Delivering Performance Management Solutions

In a summarization from an article called: "Delivering Performance Management Solutions,"

"We all know in our hearts that Performance Management is not about software.

It is about organizational culture. And culture is all about beliefs and values, knowledge, attitudes of mind, customs, rituals, and artefacts. In the organisational context it includes leadership styles, company heroes, founders, and folklore. It considers such elements as the treatment of people, ethics and integrity, customer focus, innovation, and unwritten ways of working and behaving.

Complex stuff.

There is no such thing as a piece of software that fits this requirement like a glove.

Software is now moving beyond the boundaries of feature, function, and form. It is becoming a living breathing organic entity that melds to user needs and takes into consideration a complex set of human and organisation characteristics. It is up to the vendors to architect unique finely-tuned and people-sensitive performance management solutions that will be a source of sustainable competitive advantage for their customers."

Because for sure, the software alone will not deliver these benefits.

BOTTOMLINE: For the Execution Revolution to begin, the performance management solution must address the key barriers of expertise, economics and human factors. It must also include the requirements of a best-practices methodology, an activity management system (software), accountability coaching to address the human factors, and a shared learning community.

The Challenge of Performance Appraisals

Employers and employees often come out of performance review meetings having reached completely different conclusions.

There is often huge gap between what employees believe they are being told at performance review meetings and what their managers think they are telling them, new research has suggested.

Their findings:

• Just two out of five workers believe the performance review process leads to an improvement in performance, compared with more than two thirds of employers.
• Many of the gaps between employers and employees result from unclear communication and limited transparency regarding how the review process is conducted and its impact on the employee.
• More than four out of five employers believed they provided clear goals to their employees prior to the formal performance review. Yet nearly half of employees felt their goals had in fact not been clearly communicated.
• While more than eight out of 10 employers felt they included input from their employees in the process, just four out of 10 employees agreed.

Best Business Books of 2006 - Part II

Brandon, and the good folks over at Biz Book Talk have compiled the lists of top business books for 2006, including:

• 2006 Amazon.com Editors Business Book Picks
• Top Selling Business Books in 2006 for Amazon.com
• 800CEORead’s Jack Coverts Best Business Books
• BusinessWeek Best of 2006

Looking for some good reading to catch up on? Go take a look!

BOTTOMLINE: Also look forward to the second edition of the top-rated business improvement book Six Disciplines for Excellence, due in April of 2007, published by Synergy Books.

Passion: The Key Differentiator

Excellent organizations separate themselves from everyone else based on the passion of their people. You may think of it as “fire in the belly,” excitement, enthusiasm, or zeal for your life’s work. Whatever you call it, passion is the emotion that makes you jump out of bed in the morning, itching to get at it.

Passion drives the discipline you need to accomplish the big goals you set for your life, career, and relationships.

Passion is an impatient state of mind. Nothing moves as fast as you’d like when you have a burning desire to convert your vision into reality.

But if you can harness and apply your passion with rigor and discipline, it will lead you to discovery, then mastery and, finally, to excellence.

Without passion, you can muddle through, but success (and lasting excellence) will allude you. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, sooner or later that will become apparent to your colleagues and your clients.

BOTTOMLINE: Never settle for good enough. If you can’t keep your internal fire burning, you are in the wrong business. Passion is the key differentiator.

Managing Change - Part II

Managing change involves five key activities:

1. Establishing the need for change. Be clear about the purpose and intended result of the change your organization needs to accomplish.
2. Clearly identify your organization's culture and design a change strategy and process that aligns to that culture.
3. Seek to understand the transitions that result from the change, looking for and dealing with any resistance that may undermine the change.
4. Implement the changes, generating short-term wins and consolidating those wins to create more change.
5. Use ongoing recognition of performance and success to permanently embed the changes in the organization.

A Season of Inspiration: Part III

Winter is a time for rest, for slower paces...

Time for being inside - safe and warm...

Time for understanding what is good, right, and important...

About what can be....what should be....

Take the time... to make snow angels...

Take the time.... to make... a heart of snow...


Winter is ... a Season of Inspiration.

(Many thanks to JB ....for the continued Inspiration)

Franchise Business Opportunities Showcases Six Disciplines

Looking for a franchise that helps small and emerging businesses to plan better and execute their strategies more effectively?

Dane Carlson's Franchise Business Opportunities has recently showcased Six Disciplines Leadership Centers.

Best Practices for Leadership Development in 2006

According to Chief Executive Officer magazine, these are the best practices for companies offering leadership development during 2006:

1. Having leaders at all levels who focus on creating a work climate that motivates employees to perform at their best.
2. Ensuring that the company and its senior management make leadership development a top priority.
3. Providing training and coaching to help intact leadership teams, as well as the individual leaders, work together more effectively.
4. Rotational job assignments for high potentials.
5. External leadership development programs for mid-level managers.
6. Web-based, self-study leadership modules for mid-level managers .
7. Executive MBA programs for mid-level managers.

10 Principles for Sustainable Execution

From the Human Service Connections newsletter comes these "10 Principles for Sustainable Execution."

Grow Your Own Discomfort. All organizations experience a progression of conception, birth, growth, and decline. And then they do it all over again. Disrespect for this natural process leads to corporate and individual poverty. Comfort should be discomforting.

Don’t Make Me Yawn. You, your leadership team and company must consciously work to design and redesign your identity over time, or the marketplace will fall asleep while you’re on the TV. If you have no identity or brand you will struggle to succeed in your market, irrespective of your good intentions.

Lurve The Future. Understanding the past and appreciating the present are important, but lurve (Woody Allen’s combination of “love” and “lust” in the movie Annie Hall) of the future helps you to deal with the inevitable issues associated with moving the implementation ball forward. Implementation is the opportunity to increase the velocity of success, not the barrier to it.

Shoot For The Stars (Or Shoot Yourself In the Foot)! The mood of you and your team is critical to sustainable completion of projects, whatever the level. With alignment of intentions and ambition there are no limits, just possibilities for even more possibilities. Without aligned intentions or ambition you are likely in search of medication for your resentment and resignation. Mood management is as important as fiscal management.

Stop It Or Else! Unconscious confidence in old habits of business behavior creates performance quicksand. To break out of this trap you have to STOP your behavior first, then CHANGE your behavior, consistent with your intention. Only then can you can START implementing a new strategic plane or project. New Year’s resolutions do not resolve the fear of taking the next step and improving performance. They often make your situation worse.

It’s Not About You (Entirely). Successful business execution requires awareness of your personal style and consistent skill in understanding and speaking to the strengths and concerns of others. How can our individual strengths benefit our company, our team and ourselves? When do I “hand off” to someone else? Egoless yet performance- oriented behavior helps you and your teams to succeed.

Welcome Your Breakdowns. Breakdowns are inevitable, the price of experience for any team moving forward. They represent are the opportunity to reinvigorate your vision, that of your team and design constant recalibration on your organizational adventure. If your survival software continually pushes you to implement action that results in the same, recurring breakdown, then you will continue to suffer. And the market or funding source will not pay much for this self-destructive performance.

You Don’t Get There By Reading the Road Map. Implementation of decisions comes from your will and that of your teammates, not the 119 page strategic plan. The most effective teams progress with a rough topographic guide and a focus on their overriding direction. They are likely a disagreeable band of warriors with their armor in front, strong individual intentions, and a commitment to act interdependently.

Face The Market Or Face The Consequences. Too often organizations engage in exercises and training that focus on self concerns vs. those of the market place. Guess what? A magazine writer may feature you as a “progressive” company, but if you are not able to effectively respond to a market concern you have lost your way. How much is the fame and the glory worth? What bill will you pay with it? Your action must be coordinated with everyone facing the market together to execute, consistent with your vision.

V²=REV² + RISK/2. Following in the path of Einstein, it is evident that as you speed up your transactional skills (V2) you increase the probability of increasing revenue (REV2) and reducing risk (RISK/2). The old common logic of slowing down to reduce risk does not work – it increases the risk of bringing execution to a standstill and actually moving backward. The riskiest place is to stay where you are.

Strategic Planning and Strategy Execution

Strategic planning is vital to an organization's ongoing success, but many executives aren't happy with their company's approach to the strategic planning process.

In an online survey of 800 executives conducted by The McKinsey Group consultancy, fewer than half of respondents reported satisfaction with their company's development of strategic planning.

Key findings:

• Of those who reported that their company implemented a formal strategic process, 79 percent were satisfied with strategy execution.
• Only 23 percent of respondents said that a formal strategic process drives important decision making at their company.
• The majority, at 52 percent, credited small senior groups with making critical strategic decisions.

Notably, there's a strong correlation between monitoring of strategic plans and executive approval of those plans, according to the study.

• Still, only 56 percent of respondents overall reported that their company monitors its strategic initiatives.

What Is Six Disciplines? Part II

What is Six Disciplines?
If it were just another business improvement book, it could be called “the next Good To Great” or the next "Getting Things Done" for small and emerging businesses. (In fact, one reviewer has already written about Six Disciplines as being “what E-Myth wants to be when it grows up.”)

If it were just another business improvement methodology, it could be called “the next TQM, the next Six Sigma.”

If it were just a system or piece of performance management software, it could be called “the next killer app.”

If it were just business consulting or business coaching, it could be called "the next wave of strategic activity management services."

In fact, Six Disciplines includes elements of each of these – with a key difference: Six Disciplines is designed to last, to be sustainable.

The Six Disciplines program will have such a profound, transformational impact on the way small businesses operate – and continually improve, that there will be no going back.

Adopting Six Disciplines will become the new baseline standard for how small and emerging high performance organization execute their strategy, and how they will deliver competitive advantage.

It’s a paradox - it’s both simple (based on proven best-practices) – and it’s hard (something that is on the surface so complex, that making it simple has taken years and millions of dollars to observe, understand, and design a complete program to address the barriers.)

So what is Six Disciplines?

• It’s a new category of performance improvement solution
• It's a complete program for sustainable execution
• It’s a convergence of efficiency and effectiveness
• It addresses the key barriers of expertise, economics and human factors
• And it couldn’t have happened until now

In the next several weeks, we'll be describing the Six Disciplines journey, how we’ve gotten to where we are, where we’re headed, and most importantly, what all this means in terms of being a major breakthrough for small business performance improvement.

Stay tuned!

Key Components of High Performance Organizations

According to research by Schermerhorn, Hunt, and Osborn in their research on "The High Performance Organization:"

• High performance organizations (HPOs) are designed to accentuate employees’ best performance and to “produce sustainable organizational results.
• High performing organizations fundamentally underscore the importance of prioritizing people and intellectual capital.

A high performance organization is reflected within a company’s structure, management operating system and culture where everyone participates in a shared vision and innovative leadership, dynamic change, sharing of information, systems understanding, self-managed teams, cross-trained workers, customer focus and the on-going introduction of new technology is present.

The five components of a high performance organization include:

1. Employee involvement
2. Self-managed work teams
3. Integrated production technology
4. Organizational learning
5. Total quality management

Small Business Hiring

From Dr. Jeff Cornwell comes this great news:

Almost one out of five small businesses plan to hire new employees over the next three months, according to the latest survey from the NFIB.

With the exception of the "dot com" boom, the survey indicated the highest job-creation level in its history: during the next three months, 18 percent plan to create new jobs, while only 6 percent plan reductions, yielding a seasonally-adjusted net 19 percent (net 12 percent seasonally unadjusted) planning to create new jobs. Job-creation plans are positive in all industries.

In addition to these new job openings being planned, more than 50% of the small businesses surveyed report trying to fill existing positions. But, they continue to report difficulties, with 80% report few or no qualified applicants.

Strategy or Execution?

Bob Shuneman, over at Small Biz Matters, offers his thoughts here on the quandy most of us struggle with: strategy? or execution?

Bob's key observations?

• Success is the fruit of action, not of potential or ability.
• Most plans are really nothing more than a defined set of possibilities.
• Nothing will ever come of a plan by itself.

On a humble note, Bob also offers the following:

"The best book I’ve read recently about planning and execution is Gary Harpst’s excellent book Six Disciplines for Excellence. Many of the business books published these days seem to focus too much on theories and not enough on practice. Six Disciplines differs in that respect – it’s all about teaching a system of getting done the things that we all know need to be done."

Innovation and Aligning Priorities

The Innovation Survey, from the Council on Competitiveness and New Economy Strategies released their survey which asked leading corporate executives to share their views on the changing nature of innovation.

The survey’s main finding---that innovation is going global---should come as no surprise.

However, the survey did uncover some fascinating results.

For example, when asked to rank the most important factors in their firm’s ability to innovate, corporate leaders cited access to a science and engineering talent pool, close supplier and customer relations, entrepreneurial managers, and a good communications infrastructure.

When asked to identify factors that would disqualify a region for new corporate investments, the list sounds pretty similar.

Executives were also asked to identify the biggest barriers to corporate innovation.

• A majority (61%) cited competing internal priorities due to finite resources.

BOTTOMLINE: Corporate innovation, or simply another way of stating problem solving, can be further enhanced when alignment of internal priorities takes place.

Check out a step-by-step approach of identifying misalignments, aligning processes, policies, measures, technology and people, in Discipline III. Align Systems, in "Six Disciplines For Excellence".

Leadership Development and Succession Planning

Management-Issues reports that Development Dimensions International has recently published a study that suggests today's business leaders do not rate themselves highly -- or even feel up to the job, -- raising serious questions about the future profitability (and performance) of their businesses.

Their findings?

• Strong leadership can increase the successful implementation of business strategies by 22%
• Organizations with strong leadership development and succession planning generally reported higher returns on equity and profit margins.

The disconnect?

• Too often, leaders gave themselves low grades when looking at indicators of leadership performance and potential.
• Leaders rated themselves low on critical qualities of passion for results, adaptability and bringing out the best in people.
• Leaders are barely giving themselves passing grades, and organizations are still graduating them to the next level, promoting them into leadership positions
• One in four leaders had considered bailing out of their leadership position altogether, evidence of dissatisfaction with the leadership role.

BOTTOMLINE: A leadership crisis in the making? Most definitely. The majority of organizations are not preparing for the next generation of leaders. They should be growing leaders from within -- with succession planning in mind. People performance management (including leadership development) - one of the six management best practices that is integrated into the Six Disciplines Methodology.

The Role of The Individual Plan

Over at Gautam Ghosh on Management, Guatum brings the following positives to performance management (or the performance appraisal/review/people management process):

1. It helps to review an organization/group/team or individual's performance
2. It helps to reinforce behavioral and cultural norms
3. It helps to plan and ready your workforce for the future business direction
4. It helps to develop your team

Yet....he asks the pointed question:

"If it serves so many functions, why is it often such a de-energizing and negative process?"

My assessment?

BOTTOMLINE: Because most organizations do not institutionalize a systematic and practical method of executing the performance appraisal/review/people management process. Most organizations view the performance appraisal process as an afterthought, a necessary evil.

A key component of the Discipline III. Work the Plan, (a key aspect of the Six Disciplines Methodology) focuses on the best practices of people performance management, using the Individual Plan (IP) as the central planning and execution tool.

Simply put, when each Team Member develops their own IP for the coming quarter, and it is agreed upon with their Team Leader (meaning it is aligned with organizational goals), and the two spend 20 minutes each week to review status, looking for areas of completion and risk -- then the entire performance appraisal/review process becomes routine, automatic and no surprises.

The Six Disciplines Business System makes this IP status process practical - since you use it daily, just like you use Microsoft Outlook for email, calendaring, contacts, etc.

Discipline III. Align Systems

Although critical, deciding what's important and setting meaningful goals are not where most organizations fail.

It's after goals are set that companies run into one of their most challenging foes - their own internal systems (processes, policies, technologies, measures and people).

Listen to this 60-second sound bite from Gary Harpst, founder, CEO and author of Six Disciplines for Excellence, as he briefly describes Disciplines III - Align Systems.

Discipline II. Set Goals That Lead

No organization has the resources to do all things at once; goal setting, by itself, is not enough.

The purpose of Discipline II. Set Goals That Lead - is to help organizations formulate goals and initiatives that lead people to take action that's aligned with what's most important to the organization. .

Listen to this 60-second sound bite from Gary Harpst, founder, CEO and author of Six Disciplines for Excellence, as he briefly describes Disciplines II - Set Goals That Lead.

Coaching Future Leaders

Gallup Management Journal brings us this insightful piece about developing leadership within organizations. Gallup has been researching top-performing leaders for more than 40 years.

Their premise?

"Do you want to get the best performance from your organization's future leaders? Then start asking them direct questions that, when answered, will help shape and define the type of leaders they will become."

The disconnect?

"Many forms of leadership coaching attempt to teach future leaders "about" leadership. But relatively little coaching encourages leaders to concentrate on activities that will reliably improve their capacity to lead."

One crucial discovery has been that top performance is strongly correlated to seven main leadership activities or "demands."

Those demands are:

1. Visioning
2. Maximizing values
3. Challenging experience
4. Mentoring
5. Building a constituency
6. Making sense of experience
7. Knowing self

BOTTOMLINE: Focusing each leader's growth on the seven demands can accelerate leadership development. Read the entire article here for questions to ask leaders in development.