Performance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results.
The pursuit of performance is something that is too easily lost in some of the kinder, gentler content that is found in the leadership literature today. My advice: don’t forget for a second that you’ll only be successful if the team you are leading is successful.
In contemplating the “set context and communicate expectations to promote performance” theme for this post, I drew a portion of the content below from my book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership. Our focus in the original section was on building the operationally excellent team. While you may use different labels, the concepts will support your efforts to promote high performance.
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Operational excellence starts with you setting the expectation that your team will perform at a level necessary to achieve or exceed objectives. In seeking to establish standards of performance and behavior, your very public and very frequent statements of expectations are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Your ability to grasp your true priorities in support of your firm’s goals, provides the ability for you to articulate these priorities and objectives to your team and begin setting the expectation for success.
Everyone on the operationally excellent team must understand their responsibility for execution around key objectives, and be aware that their performance and progress are both important and are being watched. The operationally excellent team always knows the objectives, where they stand in relation to achieving them, and what they are going to do to get there.
7 Sugge
stions to Promote High Performance on Your Team:
1. Communicate expectations for achievement of operating objectives from day one of your leadership role. There should be no ambiguity about your intentions and your expectations for performance, progress reporting and ultimately, achievement. Remember to link yourself as ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the team and to let them understand your role to both coach and support the team and individual efforts.
2. Kick-off all operations oriented meetings with a review of the key business objectives and progress towards those objectives. Conclude every session with a reminder of the objectives—especially near term deliverables. This is equally important for individual review sessions as it is for group situations.
3. Praise, celebrate and reward milestone achievement and positive progress frequently and liberally.
4. Acknowledge roadblocks, misfires and general problems quickly and calmly. Your appropriate reaction to these occurrences will contribute to building an effective working environment where people can honestly and openly deal with the negative as well as the positive.
5. Foster a culture that treats problems as opportunity for creativity and innovation. More than lip-service is required here. Let teams experiment and implement new ideas to fix or improve and challenge them to keep improving.
6. Seek out and deal with poor performers promptly and fairly. As the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the whole bushel, and the same is true with teams. Your handling of poor performers (professionally and timely of course) sends a powerful message to your team. You build accountability into the culture by reinforcing that a mistake is a learning experience, repeated mistakes are a developmental or training opportunities and chronic poor performance is a reason for reassignment or dismissal.
7. Set and share expectations for your own performance and be open about your progress and your own misfires. The team needs to see that you practice what you preach.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Great performance is a function of many factors. While the formula may vary a bit from team to team, alignment on goals, a culture of accountability, clear expectations and constant assessment of performance versus expectations are core to the recipe for success everywhere.
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Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)
Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at https://artpetty.com/blog/
Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]
#3 is a big one. I’m only beginning to realize how much Amabile & Kramer’s Progress Principle applies to work.
Thanks, David! Agreed. -Art
I agree with David, and would further add that when I talk to my clients and their reports, it is something that is very much absent in our organizations. It seems we’re hard-wired to find faults (a throw back to our ancestors, I suspect, who were always on alert for saber toothed tigers), but need to learn to praise and celebrate.
Art,
I really like #1 and #7. It is very important to let everyone know your expectations for everyone else and yourself right off the bat so they can prepare and work accordingly. By setting the expectations in the beginning, you get in front of problems or challenges that could be encountered. In line with setting expectations, you must also hold people accountable for their part of the project. When you set the expectations, you must also explain the outcome of underperformance and what accountability measures will be in place. By doing that in the beginning, everything will be on the table and the chance of failure could be minimized.
Thanks for sharing your, Brandon! -Art