The New Performance Environment - How to Own Your Own Performance
The true measure of any organization and its people are the consistent results they deliver and how those results are achieved. It creates an opportunity to shift the old performance model to one where we are leading our own performance. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control.
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The true measure of any organization and its people are the consistent results they deliver and how those results are achieved. It creates an opportunity to shift the old performance model to one where we are leading our own performance. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control. Shifting to proactively accepting more responsibility, actively pursuing personal and team performance, and taking control of performance activities and results may not completely eliminate surprises, but it certainly allows you to lead the conversation, control the development activities, and take more ownership of the results.
Making the shift to leading your own performance versus performance that is leader managed or just annually reviewed sounds great, but how do we get there? By proactively leading where you are and developing a personal blueprint for your personal performance actions and behaviors that are aligned to your team’s and organization’s culture, direction and priorities.
This blueprint starts with establishing a foundation of greater awareness by creating and cultivating enhanced organization, situational and self-awareness. From there, you create a framework for focused development that assists in enhancing your professional eligibility (your required job and technical skills), suitability (your natural behavioral traits and characteristics matched to your position) and viability (the actual impact of both your eligibility and suitability combined). Then, ongoing reinforcement and continual enhancements allow you to reach your full potential while increasing your organizational value and relevance.
Once the foundation, framework, and enhancements have been set, establishing an ongoing “performance connection” is the key to evolving and shifting the performance model from leader-directed, mid-year and end-of-year performance reviews to employee-led performance connections that pursue performance. We'll discuss this in much more detail in a few weeks.
If you follow your performance blueprint, by the end of the year there will be no need for managing performance. You will have been enabling and leading your performance all year long. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control.
Join us next week as we discuss Negativity Island and the effect just one negative person can have on an organization.
And for more detailed information about how to lead your own performance be sure to check out our Lead Where You Are book or online training! Both have greater insights and give you an actual plan to begin leading where you are.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Destination Success: Leading Relationships
Leading Relationships – Not All Relationships are Created Equal
We began our journey to relationship success in our last Destination: Success blog with the action step of identifying your personal sphere of influence. Our second action step to leading your relationships is to define and prioritize your identified connections.
If you missed our initial blog in this series and have not identified your sphere of influence, no worries, you can download the exercise here. If you have completed your sphere exercise from last week go ahead and download this week's document as well as you will copy and paste from last week's connection inventory to continue to build it out.
Nearly all our connections fall into one of three types of relationships. Transient, transactional and authentic. Some connections may vacillate between two or more, but for the most part will fall predominantly in one of the three. You can find complete relationship descriptions by clicking here to assist in your assessment process.
With your completed sphere of influence in front of you, first identify and highlight top 20% of your connections that produce 80% of value in your daily/weekly/monthly work efforts that lead to both your near and long-term success. These are the critical connections worth investing the greater share of your relationship development time.
Now, quickly assess the type of relationship each of your identified connections are, whether they are in your critical 20% or not. The spreadsheet provides a quick drop down action menu for each connection to assist you in this. Which connections are transient, transactional, or authentic? This is a very important step since not all relationships are equal in impact, so your time invested should be commensurate to the return on that relationship investment. At this point, you should have a list of all your connections with either transient, transactional, or authentic listed beside each one. In addition, you should have a clear picture of your key 20% critical connections that we will develop specific relationship strategies around.
In next week's blog, in this Leading Relationships series, we will look at your completed work to date and develop a relationship plan that cultivates, leverages, and maintains the appropriate level of focus on all of your current connections. We are on our way to building a foundation for connection and relationship success.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination Success: Leading Relationships
Destination Success – 3 Weeks to Creating and Cultivating Authentic Relationships
It is widely known, discussed and documented the issues we face today with so much communication coming at us and how we are losing the interpersonal side of relationships. We are relying on "bits and bytes" to develop relationships, not genuine "Hello's" and "How I can help?" conversations and interactions. In fact, it is estimated that each of us receives over 35,000 messages a day in various forms and couple that with the average person speaking over 16,000 words per day...that is a lot of communication with little to no genuine connection or relationship.
If you stay with us over the next 3 weeks and engage in the actions and activities we highlight, you will have a relationship development plan that will lead to less confusion, better partnering and connection, and more effective time allocation. Bottom line... it will help you and your organization achieve success.
Week 1 Action Step – Sphere of Influence
Take 30 minutes this week to Identify your personal and if applicable, team’s sphere of influence. (who do you impact and who impacts you on a daily and weekly basis). It is important to identify all your relationships and determine the impact, importance and time required or committed to establishing and maintaining each relationship. As we know there is only so much time in a day to devote and not all relationships are equal in impact or importance and deserve the same allocation of your precious time. So, taking a reflective and honest assessment of where your relationship time is spent is a critical first step.
Areas to explore:
- Social media relationships and time spent on online interacting
- LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Cell and office phone histories
- Who are you calling? Who is calling you?
- Email inbox and sent files
- Frequency of communication
- Importance and impact
- Personal Calendar
- What meetings do you have and who are the primary participants that you communicate with in those meetings?
- Miscellaneous, Ad Hoc, Drop Interactions
- Who and what amount of time on average are these taking place?
Feel free to download and use our simple but organized Professional Connection Inventory excel document to help chart all of your weekly connections. It definitely helps to see everything in an organized format, and next week we will expand on this document with strategic prioritization.
The path to leading more effective relationships is a deeper understanding of who, what and where are your current relationships today. Take action this week on getting a handle on your sphere of influence. Understanding is the first step in effectively lead a change in your relationship strategy resulting in more effective use of your time in cultivating the relationships in the right way.
Next week we will take your sphere of influence and apply a method of prioritization to ensure you maximize your relationship investment.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Beyond Bits and Bytes: Making Your Connections Personal
re·la·tion·ship (noun)
The way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.
In today’s complex and ever-changing world, the pace at which we now have to keep provides easy barriers and excuses to establishing and cultivating relationships. It is now easier to communicate in real-time than ever before and it is even easier to mistake real-time communication for meaningful relationships.
We may be connected by bits and bytes, but unfortunately, we are losing the art of the personal connection. To effectively lead and influence where you are, we must get back to developing, cultivating, and investing in authentic, personal relationships each day.
We know not all relationships are created equally so not every interaction will be an investment in authenticity. However, it is important to develop the awareness and skill set to identify those interactions that require proactive investment and those which are more transient and transactional in nature and impact because with limited time we can’t invest the same time and effort in every relationship.
Only 20% of your relationships account for 80% of your impact!
In fact, if you look at a day or week in your professional life, on average 80% of your impact and value, both contributing to and gaining from, comes from only 20% of your relationships and interactions you engage with. That is right, only 20% of your relationships account for the overwhelming percentage of your personal effectiveness and impact! That is why it is imperative to constantly know where and how to plan our relationship cultivating efforts.
Next week we will begin our relationship leadership efforts by defining the 3 key relationship types we each encounter: transient, transactional, and authentic.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.