Business Intelligence

(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

(11601) Susan Annunzio says:

To grow your business, narrow your focus. Get to better understand your top-performing workgroups and do everything feasible to better leverage what those top workgroups do. Replicate those workgroups by helping the mid-level performers perform better. That way you can spread success throughout your entire organization and maximize the amount of creative thinking that takes place. This is the path to growth.

1. Workgroups are the “engine rooms” for organizational growth.

Every company or organization has workgroups of various sizes. A workgroup may have just a few people in it, or it may have hundreds or thousands. Some organizations form workgroups along functional lines, others use product groupings or geographical areas. Workgroups can be permanent or temporary. A workgroup is the basic unit responsible for generating measurable results in an organization.

The leaders of your own organization probably think of it conceptually as a series of individual workgroups, each of which needs to be handled differently. Some of the workgroups are probably stand-out performers, while others under-perform. In fact, in the study of 3,000 knowledge workers, the global distribution of workgroups was:

High performing: 10%
Average performers: 52%
Non-performing: 38%

The way workgroups are managed is evolving rapidly. In the industrial era, the assembly line and economies of scale were the fuel of corporate success. In those circumstances, top-down command-and-control hierarchies worked well. Business decisions were reasonably straightforward, competitors were well defined and obvious, and it wasn’t necessary for workers to think creatively – all they had to do was follow directions.

In today’s marketplace conditions, however, the old industrial era business model is less effective. Today, markets are saturated with alternative offerings, capital is scarce, many industries have been consolidated and products are fast becoming commoditized. Businesses have to work harder to meet the customer’s needs. To be sustainable, companies have to keep cutting costs and exhibiting operational excellence. Workers cannot simply follow the orders of the business leaders but must use their own brainpower and creativity to come up with enhanced products and offerings. Leaders don’t have all the answers, and can’t be everywhere at once, so they have to rely on the combined brainpower of all employees to come up with new service ideas, new product concepts and new marketing ideas. In just the same way as the power has shifted from sellers to the customer, power in many organizations has also moved from the senior management team to the workgroups that actually get things done. It is at the workgroup level that the best new ideas of the future will come.

2. To increase workgroup performance, enhance the environment

The single factor that is most critical to the creation of a high-performing workgroup is to create the right environment. Every workgroup is a product of its environment. To sustain profitable growth, create a business environment where:

Your people feel valued.
People feel like they can do quality thinking.
Everyone feels they can create and seize opportunities

The fastest and most effective way for any organization to achieve growth is to focus on increasing the performance of your organization’s best performing workgroups. Put differently, if you can progressively enhance the environment in which your best workgroups operate, they will just naturally grow and expand.

To foster a high-performance environment:

Put in place leaders who are completely open about themselves – someone who will work to create the optimum environment for the workgroup and who doesn’t feel the need to be in the middle of everything micromanaging. Good leaders need to know their own strengths and weaknesses and rely on others to compensate where they are weak.

Use 360-degree feedback – where the workgroup members evaluate the leader as well as being evaluated by him or her themselves. Good evaluations should be based on observable behaviors rather than personal opinions.

Offer amnesty to those who bring up “unspeakable” ideas – so that everyone knows they can speak the truth without fear of repercussion. Often, people feel they might be punished for telling the truth. Remove that fear to enhance the environment. Encourage people to be respectful in what they say and assume good intent, but if there are problems in the logic being applied, encourage people to speak out.

Encourage more collaborative thinking – so that the entire workgroup will own the solutions to problems which get developed. To enhance collaboration:

• Allow team members to vent their feelings.
• List all the implicit assumptions which have been made.
• Get people to think by reversing those assumptions.
• List all the implicit assumptions that have been made.
• Get people to think by reversing those assumptions.
• List all creative ideas which get suggested.
• Highlight the smart ideas and look for any recurring patterns.
• Pinpoint any potential dangers – what could go wrong.
• Develop an action plan to move forward.

Play to the individual strengths of the workgroup members – and pass the ball to the person who can do the most with the idea. When everyone in the group understands what they do best and what others can do well, the right job can be assigned to the right person so everyone benefits. This is smart teamwork. It’s also the way the whole can be greater than the sum of the workgroup’s parts. It’s also a great idea to regularly invest in training and upgrading the skills of the workgroup members so that future high performance can be achieved.

3. Create processes by which workgroups can share their secrets

Ideally, you want to spread high performance principles and practices throughout your entire organization. There are two basic approaches to this ideal:

1. You can deliberately attempt to create a company-wide environment where high-performance workgroups can flourish.
2. You can develop sound and repeatable processes by which your existing high-performance workgroups teach all the other workgroups how to increase their performance.

It may even make sense to try both approaches in parallel and simultaneously. Some ideas that have worked for high-performing workgroups and that may be worth considering for your own circumstances and situation are:

Make sure there is support from th3e top – that your corporate and group leaders are all on the same page when it comes to doing whatever is required to support high performance.

Hire smart people, set them goals but leave the how up to them – being careful to provide enough information so good decisions can be made. Also, you want to actively encourage people to take risks by making it clear they will not be punished for failure when making an attempt to move forward.

Encourage people to make decisions quickly – and reward those who come up with good ideas, regardless of their position in the company.

Value collaboration highly – by creating an environment where your best people enjoy working with each other to achieve something substantial and noteworthy. Your compensation system needs to reflect this ideal rather than simply rewarding those who grab control and attempt to take credit for the entire workgroup’s input.

Put your front-line people first – and make it clear everyone else in the organization is there to support those who interact directly with customers. Replace bureaucracy with greater teamwork.

Treat your people with respect – so they will treat your customers with professionalism. Focus on excellence and create an environment in which people are encouraged to think for themselves.

4. Understand the three drivers of high workgroup performance.

High performing workgroups attract the best talent because ambitious people want to be where they can do their best work. They also want to feel like they’re making a difference to the company. Ideally, top performers want to be in an environment where they can work hard and be rewarded for their superior performance.

Specifically, there are three key drivers of high performing workgroups. These workgroups:

Value people, Optimize critical thinking, Seize opportunities

1. Value People

That is, they create an environment where smart people are actually treated like they can think for themselves. Employees are told what the organization’s goals are and then left to decide for themselves how best to go about achieving those goals. More to the point, managers specify the group’s objectives and then get out of the way. Managers then get referred to only when the group needs resources.

Note that in this kind of environment, a healthy level of robust debate should exist. People should passionately advocate what they consider to be the best way to move forward. Others may disagree, but there should exist a healthy respect for the contribution of others. In high performing workgroups, people feel challenged and inspired to do their very best work.

2. Optimize Critical Thinking

Critical thinking means to draw logical conclusions from complex information and decide how to use that information to achieve specified objectives. To be able to think critically, the people in high performing workgroups need to be provided with enough information to do their best work.

Critical thinking also means to separate the facts of a situation from the emotions. There needs to be consistency between what people say and what they do. There also must be a leader who will “run interference” for the workgroup – that is, a leader who will protect the workgroup from the rest of the organization. With this type of leader in place, a high performing workgroup can focus on getting the job done rather than getting enmeshed in internal politics, etc. The leader should also have the ability to secure a workable budget for the workgroup, lobby for the necessary equipment and if necessary change the corporate rules.

3. Seize opportunities

High performing workgroups generate a learning environment where people can generate new ideas, take risks, try things out and learn by making mistakes. The foundation for this kind of environment is continual learning and experimentation.

Many opportunities to grow revenues for an organization arise as a side-effect of trying something else. Unless people feel like they have some latitude, there won’t be much of a culture of taking risks. The higher the workgroup’s tolerance for failed attempts, the more people will feel empowered to try new things – which is what you want.

High performing workgroups have a knack for turning problems into opportunities. They encourage risk taking by publicly recognizing the people who make an extraordinary effort, irrespective of whether things went to plan or not. This is the only way employees will seize on good ideas as they come up.

5. To grow, move mid-level workgroups to high-level performance

The best way to enhance the overall performance of any company is to find ways to move some of the average performing workgroups into the high-performance bracket. Typically, if you can bring just a few of your average performers to the next level, you’ll double the number of high performing workgroups in your company.

High performing: 10% becomes 20%
Average performers: 52% becomes 42%
Non-performing: 38% unchanged

Focusing on transforming the workgroups in the middle – those that get a few things right but not everything – makes much more sense than eliminating the weakest workgroups. It’s impossible to cut your way to success. Eliminating the non-performers doesn’t help you develop new products, services or markets, which is what is required to grow the enterprise. Moving the mid-level performers is also more realistic and most effective than attempting to transform the entire company, which will require substantial time and money to achieve.

Moving the mid-level groups can generate dramatic improvements in company performance. The process is also manageable – it can be scaled up or down as appropriate. Even better, most of these types of initiatives can be internally driven – there will be no need to bring in expensive outside consultants as would usually be required if you’re attempting to do a company-wide transformation.

So how, exactly, do you upgrade the mid-level performers and move them into the high-performance category?

1. Go through and identify all of your organization’s high-performing and average-performing workgroups.
2. From the average performers, choose the top 20-percent – based on criteria that make sense to your situation, such as:
Performance to accepted metrics of success.
Importance of the results to the company’s revenues.
The greatest potential for growth.
The group’s internal environment.

3. Match an average-performing team with a high-performing workgroup – based on common functions, goals, clients or other types of affinities.

4. Create a SWAT team – which will be made up of representatives from both the high-performing and the average-performing workgroups. A good SWAT team will have eight to ten members who have credibility with their coworkers and a demonstrated track record of success. Set aside time on a regular basis for the SWAT team to get together and identify problems, set goals and develop joint solutions to the problems encountered in upgrading the mid-level workgroup. A member of the company’s senior management will also need to be available to act as an advocate for the SWAT team as required.

5. Let the SWAT team go to work on enhancing the average performing workgroup – by running various projects where members of both workgroups collaborate. Ideally, the SWAT team will come up with alternative ideas nobody else has thought of because they can bring a fresh perspective to bear. Draft other people into the SWAT team from throughout the organization on an as-needed basis. The SWAT team should meet regularly until its goals are achieved and then quarterly to ensure the results are sustained long-term.

6. Tell the story of what’s happening – through both formal and informal channels. Encourage the SWAT team members to share their experiences throughout your organization. Hold meetings where they can discuss what’s been achieved and solicit more suggestions. Make the SWAT team into a teaching team by sharing both the successes and the failures. Tell the story of how things have really unfolded rather than letting some myth about what’s going on take root. The more honest and open you can be, the better.

In essence, moving the middle revolves around the use of internal change agents. The people who make up the SWAT team look at the environments of the average performers and upgrade them. That change effort, in turn, swells the ranks of the high performers with all the flow-on benefits that will generate.

Contagious Success

It takes blood, sweat and tears to build a team, but the return on effort is huge. Many leaders think molding a team isn’t worth the effort, but they’re missing a tremendous opportunity to differentiate themselves and build the business. The more people can see the total anatomy of the business, the intersections of its moving parts, and the broader context in which it operates, the better job they do.

-Ram Charan

(21805) Ram Charan says:

An important part of know-how is being able to get high-energy and competent people to commit to the total business rather than just their own careers. Building a high-performing team is a tremendous opportunity to enhance the business and propel it forward.

Cooperation Is Essential to Team Building

Once you’ve taken the time and effort to recruit smart and competent people, the next challenge is to mold these people into a team who synchronize their work in such a way that will propel the business forward. The natural tendency is for each person to focus on their own specialty, but if you plan on achieving something of note, you need to get everyone pulling in the same direction. Quite simply, this is the only way to generate the synergy that comes when high-performing individuals build something together.

To mold a great team of leaders who work together well:

Shape a common view of your business–by sharing all of the data you have available. Get everyone on the same page by letting them master the basics of the business factually and accurately. It’s not until the entire team knows everything you do that they can truly add some value. Get everyone up to speed by ensuring they know your company’s marketplace realities, challenges and resources in fine detail.

Confront directly any behaviors that dilute the team’s effectiveness–something that will take courage. Many people try to avoid or gloss over conflict or hope the problem will resolve itself eventually. That’s a waste of time. Whenever someone does something that dilutes the team’s effectiveness, you need to have the inner courage to confront them directly, tell them that is unacceptable and ask them to change.

Bring to the surface and resolve any conflicts–before they have a chance to cause delays or problems. By anticipating and then resolving conflicts early on, you avoid the possibility of them becoming personalized. You should expect conflicts to come in three general flavors or themes: