Tag Archives: performance

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Cultural Atmosphere

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Non verbal activities, things like body language and other visual queues coupled with actual behaviours ( how people act) can tell a comprehensive story.

It is a normal and natural human trait to sense the nature of the environment.  We feel fear, become uncomfortable or sense this is not a happy team or group unconciously.

Conscious versus Unconcious queues

Probing with questions, getting to know others through general feedback or just consciously observing can provide data to enable conclusions about organizational or team culture.

This conscious assesssment needs to be combined with what your non verbal senses gather.  How you feel about a situation is often ignored at your peril.

Feel the Energy

Typically organizations document their vision and mission.  They promote their culture actively through written and spoken word.  The message describes how the organizations expect their human resources to act.

Unfortunately their can be disconnects between the aspirations and reality.  When you enter a office, factory or other location, the first thing you feel is the atmosphere.

You can feel the energy of the place.  Positive energy and excitement or negative energy, neither can be hidden.  Typically the atmosphere is sensed rather than materially catalogued.

This measure is more subjective than objective but it exists.  A question I often hear is “How do we know when we are a high performing team.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is a combination of feeling it and results.  The feeling is a leading indicator.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Balancing performance and process

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How well you complete the execution or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function can be measured.  This measure is often refered to as a performance appraisal.

The appraisal can cover performance across a specified period (e.g., six or twelve months) or it can be for a specified task or series of tasks.  (e.g, how well you performed in a soccer or baseball game.)

Process is how you completed the task.  That is a defined series of actions or steps required to achieve the goal.  Often for repeatablility and consistency of performance, process steps are documented.

Achieving Results

The focus of this post is the synergy between performance and process.  Taken together, leveraging both competence and skill  associated with high performance and consistency and quality associated with defined process, the  likelihood of high quality results produced with minimal effort is much greater.

The key is to balance both these concepts.  A clear, simple process will enable a high performer to excel.  It positions medium and low performers for success as well.

Overall, documented processes that are easy to understand provide the framework for performance.  That is not to say high performance cannot be achieved without clear process, but the opportunity for exceptional process is increased.

Another feature of defined process is sustainability.  One characteristic of the North American economy is a higher percentage of employee turnover than 50 years ago.

As employee turnover,  the training effort is lowered  and consistency of results is stable when the processes (how a task is performed) are well defined.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Keeping your brain alive

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Intellectual stimulation, exercising your brain, is as important as physical exercise to maintaining your health.  Elongating your life span requires attention toward all body parts – muscles, vital organs and thinking processes.

Supporting thought

On and off my posts focus on leadership behaviours.  A critical tool in understanding and motivating others is to create an environment that allows for positive exercise of intellectual prowess.

Properly orchestrated this can enrich the performance of the team, group or organization, through a series of a productive set of behaviours, that addresses not just physical well being but possibly more importantly, mental health.

Like your muscles, without regular active use your thinking processes can become atrophied.   Leaders must not just motivate action and outcomes but enable others to do so in a mentally stimulating way.

Setting the Environment

One approach is to encourage respectful dialogue.  Exchanging information in a reasoned manner while encouraging dissent and opposing views can be a very powerful motivator.

More importantly, this behaviour results in higher levels of engagement which in turn raise motivation and ultimately outcomes are better.

These outcomes hopefully map to the groups goals and objectives.  Encouraging the team to mentally challenge themselves includes the use of scenarios specifically targeted to make everyone think.

In these cases, the goal or objective may be in and of itself, about the thinking process, no more no less.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Getting Better

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The other day a colleague postulated that all organizations have a maximum maturity/ performance capability plateau dictated by the culture and the resources.  I took strong exception to this opinion.

Its all about leadership

In high performing organizations (or high performing teams) the performance/ maturity bar moves higher continously.  Sitting on ones laurels (i.e., stagnating) leads results on a downward slope.

The culture of the organization/ team is motivated by leadership.  In the best case scenarios everyone takes some leadership role and the motivating effect is multiplied.

You get what you believe

If you believe some artificial maturity/ performance barrier exists it likely will.  It is a self fullfilling prophesy.  Continual striving for greater success does not happen by magic.

The leadership and of course the team members themselves need to both buy-in and therefore support this approach.  A belief that a hard ceiling exists is a powerful inhibitor.

For Example

My colleague noted, personal experience has led to their belief the plateau exists.  In their experience it always appears at some point. While the world might not be full of high performing organizations, they do exist.

Tesla, Apple, Google are all top of mind obvious examples of organizations that continually strive for improvement.  These are not static companies.  Constant change for the better is clearly  built into their DNA.

This companies outcomes speak for themselves.

So for me, it is a real hot button.  You need to believe in better and continously put out the effort to get there.  It never stops.  And if you believe otherwise, sadly it will probably be true.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Listen to the Music #11

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On Oct 25th I started a post series that would be about the 37 live rock concerts I have attended in my life so far.

Over time, I am listing the next three best. Ten posts so far covered the top thirty (listed below), today’s covers thirty one to three and I am almost at the end.

Just a reminder; 1) Paul McCartney, 2) Led Zeppelin, 3) Elton John 4)Alice Cooper 5) Al Stewart 6) Queen 7) Bee Gees 8) Deep Purple 9) James Taylor 10)Blue Oyster Cult, 11)Johnny Winter, 12) Uriah Heep 13) The Monkees. 14) 1910 Fruitgum Company 15) Allman Brothers Band 16) Kansas 17) Styx 18) Wishbone Ash 19) Trooper 20) Brave Belt 21) Nazareth 22)BTO 23)Peter Gabriel 24) Bad Company 25) Paul Rogers 26) Jethro Tull, 27) Lady Gaga 28) Jeff Healey 29) Roger Waters 30)Procul Harum

And todays artists;

31) Bon Jovi – I joined my daughter and her friends in attending Bon Jovi.  Talk about energy.  Stand up and shout, I am alive.  Great tunes, fabulous hooks and really easy lyrics.  A real treat for me to be able to attend with one of my children and both had maximum enjoyment (new kids on the block this was not).

32) Maddonna – I saw Maddona in Edmonton as well just a couple of years back.  It was after I had seen Lady Gaga.  I would have said a more spectacular show was not possible and I would have been wrong.  No matter how often I hear it, like a Virgin is always a great song.

33) Harry Belafonte – Some University friends persuaded me to go to a Harry Belafonte concert many years ago at Vancouvers Queen Elizabeth theatre.  I thought I would be mildly entertained, I did enjoy a number of his songs that I had heard listening to my parents records but it wasn’t a rock concert.  Iwas blown away.  Harry B. is probably without exception the best entertainer I have every seen.  Polished but spontaneous this shows stands out in my memory.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

We’ll figure it out – because we can.

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I recently came across a can-do organanization with an appropriate motto.  “We’ll figure it out because we can, no worries”.  For them this was a powerful and effective approach.

For me it is a tiny bit too unstructured for a standard organizational environment.  In this case there is no need for an objective based approach or a balanced scorecard to measure how you are doing.

Success is figured out as you go along.

Always successful

Every action is a win because you are figuring it out as you go along.  In this case success definitions can be quite malleable.   It’s probably makes it a lot easier if achievement measures are flexible.  Basically this is a great way to consistently perform to expectations.

Given the expectations are figured out as you go along the team always succeeds.   This sounds like it would be a great organizational culture.

Not really as good as it might seem

Surprisingly (to some, not me) engagement checks of the team members in these type of environments consistently score low.

While it might feel like having little direction would be satisfing, that is doing whatever you want; psychological studies have shown the reality is human nature demands constraints to thrive ( in most cases anyway – this is not an absolute).

Even intellectual pursuits generally fare better with boundaries.  The blank slate is definately embraced by some, however they are a minority.

Balance

Striking a balance between defined, measurable objectives and the ability to figure it out when appropriate is more likely to result in a high performing organization than either extreme (i.e. figure it out as you go along or strict do this do that  directions)