A performance advisory is easy to describe and hard to picture, so the useful question is not what it is. It is what it would actually involve.
That has an answer, and it is shorter than most executives expect.
The questions underneath the question
When an executive asks what the relationship looks like, the real questions are narrower and more practical.
Will it add administration to a week that has none spare. Will it survive a travel quarter, or does it quietly require conditions nobody has. Who sees the data. Is there a person at the end of it or a platform. And what happens in the weeks it does not go well.
Those are the right questions. What can be set out here is the shape, and the rest belongs in a conversation.
It begins with a read, in person
The engagement starts with one private session, and the session is not an assessment of fitness in the ordinary sense. It reads the system that carries the decisions: the physiological and behavioural signal, the constraints acting on it, and the baseline those produce.
It is two and a half hours, in person, with one person. That is deliberate. A baseline taken from a questionnaire is a description of how someone feels about themselves, and how an executive feels about himself at the end of a heavy quarter is the least reliable input available.
What has to come from where
One requirement shapes the whole read. Whatever is measured has to come from inputs that already exist, because anything depending on daily discipline will not survive a hard month. A baseline that decays in the month it is needed is worse than no baseline at all.
That is a constraint on the design rather than a feature of it, and it is worth stating because it is the thing that separates this from the tools you have already tried.
What it is not
The fastest way to describe a shape is by elimination, and the reader has met all of these before.
It is not a programme. A programme is a set of static answers, and a year at this level does not hold still long enough for static answers to keep working.
It is not an application. A tool that requires you to operate it has added a decision rather than removing one, and decisions are the scarce resource.
It is not a score. A score places you against other people. It does not tell you what is costing you, and being ranked tells you nothing you can act on.
It is not coaching in the familiar sense. The limiting factor in this population is almost never willingness.
What it asks of you
Two things, and neither of them is an hour in the day.
The first is access. Nothing in this works from a partial read, and the read asks for trust rather than time.
The second is a standard you are prepared to hold. The advisory can establish what should change and in what order. It cannot supply the willingness to hold it, and that is the one input that stays with the executive by design.
How it continues
If the read identifies a meaningful opportunity, the engagement continues remotely rather than in a room.
The interpretation is continuous rather than occasional, the adjustments are made against what the read shows rather than against how the week felt, and the advisory access is direct - to the person who took the read, not to a junior assigned to the account.
That continuity is the substance. A baseline is one photograph. The value is in the film.
Who the read belongs to
The read is private, and an executive's condition is not treated as a corporate matter.
Who sees it is a fair question, and it is worth asking before anything is taken rather than afterwards. It is answered directly in the presentation rather than asserted on a page.
What it does not ask
It does not ask you to become someone else. It does not ask for hours that do not exist. It does not hand you a protocol written for a population you are not in.
It asks for a read and a standard, and it returns a baseline that the rest of the engagement is measured against.
The question this leaves
The shape is short. One private read, then continuous interpretation against it, with a standard you hold.
What is not short is the answer to the question the shape raises, which is what your own read would actually show, and what should change first.
Nobody can answer that from a page, and it should not be answered from a page. It takes the read to produce it, and the read is the beginning of the relationship rather than a step towards it.
If you want the presentation - the full account of the deployment, the continuation and what each stage involves - ask for it. There is one contact, and it reaches me.
Dan.