It’s difficult to achieve exceptional results, but it’s much harder to sustain them. Having achieved the goal, we all tend to congratulate ourselves and move on to the next challenge. We become bored, lose interest and focus, and backslide. We stop doing the things that made the difference, mistakenly thinking that those processes are now stable. They are not. All organizational processes are naturally unstable.
1. Prepare yourself and others for performance deterioration. Begin talking openly about this danger as a part of your goal achievement celebrations. Remind everyone of examples where you’ve scaled the summit and then fallen off a cliff. There will be plenty of these examples.
2. Keep monitoring all key processes. A performance dashboard is the perfect tool for this. You can see how you are doing at a glance each week or month. Any unraveling will become immediately apparent.
3. Make sure that a leader remains accountable. We all pay more attention when our names are on the board as the responsible leader. Others may become intoxicated with success, but the fear of embarrassment will keep the designated driver focused.
3. Create a crisis at the first sign of performance droop. Become distressed and let it show. People are exquisitely sensitive to how their leaders feel. Use this fact to your advantage.
How do you sustain exceptional performance?
We all like to think we are special. Have you noticed that? This longing to feel special is greatest among those of us who are below average. A good many misguided leaders miss this point entirely. They think that the way to motivate others is to never be satisfied, to always be critical and demanding.
1. Make the goals easy at first. Here’s an uncomfortable truth. Success, even when it’s meaningless, feels good. People actually rejoice when their teams win. They may not have had a thing to do with it. Success energizes, motivates and feeds on itself.
2. Celebrate incremental improvement. Progress matters. Make a big deal out of it. People need emotional fuel to keep going. They want feel that they are at least making some headway.
3. Take small steps. People who don’t make some progress tire quickly, become discouraged and give up. They convince themselves and others that the goal didn’t really matter that much anyway.
4. Preach patience and practice what you preach. Variation happens. Significant change usually takes a long time. While genuinely celebrating incremental progress, repeatedly clarify the difference between movement and the goal line.
5. Do not celebrate failure. Feel-good leaders often mistakenly conclude that feeling good is the goal. Nope. Results are the things that matter.
How do you make people feel special?
One of the evidence-based ways to achieve the results you want is to design and deploy a process that produces those results. But once we adapt to a certain process, we keep following it even if it no longer works—or never did. People don’t like change. It’s true that change occurs naturally, but the pace of natural change is glacial. Successful competitors rarely wait for change to occur naturally.
1. Focus relentlessly on results. The best case you can make that a process must be improved is the fact that it is not producing the desired results.
2. Identify a small group of passionate process owners. If you expect everyone in the group to leap at the opportunity to improve key organizational processes, you have lost your grip on reality. Only a small number of people care enough to make the necessary changes. Find them. Feed them. Empower them.
3. Make the case for change. If you just announce that the process has changed and everyone will just have to deal with it, a fair number of your colleagues will sabotage your recommended changes on principle. Explain yourself.
4. Force compliance. When you’ve accomplished as much as you can with effective persuasion, employ brute force to make the change stick. Audit the players’ compliance. Post their individual results publicly. Public embarrassment works. Attach unpleasant consequences to the failure to comply.
How to you achieve process improvement in your work environment?
This is hard to do. It’s even harder to do well. You have the nice leaders who want everyone to be happy and love them. They just can’t bring themselves to confront their colleagues because that would hurt their feelings. They hint and beat around the bush. They avoid unpleasantness by talking about some other problem.
Then there are the jerks. They yell at underlings and berate people publicly for not doing what they want them to do the way they want them to do it. They confront not to produce results but to distract others from their own shortcomings or to throw their weight around.
Effective confronters avoid these two paralyzing extremes. Here’s how you can do it:
1. First, calm yourself. If you confront others when you are angry or frustrated, your emotion will drown out your message. You want to create an energizing discomfort that motivates, not discourages.
2. Ask reasonable but pointed clarifying questions. Ask permission to speak frankly and emphasize that you do not wish to be hurtful. Get right to the point. After you’ve asked the right question, stop and wait for the answer. Resist your natural inclination to fill uncomfortable silences with rambling explanations about why you hate to have to ask what needs to be asked.
3. Ask whether you’ve been clear. Ask whether you are making sense. Ask whether the questions you are asking are reasonable. Then wait for the confirmation that you have indeed been clear.
4. Ask whether you’ve provided the support they need. The reality is that people often need muscle to get things done in bureaucracies. If you can’t or won’t block for your runners, you cannot expect them to advance the ball.
5. Extract a new commitment. Refuse to leave the discomfort zone until you have a renewed commitment to achieve the results that you have both agreed make sense.
How do you effectively confront poor performance in your organization?
It is easy to write an action plan. You’ve dashed off hundreds of them. They sound good. After you’ve read a few, they all start to sound alike. They are well intentioned. They sound like they would work. Once you’ve written it, you can check this box knowing it is unlikely that you or anyone else will ever look at it again.
Creating a customized, innovative action plan is a lot harder. You have to think. Instead of writing down the things you feel like doing, consider what you would do if you were willing to do whatever it took. Forget about the barriers you face for a moment. Suppose you could get everyone’s full cooperation. What would you do then? When brainstorming about what might work, don’t hesitate to consider the most ridiculous options.
1. Specify exactly what you are going to do. Begin by explaining what you have already done. Use short, simple sentences. Focus on behavior instead of intention.
2. Explain how you are going to do it. Break it down into the simplest possible steps.
3. Identify who will do it. When it comes to persuading key stakeholders and opinion leaders, the people who are most effective are those with the best personal relationships with those opinion leaders. These powerful persuaders may be low ranking employees or informal leaders who are not even on your team.
4. Say when you will do it. Ask the responsible leaders whether the timeframes are reasonable. Obtain their commitments that they will execute the plans by that time.
5. Check to make sure it was done. The only action plans that matter are the ones that are executed. We all know how rare real execution it. Go over the task list at every meeting. Check off the tasks you have completed. Ask about the progress others are making. Offer your help while making it clear that you will not stop checking on them until their work is done.
6. Monitor results. The most elegant action plans—even when fully deployed—are worthless if they don’t produce improved results.
How do you encourage the development of action plans that actually work?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all just did what we are supposed to do? Some of us are more self-disciplined than others, but all of us tend to slack off if we can get away with it. All of us know that we should wash our hands between patients, but an astounding number of us will not do it unless someone is watching. It’s discouraging, but it’s just the way it is.
1. Specify the behavior you expect. Be very clear and specific. Describe precise behaviors. Resist the temptation to focus on attitudes. Assume nothing. When you have clarified exactly what you expect to happen, make it clear that you expect it to happen every time.
2. Inform people that you will be watching. Then watch. When people figure out that no one is watching, they will fall right back in to their natural patterns of non compliance. Do you really believe that anyone would follow the speed limit if the cops were never around?
3. Hold people accountable. The consequences for noncompliance must sting. If you issue parking tickets to those employees who park in the spaces reserved for patients but do nothing more, the transgressors will just tear up the tickets and keep parking improperly. And they will complain bitterly about receiving these annoying tickets. If, on the other hand, a ticket results in an automatic corrective action and a letter to their files, they will find another place to park.
How do you inspect what you expect in your company?
We all face a blizzard of complex and confusing processes every day at work. It is easy to get lost. Confused, discouraged and distracted, we fall into doing what is right in front of us, what we feel like doing—or doing nothing at all. We completely lose sight of the goal. Average or below-average results predictably follow. Deliberate, focused activity does not occur naturally. Leaders make it happen.
1. Focus on the results you want to achieve. You cannot focus on everything at once. Begin every leadership meeting with your performance dashboard. If don’t have a dashboard, create one. Focus intensely on those indicators that are currently not meeting your targets.
2. Figure out exactly what you will have to do to improve your performance. This is not as easy as it sounds, but you must do it. Since you have selected indicators that allow for comparative performance, someone somewhere is getting the job done. That means it can be done if you will figure it out and do it.
3. Review your task list at every meeting. Everyone loves to talk about what others should do, but personal accountability and follow through are not nearly as much fun. Make sure every task has a timeline and that someone is responsible to see that it gets done.
How do you use task lists to produce and sustain exceptional results?
You know exactly who these people are. They are miserable and they make everyone around them miserable. They complain and whine. They stir the pot and deflate morale. Their colleagues hate to see their names on the schedule. They are poisonous. You only keep these people around because you need warm bodies and because you are hesitant to deal them. You just keep hoping they will straighten up or leave on their own. They never do.
1. Describe your net-negative colleagues in specific behavioral terms. This is not an issue of whether you like someone or whether they are popular. It’s about how they behave. It’s about repeated patterns of disruptive behavior or poor performance that have rendered the work environment toxic and limited the results you might have achieved without them.
2. Give them fair warning. These malcontents deserve a fair chance to turn themselves around. Meet with them. Tell them exactly what they are doing wrong and what they must change. Follow this up with a letter documenting your conversation and laying out the consequences of their failure to comply.
3. Do not set a deadline. Almost everyone can act better for 90 days or so. Make it clear that their negative behavior must change immediately. Emphasize that their behavior changes must be permanent. Any future regression into negativity may result in summary discharge without further notice. This is not a progressive corrective action. This is a line. They must tow it or leave.
How do you remove net-negative colleagues from your organization?
It would be great if all of us were equally effective leaders. That is just not the case. Some leaders are truly exceptional. Some are awful. Most of us are more-or-less average. Given this reality, every leader is obligated to field the best leadership team possible throughout the organization. This imperative is the most important test of leadership. It is not easy. Every leader is a legend in the leader’s own mind. Every person who has a leadership job believes that he or she deserves to keep it. We all have reasonable excuses for not producing results. It’s never our fault.
1. Take a hard look at your current leadership teams. Ask yourself if you could do better. If you could, then you must. It’s that simple. Do not permit your discomfort to dissuade you from doing your duty.
2. Ask your colleagues whether you are obligated to field the best possible team. This question will get everyone thinking more clearly. It will force everyone to face the competitive reality that leaders are not all the same. It will remind everyone that leaders exist to produce results, and it will trigger the sobering realization that fielding the best-possible team is their duty too.
3. Trade up. You can give lip service to fielding the best possible teams, but no one will believe you unless you actually do it. If you tolerate mediocre leaders when better people are idling in the wings, everyone will realize you are all talk. And your boss will be thinking about replacing you with a more effective leader.
How have you fielded the best possible leadership teams? What barriers did you overcome to accomplish this?
You have learned by now that people want to do what they want to do. They resist processes. They deride them as “cookbook” or “kindergarten.” Most people would much prefer to fly by the seat of their pants. But the only way to consistently produce the results you want is by following a process that will produce those results.
1. Identify the process owners who care. Don’t waste your time with the slackers and whiners. Talk to the people who want to make a difference. You know who they are. They have good ideas about how to make things better, but their negative colleagues have hooted them into submission. They have just about given up. Your invitation to suggest how their daily processes might be improved will be a breath of fresh air.
2. Invite them to suggest how the process might be improved. Begin your discussions with the results you want to achieve. Document your current level of performance. Emphasize the gap. Ask your quiet champions to tell you what goes wrong and ask them how the process would flow better. They have ideas. No one has been interested before.
3. Find evidence-based processes. Somebody else in the world is probably successfully accomplishing what you are trying to do. They almost certainly have a process in place that they have been perfecting for a number of years. Ask them if they will share what they have learned. You will be amazed how often even your competitors will share their insights.
4. Document these processes. When you think you have found an evidence-based process that will work for you, write it down. Make it available. Be sure it is simple to understand and to use. Keep it short. Then keep improving it. Keep it up to date.
How do you identify and deploy evidence based processes in your company? What are some examples?