It Starts with Leadership

Performance improvement—and particularly “continuous performance improvement”—is always at the forefront of business discussions.

There are thousands of books, methods and “sure fire” approaches being touted as the answer. With the exception of a few standouts, few of them make any real difference. At Media 1, we’ve taken the position that true improvement happens when a few relatively simple concepts are followed, and it doesn’t matter exactly what you call them.

But a couple of things are for sure:

1. Simpler is better.
2. Great leaders help lead great improvement.

That’s why our performance consulting practice is based on a few basic principles and uses a limited number of tools—tools that can be easily scaled and adapted to client needs to help them accomplish exactly what they need.

One of the big principles is that great leadership is the key to organizational performance improvement. Why? In our experience, three practical reasons are at play.

First: Without leader support improvements often do not accomplish intended results.

Second: In the absence of ongoing leader support, performance improvement interventions can often fail or lose their effectiveness over time.

Lastly: No matter how you look at it, improving business performance contains equal parts of people, process, and technology—none of which are successfully done in a vacuum.

Support from “The Top” is critical to the success of any business endeavor. This is especially true when making changes, even if they’re meant for the better. No matter how good or “cool” your interventions may be, they are not going anywhere unless leadership embraces them, touts them, funds them, and monitors them.

The Chicken or the Egg

The real question:

Do you get great leader support because you provide great solutions that increase business productivity and success?

OR

Do you provide great solutions because you have great leadership support?

The answer: Yes.

Don’t think about it too hard or let it devolve into a chicken-and-egg debate. The basic answer is that both are required. Great solutions get great leaders to support them. Great leaders inspire and support great solutions.

And great performance consultants know this. According to a recent CorpU article discussing results from the 10^th Annual Learning Excellence and Innovation Benchmark Study (also by CorpU):

“…expert companies that use a consistent performance consulting methodology enjoy more leadership support for organizational learning than those that do not… {and} a possible reason – performance consulting provides a structured way to ensure the right people are being asked the right questions regularly, thus increasing leaders’ support and alignment of learning with the business.”

Companies that have great support from leaders are able to successfully increase their performance because they have a culture that allows it to happen. That means these companies have a culture in which leaders are open to taking regular and frequent looks at current practices in a hard and honest way to see where continuous improvement can happen.

These cultures are usually characterized by:

• Clear leader-driven strategic and tactical directions and expectations that are clearly tied to business metrics along with great communication about how efforts are going and where improvements can happen.
• The right tools, processes, and resources in place that allow change and improvements to happen
• The right measures and incentives that support improvement and don’t clash internally—rewards or consequences that support the right things and don’t inadvertently work against desired outcomes
• People with the right skills, knowledge, and attitudes to foster improvements and usher them from concept to reality—including ways to address emotional and knowledge issues that normally arise during any change initiative
• People with the right capabilities to do what they are supposed to do at the time they’re supposed to do it
• People with motives that are in sync with what the company needs to accomplish

Great performance comes about because the environment supports it and the right people have the skills to pull it off. Good leaders support good solutions that help them improve their productivity. They don’t really care if the solutions are learning solutions or business process solutions … as long as they work.

Once you know that leader support is one of the major keys to success, you can focus on ways to get that support. And you’ll see that with it, things work out. Without it … well, they won’t.

Getting Leader Support

So what does that mean for you? It means you need a quick, proven way to figure out what needs improving and what can be done to improve them in business terms that leaders respond to!

Business leaders tend to respond well to things that help them achieve their business objectives. So it’s your job to help their organization build and support solutions that do just that.

Solutions generally come in sets to address people, process, and technology issues. Keep in mind, it’s all based on a “performance viewpoint”—something we’ll discuss in my next blog entry.

Basically, you need a way to assure that people, process, and technology are addressed to help ensure successful improvement. And you can accomplish that by talking about the performance consultant’s secret weapon—the Performance Improvement Factors Grid.

In the meantime, you’re already on the right track. You know it all starts with great leadership. Get that and you’ve got one of the most important keys to successful corporate performance improvement.

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Tagged: change management, continuous performance improvement, corporate performance environment, good performance, human capital improvement, organizational improvement, performance artist, performance consulting, performance factors, performance improvement

Posted in: Thought Leadership