What Is Executive Performance?

One of the biggest lessons from professional sport is that the theoretically best intervention is not always the best intervention for the person in front of you.

A hard training session may be useful in isolation. It may be poorly timed if someone has travelled overnight and has an important board meeting that afternoon.

An early night may be sensible advice. It is less useful when the person is hosting a business dinner until midnight.

A wearable may suggest that recovery is low. That does not mean the rest of the day should automatically be reduced.

The decision must account for what has happened, what is coming next and how the person tends to respond.

This is where many performance systems become too rigid. They are built around ideal routines rather than real lives. Senior executives rarely operate in ideal conditions. Meetings move, travel changes, work runs late and personal demands intervene.

A useful system must be flexible enough to survive that.

For me, that means understanding three things: the person, the demands and the context. Without all three, even good information can lead to poor decisions.

There is a growing tendency to describe executives as corporate athletes. The comparison has some value, but it can be taken too far.

Executives are not athletes, and they do not need to live like professional footballers.

The useful transfer sits at the level of principles.

During my career in professional football, we rarely struggled because we lacked information. We had physical data, medical information, training data, subjective feedback, tactical demands and input from a range of specialists. The challenge was working out which information mattered for the decision in front of us.

That is a different problem, and it is one that applies directly to senior executives.

More data does not automatically create better decisions. More tests do not automatically improve performance. More interventions can make an environment busier without making it better.

The best performance systems tend to be individualised, contextual and selective. They bring together different sources of information and then decide what deserves attention.

Sometimes that means doing more. Sometimes it means doing less. The point is to make the support relevant to the demands ahead.

Wearables and health technology can add useful information. Sleep duration, activity, resting heart rate and longer-term patterns may all help build a picture.

The problem starts when the metric becomes the decision.

A score does not know that somebody has a board meeting at 10am, that their child was awake during the night or that they have just flown across three time zones. It does not know which part of the day matters most.

That context must come from the person.

This is why I use the principle:

Data supports the decision. Judgement and context lead it.

The data may change the weight we give something. It may highlight a pattern that was not obvious. It may prompt a useful question.

What it should not do is remove the need to think.

There is some overlap between executive performance support and executive coaching, but they are not the same thing.

Executive coaching often focuses on leadership, behaviour, communication, career development or organisational challenges. Executive performance support is more concerned with the conditions that allow someone to perform well: sleep, recovery, exercise, nutrition, workload, travel, pressure and the timing of important work.

The two can complement one another.

Someone can have excellent leadership support and still arrive at their most important meeting after three poor nights of sleep, a long flight and six hours of back-to-back calls. Equally, improving sleep and exercise does not make somebody a better leader on its own.

They address different parts of the problem.

Good support starts with the individual rather than the programme.

It should understand how someone responds, what their week looks like and where the important demands sit. It should identify the few things most likely to make a difference rather than trying to improve everything at once.

It also must be realistic.

A recommendation that looks perfect on paper but cannot be followed has very little value. The same applies to systems that create more admin than they remove, or ask an executive to spend their day thinking about performance scores.

The aim is to make performance support easier to use, not harder.

That means adapting when the day changes, using data where it adds value and keeping judgement at the centre of the process.

Senior leaders are rarely going to have perfect routines, and they do not need them.

What they need is a system that still works when the day becomes difficult.

Good executive performance support should reduce complexity, be tailored to how you respond, and help make the next decision clearer rather than add more noise.