THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF PERFORMANCE: A SWEET SPOT

Abstract

The building of distinct capabilities in an organization is essential; without those capabilities, organizations lose competitive edge and advantage, and ultimately market share and brand presence. Organizations utilize many tools to build human capabilities, which include interventions that seek to improve performance. The more HR can provide a line of sight to the C suite that those interventions and capability-building activities positively impact performance and business outcomes, the more effective HR can be at moving the HR strategy to the core of the business strategy. This writing explores using intersectionality to describe a confluence of design thinking, human performance technology, organizational network analysis, and influence on performance interventions. Keller (1987), Parker and Marsha (2021), and Roy (2021) have written on the various approaches to improving performance, but none of these studies utilized a confluence of the aforementioned strategies, hence the “sweet spot.” That spot is the foundation and centerpiece of the reasoning in this paper. This paper chronicled a performance exercise utilized by the author at the City of Detroit as an HR practitioner and applied this intersectionality to performance in the grounds maintenance division. It was learned that all aspects of these strategies layered together yielded robust results, concluding that many more HR practitioners and human performance technologists could employ this strategy and measure the outcomes.