that requires a level of security at core, and that’s the missing part. High performers can be, and I’m not saying this is a blanket statement, but often it’s the case that they’re insecure. They don’t want things happening in their world that they didn’t do or they didn’t okay. Or that a good idea they didn’t come up, they claim or own the idea, even though it came from another person. So people in the business and the team are not necessarily free to suggest things. You’re quick to criticise and put things down and be a bit negative about stuff that’s not working, but not necessarily creating an environment where people take ownership and want to contribute and bring ideas where no idea’s a bad idea. But you’re able to talk about stuff where you’re secure enough to be a bit vulnerable and say, listen, this is where we’re at right now. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t have a fixed plan about how to get to where we want to go. I know where we want to go ’cause our vision’s clear. I don’t have a fixed clear plan yet about that. I’d love you to help me. You are good at this. You’re good at that. So they understand and they’ve bothered to get to know their team and they know what they’re good at, and they pull that out of their team members by being a bit vulnerable about what they don’t know, or especially if they’re not, if they know that they’re weaknesses, they’re not good at like, putting all the steps in place. Some people are great at vision and knowing where they want to go, but they’re not necessarily good at all the steps. It’s actually rare to have both abilities.

Jo:

I’ll put my hand up there and we talk about this a lot. I’m great at vision, and I can come up for a strategy for the vision as well. It’s like, these, this is the way we’re gonna get to where we wanna go. What I’m terrible at is the linear A to Z steps. And we know this for a fact, as soon as Jo tries to give direction at an A to Z level, I confuse people. I irritate people. And it’s so funny because my team now, I have a team of people who are performing highly and they go, Jo, can you just leave us alone to do the job

John:

<Laugh>

Jo:

Like, we know where you want us to go. We know you’ve given us the outcome that you want. Can you just leave us alone? Stop trying to tell us how to do it. And I feel like I’m being helpful. Like, I want you to do it this way, because that’s the only way I know. And I’m going, I’m being so helpful. Look at me. I’m being so helpful. My team will love me. Meanwhile, they’re reading instructions or hearing instructions from me, and they’re going, what the heck just happened? Who’s this woman? Has she had enough coffee today? <Laugh>.

John:

Yes. And you’ve become secure enough to say, to say, okay, happy to step back, let you work it out. Or do you need any help? Ask the question rather than tell. That’s a big different move from a directive leader to a more coaching kind of leader who draws out the best in people and asks questions about things rather than telling them what must be. So if you respect yourself enough, others will respect you much more naturally. You won’t have to demand respect and well, you can’t. But if you respect yourself and look after yourself and put good boundaries in place in your world, and aren’t always reacting and responding and everything else, but you’re fairly deliberate about the way you do things, then others will respect you more easily. And things can work. You can empower your team. The other thing is you’ve gotta then get the team on board in their roles and make their roles about the outcomes that they are meant to deliver for the organisation. Rather than about a list of tasks or about the amount of time they put in. So if they’re delivering the outcome and they do it a different way to you, who cares? As long as the outcome is delivered and the goal is achieved, and that should be how it is. So you get an agreement about the outcome, and they get them to own it. And then let them go and say, if you need anything, let them check in. Or you check in occasionally and say, how’s it going? But it’s not about telling them how they must suck eggs.

Jo:

<Laugh>. I know you are working with a lot of people of a similar generational age. We were so used to the clocking in, clocking out where it was easy to measure performance because a person turned up at nine and they finished at five. And the pandemic showed us that most people don’t wanna work like that. Most people like that. Most people these days and a lot of our Gen Xers are going, they’re entitled. They haven’t earned their stripes. Because we’ve got employees or who are sitting there going, just tell me what you want done and leave me alone to get it done. So how do we help ourselves shift? Because that was so uncomfortable for me, and that was about me not feeling like I was in control. How do you help somebody like me shift from being, I need to see it all, touch it all, see the clock in, see the clock out, look, track the KPIs every day. I mean, that’s how I was taught. My national management role was, you know, I got chastised if we were under budget by 0.02 of a billable hour on a Monday, like <laugh>, how do you help someone like me shift to an outcome based direction? Because that feels risky.

John:

Yeah. It does. But it’s about knowing the person. You’ve gotta build a relationship with your team. You’ve gotta know them well, understand their capabilities, understand where they like to help where, where they actually like you to be involved and where they like you to back off <laugh>. And basically it’s little by little. It’s trust grows little by little. And if they perform well with this much, you give them more opportunity. So you gotta keep focused on the outcome and not try to control the process unless the process is really critical to the business in some way.

Jo:

Yeah. So for us as health professionals, we need to have a process where it’s not just about how many clients did you see today? It’s like, did you provide quality care? Are your notes up to date? Are your plans up to date? Have you done your insurance billing? Have you reported to all the people you need to do? Like, it’s not about skiving off or not doing tasks, but it’s also not about going, hey, John, I noticed that it’s Tuesday morning at 7:30 AM and you are under your budget. Like, you’re under your outcome performance by 0.2 of available hours yesterday. What are you gonna do today to make that up when you’ve still got another four days in the week?

John:

Yes, if you’re on like that, then what they’re gonna do today is quit <laugh> or take sick leave. It’s just totally unhelpful. And I’m a Boomer rather than a GenXer. And I’ve never managed people with that kind of intensity of micromanaging. And if people do that, I’m sorry, <laugh>.

Jo:

Yeah, we do it because we’ve come from agencies or government departments or really large corporations because this is still back in the industrial revolution when we had that whole time in motion study done, which is irrelevant now. It’s so old. It’s outdated. It’s not useful. But that’s where we came. So we don’t have any other template to follow

John:

Okay, well, to me, it’s what you must do these days. And maybe why so many employees are disengaged and struggle in the work environment, and leave their bosses. They leave their bosses rather than their jobs. They might love the work, but they hate the environment. So it is so important that you learn, build connection, build relationships, to get to know the person, actually care about who they are. That’s so important. Find out a bit about what they’re passionate about. What fires ’em up, You’re not trying to become their best friend, but have meaningful conversations consistently with them so that you get to know them at a deeper level, the key people. And then help them. Help them understand how what they do serves the organisation. So this is how what you do makes a difference in people’s lives and helps us as an organisation do what we do really well. So it’s gotta be about something that matters. If my job is just doing a whole lot of stuff that really only matters when I don’t do it properly, that’s so bad. So how does what I do every day make a difference in people’s lives? Not just make money for the company? How does it make a difference in people’s lives if they can’t see that they’re not gonna be engaged or put in? And then as you help them with that, and then you find out stuff about them, say, well, if you’ve got any ideas about how to do this better, or about how we could explore more things, happy to hear them and make sure there’s a two way street. It’s not just telling it’s, but it’s receiving. And then in the team environment, create that too by setting a tone and, and being a bit vulnerable, being secure enough to say, Hey, I need you guys. I need your help. But I don’t have all the answers to everything. That’s actually empowering to say that <laugh>, it might feel like you should know everything, but everyone knows you don’t. So why pretend?

Jo:

Well, and it’s obvious, right? I was that leader who felt like I needed to know all the things. And do all the things, because if I didn’t, then that somehow diminished me, but it wasn’t until I started seeing the capabilities in other people, I’m like, I would never have thought to do it that way. That’s such a better way to do it. Why aren’t we doing it that way? Can we please make that now the standard?

But I wanna speak into this thing because you talk about being vulnerable, and I think we need some wisdom here because as leaders in our businesses, we should not be going to our team members and spilling our guts. No, this is not, we don’t have a temper tantrum. We don’t talk about other employees. We don’t and moan about competitors. So how do we be vulnerable and share what’s going on and not be unwise? Like how do we learn to do that? Because there’s not a checklist.

John:

<Laugh>. No. <laugh>. Brené Brown’s the queen of vulnerability and she’s articulated this topic so well, but she says she doesn’t share stuff she’s going through. She shares it after she’s gone through it. So to be real, you don’t just pour out your problems that you haven’t sorted out yet. Where it’s relevant to your team, you might say, well, yeah, I’ve actually been through a difficult time in the last few months. You might have noticed a little bit. I hope I haven’t been a problem. Or I hope it hasn’t hindered the work in any way. But I’ve been dealing with a bunch of things in my personal world, and you don’t have to share details, unless you want to, but share things after you’ve gone through them or lessons learned, but be a bit vulnerable about stuff,  that you’ve made mistakes you’ve made in the past or things that you’ve had to learn. Not to say you’ve learned everything. But this is a process where I’ve had to grow and learn. And this environment here is hopefully one way you can grow and learn. And where mistakes don’t get caned. Or chastised. But it’s an opportunity to learn. You say, okay, well, this has happened. That’s a shame. It’s happened, but how can we learn? What can we learn from this? And maybe a mistake made twice or three times that, that’s then something that’s gotta be talked about in a different conversation, but honest mistakes that are made by people who just didn’t know, or they’re learning or they went too fast or whatever. That’s a learning opportunity. And again, you’ve gotta come back to being secure enough to deal with your own emotion.

You always gotta deal with your own frustration or emotion first and not put that on the team or put that on the individual. So you deal with yourself first, and then deal with the situation. It’s basic conflict resolution. Then you deal with the conflict inside you, then you’re better placed to deal with conflict between people if you’ve got a conflict between employees. So it is about dealing with you. So to be an effective leader and a consistently high performer, you’ve got to be able to lead yourself really well. So that’s to do with managing your mood, managing your emotions, and your own emotional wellbeing. So your social and emotional intelligence is really critical to be aware of yourself and manage yourself, to be aware of others and manage others. That’s the whole realm of social and emotional intelligence.

And they’re the skills. It’s funny, 15 years ago I started as a business mentor, and it was very hard to sell that kind of service. Now people are lining up and saying, Hey, can you help? ’cause they’re realising that yes, social emotional intelligence is so critical to people management. Anyone who’s working with and trying to build teams and motivate people and get an environment where people love to be every day, whether it’s in the room or on Zoom or wherever. But a workplace that people love to be at, which is what we all aspire to. You’ve gotta learn how to build that. And it requires really high levels of social and emotional intelligence. The good news is, whereas your IQ, your intelligence quotient, it’s kind of a fixed thing. I think it’s not very useful either. But, social and emotional intelligence, the skills you can learn, you can grow your social emotional intelligence. And it’s where we should be focusing if we wanna manage and lead people.

Jo:

And if you’re a health professional and you’ve just tuned out, ’cause you went, I’m a health professional. I’m a mental health professional. I know everything there is to know about human behaviour. You know everything that there is to know about pathology and about diagnosis and about treating something that is a problem. And I see this all the time. I meet so many health professionals who have poor social emotional intelligence because they’re not used to dealing with healthy people and creating healthy environments because we spend all of our time working with really unhealthy people, helping unhealthy people come back to some level of normal, like how they can function in society. We’re not used to building teams of healthy people who want to be healthier and become better. So it’s not a judgement, but I just really wanna help health professionals understand you can’t switch off from this conversation about your social and emotional intelligence. If you can’t keep staff, if you can’t recruit staff, if people don’t wanna stay with you, if you’ve got people, all they wanna do is earn more money, earn more money, earn more money, and they are lost in the vision, you’ve gotta start asking questions about your leadership that’s uncomfortable for you to hear. I’ve done my stuff. I had to live that journey. John did his stuff. He had to live that journey.

John:

Yeah. One of the laws of leadership that John Maxwell’s written a book called 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership or leadership laws. But one of them, and the one I like the least, because it’s true <laugh>, it’s that you attract who you are, not what you want as a leader with your team. So if you’re not getting the kind of people that you want on your team or you’re losing the ones that you really would like to have, the issue is not them. The issue is actually here. And there’s a personal growth journey to be had ’cause you attract who you are rather than what you want. And when I first read that book a long time ago, I didn’t like that one. I liked a lot of the other laws, which made sense to me, but that one didn’t make sense until I realised it was true. And I had a lot of growing to do <laugh>.

Jo:

Yeah. That’s uncomfortable. Thanks for that. That was where I kind of wanted to end the podcast today. But I don’t like it, John. I don’t like it <laugh>. So there’s some insight into what our relationship is like people, that’s it! <laugh>

John:

I don’t coach, I learned a long time ago. And don’t try and coach Jo <laugh>. Support, love, encourage, yes. Coach, no. <laugh>.

Jo:

Yeah. But because we often work from home together, ‘ve heard many of your conversations and I’ve met people that you’ve worked with in the community who really value what you do. And you’ve got this incredible 18 month program that takes people from being a high achiever to a high performer. And when we came up with that program, ’cause we talked about it together and, and your delivery of it, and then seeing people come through to the other end of that program now I’m like, whoa. Yeah, that’s cool. I wish I had invested in that 15 years ago.

John:

It’s an incredible privilege because I love working with very smart people who just wanna work on themselves and realise that there’s room to grow and to be able to work with them for 18 months as they conquer a few of the internal issues, mostly internal, some external in their team and so forth. But it’s a privilege.

Jo:

Yeah. So it’s an 18 month program. I just want people to understand this. This is not something that will be fixed in one coaching session <laugh>. Because people will often come to us and say, I just want one coaching session, but here’s the list of the 99 things we need to deal with in this one hour session. And you and I are just like, oh, lordy, I’m good, but I’m not that good.

John:

<Laugh>. Yeah. I don’t lie.

Jo:

Okay. That’s true. So John, how can people get a hold of you to learn more about this program and find your book? Where do they go to do that?

John:

My website is johndrury.biz. And there’s an author page where you can get the book. It’s on Amazon as well if you want to get an online version for your Kindle. And my High Achiever to High Performer program is also mentioned on the website. Oh my details to contact me, book a call. That would be the best way to have a chat and for me to understand a little bit more about who you are and what your needs are. And then I’ll tell you whether I think I can help you or not. And it would be great to talk to you.

Jo:

So John, we have coffee together quite often, <laugh>. So if we were going out to a cafe what would you be ordering? ’cause This is my question I ask everybody, so I’m gonna ask.

John:

Okay. We have coffee together and I often make the order and I have a flat white and Jo has a double macchiato and they always bring it out and give me the double macchiato ’cause they think it’s a male drink and the flat white is for the girl. But no, you got it wrong. I don’t like my coffee that strong.

Jo:

Okay. There’s no judgement, but I know. So anybody who wants to buy John a coffee, it’s a flat white. And if you’re not in Australia and you haven’t got a clue what that is, you need some education people. <Laugh>. Alright, that brings us to the end of this podcast episode. Thank you so much, John, for sharing so openly and allowing me to share vulnerably with the people in the world today. Until next time, go be your awesome self.