Limits to human performance – the bell curve revisited

In one of my previous postings, I wrote about some extensive Danish research on stress and managers. Now, let me explain some of the very fundamental things about how these researchers think about stress.

First of all, stress is healthy. Maybe somewhat a surprise. But you probably know it yourself, when you a kick out of something, feel completely in flow, and just loves what you are doing, – these feelings are generated when there is a balance between expectations and resources. Our body is in a short period of stress where energy is purposeful for you – and your brain and body can deliver the highest possible performance. To support these short periods of high performance, your body needs time for restitution.

But when the the expectations are too high, compared to your available resources, you will experience negative stress, and your performance will degrade significantly. If you are under this type of pressure for a very long time, you become a patient. The balance for you and your manager is to give people the ups and downs needed to perform as a human being.

On top of this it is very important to use the ups for the most value generating tasks, for example innovative product development, process optimizations or whatever your competitive advantage is built on.

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