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When we think about high performance in sports, it's easy to understand the term. It's about winning, but it's also about the way the winning is done. Lance Armstrong was everyone's darling in cycling, winning seven Tour de France titles, all of them after battling testicular cancer. But when his use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career was uncovered, his titles were stripped and cycling fell out of love with him. Despite his achievements, the deceit and cheating mean he's not a good example of high performance.

The story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's baseball team is a different matter. Unlike Lance Armstrong, they were performing at the bottom of the league based on wins. But they challenged many of the long-held traditions about how to build a baseball team. They ignored the highest-paid players and recruited players who were rejected or under-used and not valued by more successful teams. Their strategy seemed insane, but the Oakland A's rose to the top rungs of the league on a budget a fraction of the size of their competitors'. They revolutionised the game of baseball. They are a great example of high performance.

In simple terms, a high-performance organisation is one that can perform at a very high level in the game it's playing. The game an organisation is playing is the fulfilment of its mission and the pursuit of its vision. All this means is that a high-performance organisation does well at what it says it wants to do well at.

It's true that there are organisations that say they want to be profitable, and do well at being profitable. There are plenty of organisations that have done this, and at the expense of their people, their customers, or the planet. In their book How Companies Lie: Why Enron Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg, authors A. Larry Elliott and Richard J. Schroth discuss how companies like Enron, Tyco and Sunbeam haven't taken care of all their stakeholders: the people that supported them, and whose support they need to last into the future.

Profit cannot be the ultimate definition of high performance.

Those are not the kinds of organisations that this book was designed for. Profit cannot be the ultimate definition of high performance. It's more than that, and has to be if an organisation is to stand the test of time. And so high performance is more about the culture of an organisation, and the way it pursues results for all its stakeholders. The high-performance culture is one of:

• continuous improvement

• measurement of performance

• alignment with strategy

• consistently reaching for the right targets, without unintended consequences.

Models of excellence

Organisational excellence models such as Baldrige Performance Excellence, the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) and the Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF) have been around since the 1990s. These models have been used by many different organisations around the world in their pursuit of high performance. Each model is used in an awards process, where entrants are evaluated by an accredited team against a collection of criteria organised into (usually) seven categories. The seven categories are:

1. Leadership. How the organisation's leaders inspire high performance, encourage open communication and transparency, and create a climate for learning, collaboration and success.

2. Strategic direction and planning. How the organisation's vision and values and direction are derived, how goals are set at all levels and aligned to the overarching direction, and how people are engaged in executing the strategy.

3. Data analysis, measurement, information and knowledge. How the organisation uses data analysis, measurement and reporting of performance and other forms of evidence to inform its decision making, strategy execution and continual improvement of performance.

4. People and workforce. How the organisation values its employees and partners, the culture it nurtures, and how it facilitates a safe, healthy and collaborative working environment.

5. Customer and market focus. How the organisation understands its customers and their needs, ensures a customer focus throughout the organisation, and positions itself within its market.

6. Business processes or operations, products and services. How the organisation has designed the flow of work to develop and deliver its products and services, with an emphasis on systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration, in alignment with strategy.

7. Results. How the organisation has defined and attained success, including its impact on customers, its people and society.

Within each of these categories, entrants must demonstrate how they follow some form of quality management plan–do–study–act (PDSA) cycle:

• Plan. The organisation has a deliberate approach for the category, such as a framework or process or model.

• Do. This approach is deployed or implemented deliberately throughout the organisation.

• Check. The results of deploying or implementing the approach are objectively measured.

• Act. The measures are used to decide what to continue about the approach and what to modify to get better results.

These organisational excellence models encourage a broader definition of what high performance is. Their philosophy is that high performance is a way of being rather than a place to be. Results, the seventh category, are important, but not at the expense of the other six categories.

In the past, as an evaluator for the Australian Business Excellence Awards, I consistently noticed the weakest link for the majority of organisations was evidence-based thinking. So few could demonstrate, measurably, the results they were creating across each of the seven categories. And, not surprisingly, categories 3 and 7 were always evaluated lower than the others. Seeing this pattern back then, and in every organisation I've worked with since, made me realise we need more evidence-based leaders to inspire and guide their organisations along this journey of high performance.

High performance and the bottom line

We are told that the purpose of business is to make a profit. In the public sector, the parallel is to meet budget. While there are moral reasons why profit ought not be the ultimate purpose of business – for example, when others have to suffer to make those profits possible – there are also sound business reasons why we ought to move away from single measures of success, such as profit. In their book The Balanced Scorecard, Robert Steven Kaplan and David P. Norton argue that non-financial performance is just as important as financial performance. This has led to other scorecards, such as the Triple Bottom Line, also aiming for more balance in our definition of success. A scorecard with balance is one where success is defined by the perspectives of every stakeholder affected by a company, and these perspectives give context to what that company measures, monitors and manages. It's not just the financial bottom line that counts.

High-performance organisations and companies don't solely pursue financial results as their definition of success.

A great example of the consequences of a profit-driven strategy is the factory farming of chickens as described in The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. To increase profits, some companies maximise the number of birds per square foot of space. (In many operations, chickens get about the size of an A4 sheet of paper to live their lives in.) Aside from the birds' suffering and the stressful work environment for employees, there are some very significant costs to local communities and ecosystems. The ammonia from the chickens' waste makes going outside unbearable for whoever is downwind of the factories and causes irritation and health problems to those exposed. When the waste products are flushed from the factory floor, they run off into nearby streams and waterways and kill the aquatic life. These are the costs that don't make it into the companies' financial statements or annual reports, costs that communities and the environment pay (now and in the future) to subsidise those profits.

High-performance organisations and companies don't solely pursue financial results as their definition of success. They pursue an array of results based on what all their stakeholder groups value most. And they pursue those results in a way that does not depend on other stakeholders paying the costs; how we make the journey to high performance is at least as important as getting there.

So evidence-based leaders start with exceptional:

• clarity about the results that truly do define success for their organisation

• ownership of and responsibility for those results

• care in guiding the organisation to that success.

They give more attention and effort to these three things than most leaders seem to these days. These are the three basic principles of evidence-based leadership.