Archive for the ‘Performance Culture’ Category

It’s obvious to most people why people who work in the strategy office, or even in quality or process improvement roles, need to have some degree of performance measurement skill. But that’s not sufficient if your goal is to have a consistent approach to selecting performance measures throughout the organisation that keep everyone focused on what really matters in achieving the organisation’s strategy.

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For over a year Michelle and the Strategy Team worked to find a set of performance measures the Executive Directors would accept, and to no avail. With the help of a little external pressure to get that Corporate Plan measured, they eventually got the okay to bring in a consultant (yours truly) to facilitate the Executive Directors to craft their own suite of performance measures.

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If there’s still some uncertainty or cynicism about performance measurement in your organisation, I’d suggest don’t rush in and try and implement a corporate-wide performance measurement approach all at once. You’ll probably get more traction by starting your performance measurement journey with a pilot.

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In his book, “10-Minute Toughess”, sports psychologist Jason Selk says:

“…people spend too much time aiming at the bull’s-eye and not enough time shooting at it. Rather than placing so much emphasis on getting ready and aiming, go ahead and take a shot. Taking the shot gets you started and also lets you gauge how far off the mark you are. Make adjustments, but keep shooting until you get closer and closer, and eventually you will hit the bull’s-eye.”

In business performance management, this means we need to get comfortable with failing before we’ll truly succeed. We need to stare our weaknesses and problems and obstacles straight in the eye and attack them with solutions until they yield to our intentions for high performance. But this means changing a mindset that’s endemic, menacing and unconsciously ingrained in management culture: making excuses.

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Possibly at the root of all objections people have to measuring performance and having KPIs is their beliefs about why we do it. Before you can successfully overcome all the other typical objections people have – like not having the time, not knowing where to start, not seeing the need for it – you need to be sure first and foremost that people understand the real reasons why we measure performance.

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There are at least three good reasons why your authenticity as a performance measurement practitioner really matters. Firstly, people need quite a bit of coaching before they’ll trust performance measurement. Secondly, you’re going to need an energy source to persist until people stop resisting measuring. Thirdly, inspiration works much better than edict at engaging people to measure. Your authenticity boosts all these things.

Want to know how to boost your authenticity?

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Most performance measurement systems are never fully brought to life because of poor change management. The following prompts are a framework to design your performance measurement system, acknowledging that it is a change process, just like any other initiative your organisation faces in the spirit of continuous improvement and adaptation.

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There are many reasons why people won’t stay committed to their goals, but it’s much easier to work with the reasons why they will stay committed. Here are four of those reasons, expressed as tactics you can deploy to make it much easier for people to keep to their goals.

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We all know that what you measure influences people’s behaviour. So if you want people to collaborate to improve corporate performance, rather than compete to improve personal performance (often at the expense of corporate performance), think carefully about what you measure!

Here are 5 practical steps to help your team to measure in way that will encourage collaboration to improve corporate performance, and help put an end to measures that trigger fights about who’s right and who’s wrong, rather than dialogue about how to achieve shared goals.

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Measuring what matters is more important than most things we give our time to. In Part 2 of this article, we’re looking at even more ways for how to become more conscious of what you can stop doing, in order to make the time for performance measurement.

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