Archive for the ‘Performance Leadership’ Category

Vision and mission statements these days have reduced to a pedestrian, cliched, insipid product of jumping through strategic planning hoops. They’ve lost the ability to unite masses of people for a shared cause and imbued more cynicism into workforces.

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IN THIS EPISODE:

Upcoming Events: We’ve started but they’re still registering…
Practical Tip: Should You Measure Your Mission?
Your Questions: Destry asks “How do you measure without work losing its meaning?”
Getting More: Measuring What You “Need” Versus What You “Can”, Why You Can’t Measure Your Performance Outcomes, Five Steps to Find The Right Measures

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I love mantras. I love how they can carry a paragraph full of meaning in just a few words, and because of this be fabulous reminders of what matters. I have mantras for running (“light and quick, here and now”) and mantras for dealing with setbacks (“onwards and upwards!”) and – yes, you guessed it – mantras for measurement!

Here you go, I’m gonna share some of them with you:

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Recently, one of my Performance Measure Blueprint attendees, Greg, sent me an email with the subject line “I thought you might get a laugh out of this – My first Measures Newsletter”.

I opened it, read it and then hit “reply”:

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The people who make up your Measures Team aren’t in it for the glory or the glamour. No, performance measurement can be a dirty job, particularly when you’re faced with an organisation that stills sees it as threatening, boring and a bureaucratic waste of their time.

So you must keep your Measures Team focused on the real prize: the pride of leading others to successful organisational or business performance transformation. And here are a bunch of tips to prepare them for that kind of success:

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IN THIS EPISODE:

Feature: 7 Tips to Prepare Your Measures Team For Success.
Q&A: How do you build the motivation to improve performance skills and making them important to the staff?
Quick Tip: Success loves speed.

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Managers and Executives don’t usually invest in performance measurement, they invest in the benefits that good performance measurement will bring them, so long as those benefits are relevant to what’s on their radar right now. And that’s the role of a good KPI business case: to show how better performance measurement can make it easier and faster to achieve their priorities.

Here are the ingredients of a good KPI business case:

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IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: How to Rebut 3 Common Objections to Measuring Performance.
Q&A: Does linking salaries and rewards to performance change people’s attitudes and behaviour to ensure effectiveness?
Quick Tip: What to do when you don’t have the buy-in to start measuring performance.

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In his book, “10-Minute Toughness”, 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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One of the worst immeasurability problems with strategy is the excessive use of ‘weasely’ language. And you’ll know what I mean if your strategy is full of words like efficiency, productivity, sustainability, or even performance outcomes.

Wikipedia explains what weasel words are:

The expression weasel word derives from the egg-eating habits of weasels… An egg that a weasel has sucked will look intact to the casual observer, while actually being empty. Thus, words or claims that turn out to be empty upon analysis are known as “weasel words”. The expression first appeared in Stewart Chaplin’s short story ‘Stained Glass Political Platform’ (published in 1900 in The Century Magazine,… in which they were referred to as “words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.” Theodore Roosevelt attributed the term to Dave Sewall, claiming that Sewall used the term in a private conversation in 1879…

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