This article spotlights esteemed performance experts slated to present at Utah Business Forward. With six distinct tracks covering Acquisition, AI, Branding, Entrepreneurship, People & Culture, and Performance, this dynamic event will take place on November 20, 2024, at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.
Unlocking exceptional employee performance is one of Utah’s business leaders’ most important areas of focus. When individuals succeed, companies succeed.
For Lyn Christian, founder of SoulSalt, company success — and employee success — is about people finding their “best selves.”
Christian describes the process of finding truth as an “excavation.” Christian had been a teacher for 15 years, but some core life and career elements weren’t lining up. Changes were necessary.
“There are many different crucibles, … where sometimes we just really need to know who we are and what we stand for and what we won’t stand for,” Christian says. “And it goes beyond just bringing your best self to work. It’s plugging in and bringing your best self to life.”
In this era, Christian’s life changed a lot — leaving a job and building a new career from scratch as a life coach, making personal changes and building satisfaction that allowed progress toward new goals. And Christian took notes on the process, which led to writing a book and starting a company.
Employee experience, meet employee performance
“I’m talking about self-leadership, self-authorship, where the person leads themselves to get results because they are totally enlisted in what’s going on at work,” Christian says. “It improves resilience, people show up more authentic, they feel more authentic at work, and their job satisfaction goes up.”
Christian says companies can create mitigation plans against areas where employees are weaker and strategies to best leverage and partner different team members’ assets.
Tapping into potential and engagement is about finding what social and personal aspects someone is bringing to the workplace with them and making sure companies are safe environments, Christian says. Employees get turned on to their work and increase their engagement when they buy into the shared goals of the team and have space for personal growth.
“I started coaching in 1998,” Christian says. “These are the consistent things that put [people] in touch with who they really are and what they’re capable of doing when they get in their peak zone.”
Christian notes that the phase of work culture we are living in allows employees more room to reinvent themselves if they feel like they are not in the right space, partly because market changes have allowed companies to recognize translatable skills. Christian also notes that employees should be aware when they’ve divested emotionally from their work and take time to decide what that means for them.
Christian says that by being aware of these needs, people can build careers that allow them to engage more with their work, even if they are at the highest levels of a company.
Playing the long game
Coaching women’s basketball at the University of Utah requires Head Coach Lynne Roberts to be both in charge of a team focused on achieving their best on the court while also navigating their success within the much larger environment of a major research university.
Because basketball is a team sport, everyone brings their own skills and personality traits to the table. Roberts says mixing and matching those skills is key to figuring out how her players can perform their best together.
“That’s the science … what might motivate you is going to be different than what might motivate me, right?” Roberts says. “You’ve really got to know your people. You have to know what motivates them, what doesn’t.”
But beyond on-court performance, there are other unique opportunities when coaching young women.
“What I’ve learned is, being a college kid, that 18- to 22-year-old range is really when you’re figuring out who you are,” Roberts says.
Given the lack of financial stability in women’s basketball, even her team members who go on to play professionally are likely to have to balance their sport with another career. Roberts loves helping her players find their avenue as part of their time on her team.
“You get to use basketball to get a free education. You get to use basketball to have unbelievable experiences: travel, be part of a team and play at the highest level in front of 10,000 fans,” Robert says. “But really, it’s an avenue to get your degree free. … The world needs more confident, empowered and educated women.”
Roberts herself is competitive enough that she races people to the water fountain. But she says this larger standard of success is a key part of the formula when thinking about performance.
“I have an opportunity to really empower them to not just think about basketball but to think about what are they going to do when they’re done playing, when they have to hang up the high tops,” Roberts says.
What data has to do with it
As the VP of marketing at Alysio, a company that tracks sales team performance, Justin Ashby has spent much of his professional time trying to explain why analytics are so important in measuring success.
He loves collecting data to make sense of where improvements can be made.
“You can clearly track and clearly see how well you’re doing every single day. Then you make adjustments, and you can get more connections and increase your [success],” Ashby says.
He honed his own performance strategy when he was applying for business school and studying for the GMAT. When Ashby didn’t get the score he wanted after studying for two months, his wife suggested he switch tactics. He rebuilt his methodology from scratch, focusing on what worked and what didn’t. He soon achieved a much higher score.
“That just made me fascinated with all the different levers you can pull to have a great performance,” Ashby says.
He now applies this knowledge to his work, tweaking his approach based on past successes and failures to improve outcomes over time.
With a corporate culture that largely ties each position to added revenue, he says each role has to be well-defined to meet clear markers for high performance. For roles that are not clearly tied to revenue, metrics can help make sure individuals and companies have a standard for what is needed to find success.
“It’s all about leading indicators versus lagging indicators,” he says. “Truly tracking and influencing your performance is all about focusing on the leading indicators, which is what’s in your control.”
Dealing with the best
According to Nick Wenker, deputy general counsel and SVP of legal at Young Living, negotiation is an area organizations can use to unlock higher performance. Wenker has spent his career dealing with contracts and building strategies to ensure people around him succeed and avoid risk. He believes a strong position and disciplined approach to negotiation can keep business leaders from making costly mistakes.
“It’s a hugely important topic because it’s something that even top executives get wrong all the time,” Wenker says. “Many of the worst contracts I’ve had to work on were ones that were championed and spearheaded and pushed through by vice presidents or C-suite officers.”
Wenker has seen challenges arise when companies enter into contracts that could cause more damage than the value of the relationship to begin with.
Companies might enter into a $1 million contract with a software company that could end up with a data breach costing up to $50 million, he explains. Sometimes the product delivered after a contract is made isn’t sufficient or a client becomes difficult to work with, causing unseen costs to occur.
These cases are why negotiating a clear and well-written contract is crucial, Wenker says, suggesting companies map out deliverables and expectations well while accounting for risk. He also notes that these decisions need to be considered within the companies themselves, they can’t just pass negotiations off to lawyers and expect ideal contracts.
“All it takes is one bad contract to sink somebody’s career, sink somebody’s company,” Wenker says. “The amount of damage you could do to your company might even be more money than the amount of money that’s in the price of the contract.”
Wenker notes that this kind of problem can extend to seasoned executives who have been navigating business relationships for a long time because they believe the relationship in the contract will work out.
“There’s all these human biases going on there where people, even if they’re smart and experienced, end up having blinders on, and they really don’t think [everything] through,” Wenker says. “This is kind of a widespread issue, and I think it comes from a combination of factors, one being most people just don’t understand negotiation and especially don’t understand contract negotiations.”
For Wenker, success in industry is about routine improvement, learning over a long period of time what can be honed in small parts. No one can become a perfect negotiator right away, but applying these kinds of lessons and strategies can help with practice.
“If you’re negotiating properly, you’re taking responsibility for the contracts you’re bringing to the company. To me, that’s part of being a high performer,” Wenker says.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article did not use Lyn Christian’s preferred pronouns.
