How to understand and hone your performance mechanism

Friends and readers, what I’m sharing with you today is the culmination of nearly twelve months of work — countless conversations with clients, stakeholders, my team, expert third parties, and a few good friends and mentors who are way smarter than me! All of it has been in service of one thing: getting to the clearest articulation of what I do best and the problem I help people solve.

What started all of this was a milestone: 2025 marked a decade in my own business. It’s been a wild ride. And in addition to celebrating the moment, I took it as an opportunity to take stock — it was a chance to look back across everything I’d built, tested, and learned, and ask what it all added up to.

So, here it is – the best of what I’ve been up to in the last ten years and what I’ll be chasing even harder for the next ten. (If you want to skip to the punchline, here’s my new website – www.hollyransom.com – new positioning, same person… oh, and way better photos 😉 – go take a look. I would love to hear what you think.)

Across nearly a thousand engagements — on stages, in boardrooms, and inside leadership and sporting teams — clients brought me many different questions, but underneath almost all sat the same one: how do we get this team, this business, this high-stakes conversation to perform better? Whatever the context, the underlying objective was always about performance.

Because while markets move, geopolitics shift, and the world keeps on changing, the assignment is always the same:

So, how do we adapt and perform?

How do we get what we really want from ourselves? How do we get what we want from our team?

What I’ve found is that no matter the industry, the country, or the entirely unique problem faced by one specific business, the enemies of performance are the same. They impact our attention, the way we make meaning, and the way we take action – and they don’t just degrade different parts of performance; they interrupt the way the parts work together. That’s because, no matter the context – the executive leadership retreat, company strategy day, or the mainstage – the systems of performance are also the same, and they always involve attention, meaning, and action. It sounds simple, and the good news is that when you do it right, it is.

This is where I come in: I help teams look at what they need to perform better. And it’s not about maximizing effort or learning new lingo or adding five more frameworks to your already teetering pile, it’s about understanding the basic mechanisms of how your team or your company performs.

Sometimes getting better involves diagnosing why a particular team is not performing the way they want, and giving them the tools they need to change it. Sometimes it involves designing and facilitating one or more high-stakes conversations, and I’d argue that the most overlooked, borderline invisible performance lever any of us has access to is our conversations. Year after year, I see that the rooms that outperform are the ones that’ve learned that how they talk to each other is a system, not an accident — and systems can be designed.

There’s one more thing that is changing, and if you’re not already a follower of my other newsletter on LinkedIn, go check it out, because as of today, it has a new name: Pressure Tested.

Every week, I’ll cover an idea, a story, a book, or a study that illuminates what works and what doesn’t. It may be an idea or a tool that’s proven its merit in the arena or an approach I’ve seen hold up in surprising ways. I won’t be reviewing hot takes or yet another hack – I’ll be talking about tools that engage your powerful system of performance, and that you can pick up and put to work, unlocking performance in your own team.

For the next few months, I’ll continue to share similar content across Conversations that Matter and Pressure Tested. And after that, there will be some more exciting changes.

And I want to hear from you, too: what needs to perform better in your world right now? What idea or approach worked for you? What didn’t and why? Hit reply and tell me — I read everything.

And if you haven’t yet — go say hello to the new site: www.hollyransom.com to learn more about the elements of performance – and a few personal adventures in it, like my Antarctic polar plunge, photographic evidence supplied. I’d love your feedback.

Onward,
Holly