(11602) Susan Annunzio says:
To get different places in the future, you’ll need to be willing to think and act differently. Rejecting conventional wisdom is never easy, but it’s the only way to move forward. To get to where you want to be in the future, replace conventional thinking with workgroup-based reality thinking. Do that consistently, and you’ll be impressed with the results.
You’re successful if you meet your quarterly targets vs. Short-term thinking stunts long-term growth
The number one inhibitor of high performance is short-term thinking. In essence, this is living for today at the expense of tomorrow’s success. When companies cut head count and reduce budgets to meet this quarter’s financial targets, all they actually end up with are overworked and frustrated employees who are less likely to come up with new and innovative ideas in the future.
The way forward, then, is to balance the short and the long term. Enterprise leaders need to collaborate with their workgroups to achieve a sustainable balance. Specifically, the leaders of the high-performing workgroups need to be consulted and realistic goals need to be agreed upon. Once those goals are specified, the decisions on how to achieve them should be made at the workgroup level. Across-the-board cuts just aren’t a great idea.
Company leaders help workgroup performance vs. Workgroup leaders protect their groups from leaders
In too many companies, the leaders of high-performing workgroups spend a lot of time protecting their groups form the larger company’s management. This form of “intelligent disobedience” is a huge drain on the workgroup leader’s time and energy. If this same amount of energy could be directed to positive pursuits instead, the results maybe impressive.
High-performing workgroups are inhabited by risk takers - those who are willing and eager to challenge the status quo in order to find better ways to get things done. The leaders of these workgroups are exactly the kind of people who can drive growth for an organization, and yet companies are inadvertently driving them out.
Let workgroup leaders do what they think best.
Productivity = High Performance vs. Productivity + Innovation = High Performance
The terms “productivity” and “high performance” are often used so frequently that people assume they are one and the same. They’re not. In the industrial era, productivity numbers measured the number of units produced in a given period of time by a worker. In a knowledge-based economy, however, productivity is much more difficult to measure. Merely producing more of anything is not useful if the quality level is so low as to make the additional units of no value.
In addition, it’s difficult to measure workplace productivity when people can go home at night and use email, cell phones, laptop computers and other communication technologies to keep thinking about their work. Should the hours these workers spend working at home, while commuting or even while sitting at the beach be included in productivity metrics?
When managers solely emphasize productivity, they drive out of their organizations the capacity of workers to engage in the type of creative thinking which will add value. Knowledge workers add value by doing better work, by introducing more creativity and customer-focused innovation into their tasks. To increase both profitability and sustainability, companies should be encouraging their workers to be more innovative.
Genuine high performance arises when productivity is blended with creativity and innovation.
A workgroup leader is the most important must-have vs. The environment is more important than the leader
The workgroup environment rather than the leader is the most important factor in driving high performance. This fact holds across all industries and geographies. Effective leaders come in a variety of personalities and styles, but an effective workgroup environment comes in only one flavor - people must be valued, critical thinking must be optimized and opportunities must be seized.
When a workgroup’s environment is linked too closely to a leader, the workgroup loses traction if that leader moves on. To avoid this, make the group responsible for creating its own environment. Use a 360-degree feedback process to evaluate the environment and gather input and ideas on how to enhance it. Ideally, you wan the workgroup to have an environment people genuinely want to be a part of. Make it possible for the workgroup to achieve that and the results will flow.
High-potential individuals drive workgroups vs. It’s the workgroup that counts, not the individual
If you put your very best workers in the wrong type of environment, they’ll get bogged down and won’t be able to do great work. Therefore, work to enrich your environment rather than try and attract top talent alone.
To generate the best return on your investment in human capital:
- Provide everyone with ongoing training and mentoring.
- Develop detailed career paths for each individual.
- Get each individual you can into a high performance team.
One distinguishing characteristic of the environment of high-performing workgroups is they have a “we’re-in-this-together” mentality. The members of the group don’t care about trying to look good at the expense of the team’s results. Nor are they trying to aggressively attempting to advance their own careers. High-performing workgroups believe the whole is greater than the sum of the group’s individual parts because everyone works together.
To grow, eliminate low-performing workgroups vs. Even high-performance workgroups have room to grow
The easiest and surest way to increase the performance of your company is to increase the performance of all those workgroups which you already classify as high-performing. There is always room to grow at the top. These workgroups are already doing what’s required, and they will know best how to enhance their won performance better than anyone else.
Another way to increase organizational performance is by moving some of your average workgroups into the high-performance category. Develop processes by which an average workgroup can be teamed up with a high-performing workgroup. Let them collaborate to find the best way to transfer the requisite expertise and skills.
When facing challenges, bring in outside consultants vs. Your employees already know how to solve problems
The knee-jerk reaction of many companies when they face a serious challenge is to hire a team of consultants to provide assistance. Occasionally the outside perspective of consultants is worthwhile, but in the majority of cases companies would do better if they consulted with their own employees who often know how to solve the problem but nobody has asked them directly.
The key to making this work is to offer employees an “amnesty” - if they tell the truth about what needs to be done, you have to guarantee they won’t suffer any negative consequences. If employees can be convinced they won’t become candidates for dismissal the next time your organization cuts its head count, they will be happy to step up to the plate and give you their ideas.
One idea in this context is to send out a Request for Proposal to your internal staff in just the same way as is often done with projects. Let your people form their own ad-hoc teams to work on their proposal. Treat the ideas put forward with respect. You may be surprised to find that your employees put together a proposal that far outweighs what outsiders can provide because it deals with the details of the situation. Use that idea well - and don’t forget to recognize and reward those who contribute.
Grow by fixing what’s wrong with the organization vs. Look for “dumb” ideas - they can be paradigm shifts
If you manage a company, be very careful when you reject out-of-hand the next “dumb” idea your people suggest to you. That idea which sounds so foreign to you may actually be a great way to differentiate your organization and allow it to move forward dramatically. That idea may be an early indicator of the next paradigm shift your industry will go through.
Many senior managers have the perspective of adopting new technology to do the things that have always been done faster, cheaper and better. When someone comes along who has grown up with the new technology and has no interest in the historical basis for why things get done, they might be able to see a new opportunity to grow that won’t be obvious to the old hands. Even an entry level worker may have an idea that can open up new opportunities.
Keep information confidential vs. Workers need more information, not less, to excel
Paradoxically, many companies hire knowledge workers for their ability to think and then refuse to give them enough information to do that for fear that data will fall into the hands of competitors. Or senior managers will hoard information they think will scare the rank and file. These actions are probably well intentioned but ultimately counterproductive.
What’s the alternative? In high-performing workgroups, people know everything. They are told the good and the bad - where the organization is at present, where it wants to go in the future, what the challenges are and even what the management’s greatest fears are. In short, the employees are trusted that they will use that information in the company’s best interests.
Concentrate on retaining the best talent vs. Build the right environment and the talent will come to you
Being part of a high-performing workgroup is highly attractive to the best talent. They may have come on board because of your company’s reputation, compensation claim, technology or other factors, but to make the best people stay, you need to provide them with an opportunity to work in a high-performance environment.
To be specific, top performers in any field:
- Like to be challenged intellectually
- Crave the opportunity to be responsible for the results they generate personally.
- Like being told what the goal is and then left to their own devices to figure out how to do it.
- Want to work in an environment where they know everything that’s going on.
- Will avoid work situations where leaders are pursuing their own agendas rather than doing what’s logical.
Quite simply the best talent like to be part of high-performance workgroups. Most companies are not creating those kinds of environments at the present time. If you create the conditions under which high-performance workgroups can flourish within your own organization, this will be highly alluring to the employees you need the most.
Contagious Success