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?
Once you decide what to measure, you will naturally want to compare your performance with your colleagues and competitors. And you will want to find out how the very best companies in the world are performing on those indicators. Finding and displaying apples-to-apples comparisons can be a challenge. Leaders, fearful that they really don’t measure up, will complain that they can’t find good comparative data, and particularly benchmark performance data. That’s just an excuse. You can always find out how the best organizations are performing. The organizations that are producing exceptional results are usually eager to share them.
1. Make your expectations clear. Don’t let your colleagues off the hook. Find out how the best leaders are performing, even if you have to look outside your own industry. Don’t accept any excuses. Demand benchmark comparative data for every major performance indicator.
2. Participate in a national database. Since every leader who aspires to be successful is interested in measuring performance, an endless number of national performance databases have emerged. These will report your percentile ranking on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and physician satisfaction. This makes it easy to know exactly where you stand. It does not make it easy to achieve and sustain exceptional performance, but you can know where you stand.
3. Include benchmark performance on every performance chart. Once the number is there, people will not be able to ignore it. And their competitive juices will kick in. The slackers will lobby hard not to publish world-class performance results because they know that you will then expect them to stop slacking and producing exceptional results instead.
How do you identify benchmark performance in your organization?
Once you focus on results by identifying performance metrics, you will need to set some goals. To your surprise, even your best people will lobby to set goals that are easy to achieve. People want to feel good about themselves as they are. Very few people roll out of bed every day looking forward to working hard. We all want to do only what we want to do and we want it to be easy, fun and quick. And the idea that one’s performance must keep improving year after year is positively annoying to people who have convinced themselves that they are already special.
1. Begin where you are. Set annual goals that are both tough and realistic. Setting the 95th percentile as your target when you are currently functioning at the 10th percentile is ridiculous. Such expectations are not motivating; they are merely discouraging. As you approach top quartile performance, strive for smaller improvements each year. It’s a lot harder to go from the 89th percentile to the 91st percentile than it is to improve from the 38th to the 45th.
2. Use comparative performance to set your goals. If you are producing at the 6th percentile and your competitor is already functioning at the 51st, you will look pretty stupid setting your goal at the 12th percentile.
3. Decide on the level of performance you expect to sustain over time. Most leaders would agree that the organization that is consistently producing results across the company in the 90th percentile (the top 10 percent in the country) is a better organization than one that hits the 99th percentile in one or two areas and is merely average in the rest.
How do you assure that your goals are both demanding and realistic?
Reporting individual and organizational performance data is one thing, but finding and publishing comparative data is another thing entirely. I may think that my 95 percent accuracy is just fine until I learn that the rest of my colleagues are averaging 98 percent. It then becomes clear that my own performance is unacceptably poor, that I am the worst performer in the group. Whiny leaders often complain that accurate comparative performance data does not exist or cannot be found, but real leaders neither make nor buy that excuse. You can always find meaningful comparative data. And you must.
1. Demand comparative data. Begin by comparing your individual performance to your colleagues’ performance. Move on to comparing your team’s performance with other similar organizations. Finally, compare your organization’s performance with your competitors. That really satisfies or stings, depending on your relative performance.
2. Emphasize comparative performance. Once you begin reporting comparative performance data, its superiority over individual performance will become obvious. Before you know it, comparative data will be the only metric anyone is interested in.
3. Go public. While this is brutal, it is highly motivating. There is nothing like seeing your comparative performance on the Web for making or ruining your day.
How do you use comparative data in your department?
When you decide what to measure, publish your results for everyone to see. If your published results don’t make people uncomfortable, you are measuring the wrong things or you have not set your goals high enough. People will be fine with public performance data showing them to be perfect just as they are, but poor comparative performance data stings. Until you make your performance public, you will remain focused not on results but on continuing to do only what you feel like doing. People are strongly inclined to avoid discomfort.
1. When possible, publish some individual data. Such data give individuals a sense of control.
2. Always publish team performance data. This illustrates the most basic truth of organizational life. It is simply not possible to achieve and sustain exceptional results without teamwork.
3. Publish your results on the Internet. There are few better ways for organizations to invite their stakeholders to hold them accountable. This openness helps to create a culture of transparency, ownership and competitive motivation.
How do you publish your organizational results?