The New Performance Environment - Employee-Led
Employee-Led performance is the key to shifting performance results from top-down driven to one that is employee owned, leader supported and enabled by the organization.
“The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control. Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.”
― L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
In a traditional performance environment, much of the role and responsibility for ensuring performance results, conducting performance feedback, developing accountability and providing effective change management resides with formal leaders in the organization. In addition, training focused on developing core leadership skills, activities and behaviors is generally reserved for these leaders and not the general employee population.
This leader-led performance model, unfortunately, limits true performance ownership and we limit the potential and impact of having everyone no matter what their title or position lead from where they are.
Employee-Led performance is the key to shifting performance results from top-down driven to one that is employee owned, leader supported and enabled by the organization. As a foundation, it is important for an organization to create a baseline of expected leadership skills, activities and behaviors that everyone from senior leadership to entry level individual contributors understand and exhibit. This creates a foundation of common leadership expectations and a “language” of leadership that defines your organization.
Of course, roles and responsibilities vary and the level of leadership impact changes but developing a core set of leadership competencies in everyone and giving control and responsibilities to create ownership is critical to tapping into and leveraging the value of every employee leading where they are.
Tips for implementing an employee-led performance environment:
Create awareness and set an expectation that everyone can and should lead where they are.
Support developing the leader in everyone with coaching and training.
Establish cross-functional employee-led teams chartered to improve a specific issue or process. Provide resources and support the team. Give the goal, not the method.
Reward and recognize employee-led success.
Come back next week as we discuss how to own your own performance!
If you’re looking for help in administering your employee survey, or just need help in building an effective survey question list, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’re here to enable your success.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Destination: Success | A Man on the Moon
An engaged team put a man on the moon!
There is a predictable model for team success leading to amazing results. Let's explore the formula for success one team used to literally put a man on the moon.
When President John F. Kennedy first announced that America was going to send a man to the moon, most thought that it was impossible and insane and predictably asked, "Why?". But alas, we know (or most of us know) that he did it!
The formula for success President Kennedy used?
Purpose + Behavior + Commitment + Support = Amazing Things
First have a purpose. It must be compelling, relevant, and go beyond just performing or completing a task. The purpose established by JFK – “Put a man on the moon and return safely by the end of the decade”. Now that was a clear and compelling purpose.
The second element of the formula for team success – behavior. To enable success, a team must identify and consistently display enabling team behaviors. For the Apollo team, they didn’t focus on obstacles, they focused on opportunity. It was about the mission and not personal gain. They worked as one to achieve the purpose and never lost sight of what was truly important. That team had the right behaviors.
The mission required the third element of the success formula; commitment. Not just commitment from the three astronauts who risked their lives, and as a result, became national hero’s either. No, it was the thousands of NASA employees dedicating their lives to the purpose. Even when tragedy struck the program in 1967 and three astronauts lost their lives on the launch pad, commitment to the purpose never wavered. In fact, that incident rallied NASA to ensure that the sacrifice of human lives would not be in vain. It takes real commitment to ensure team success.
And finally, it takes support to succeed. President Kennedy made an appeal to both Congress and the American people on May 25, 1961. “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out; of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth”. The men and women of NASA had the support of the President and now an entire nation.
Because the team had a compelling purpose, showed the right behaviors, were committed to success, and had the support it needed, on July 20, 1969 at 10:56 PM Astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module ladder and planted his foot on the powdery surface. Then on July 24, 1969 the space capsule safely splashed down, completing Apollo 11’s mission and realizing the dreams of a nation.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
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 | Don't Wait, Get Engaged!
Employee engagement is on you and me. True engagement is a personal choice. Maybe you don’t how or where to engage but even engaging to find those answers is a critical personal choice. In the last two blog posts we have explored engagement from the organizational level on how to enable engagement and from the leadership level on how to support engagement. Now, we will highlight how to personally engage which, bottom line, is what truly matters.
Let us start with these questions:
Are you personally engaged?
I mean truly engaged?
Do you come in each day to complete your tasks to the highest level and go home satisfied you have earned your pay check?
If so, great! But I challenge you and say there is so much more for you to engage in and contribute to. Organizational performance is evolving and rapidly changing and it requires each of us to actively engage in making success happen versus passively existing and expecting success will just happen to us.
There has not been one employee engagement survey conducted that produced greater employee engagement just by delivering the results of the survey. Not one PowerPoint presentation that explains the power of engaged employees and the initiative’s suggested to improve engagement that has actually engaged any individual employee. It is all just engagement talk, not personal, active engagement.
The only path to improved employee engagement is for each of us as employees to actually engage and stay engaged. We don’t need to wait for an annual survey to tell us we need better engagement. In over 20 years of conducting and looking at employee engagement surveys and scores, only one 500 plus employee organization out of hundreds we have worked with had 98 percent actively employee engagement, no other even comes close….just one! And it took 2 years of enabling and supporting by the organization and leadership, with a focus on engagement, to achieve such success.
So where can we personally engage?
Areas like engaging more actively in your personal performance. Try proactively setting expectations with your manager not your manager setting the expectations with you. And then you setting time on their calendar to actively lead every 6-week performance discussion on your progress to those expectations. That is active engagement!
- Engage in change – see possibilities in everything, think disruptively and create options and recommendations for change. Don’t just embrace change, engage in change.
- Engage in developing authentic relationships, move from transactional interactions to investing in building authentic relationships.
- Engage through accepting personal accountability no matter what. Make things happen, don’t let things drift and just happen.
- Engage with a purpose, find your purpose beyond delivering a task. Come in each day with your task to contribute to a more meaningful purpose in your work.
- Engage by either volunteering for or jump-starting an employee-led engagement team within your organization. Get involved!
There is a lot of talk right now about engagement, but the bottom line is that to get more engagement we have to be the ones to more actively engage.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
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.
The 2017 Houston Astros: A Blueprint for Success
Congratulations to our hometown Houston Astros!
It has been over 55 years in the making, but 2017 calls the Houston Astros World Series Champions! And what an amazing impact the team has had on a city in the midst of recovering from Hurricane Harvey. In fact, the city went from flooding with over 40 inches of rain to over 1 million people flooding the streets of downtown Houston to welcome their world champions home.
So, what was the formula for the Astros success? (By the way it is a very similar formula used by the Chicago Cubs to win the 2016 World Series!) A formula that even Sports Illustrated recognized that, if followed, predicted this World Series win back in 2014 by putting the Astros on their cover claiming them the 2017 World Champs. They followed a blueprint for performance success that we use with our clients, Employee-led (player led), Leader Supported (manager guided) and organizationally enabled.
For more information on our ELO model for performance, please download our whitepaper here.
The quest for this 2017 Championship began over 55 years ago but really accelerated when Jim Crane, the current owner, purchased the Astros in November of 2011 and began to enable success. He first hired Jeff Luhnow from the St. Louis Cardinals in December 2011 to be his General Manager. Jeff’s formula for success truly mirror’s our organizational model for our client’s performance, Employee-Led (player-led), Leader Supported (Manager support), and Organization Enabled (Astros ownership and GM). You cultivate a purpose driven culture, enable success by investing in your talent, providing that talent with the right and best resources, and support them with leadership, not management, that develops the leader in everyone in the organization regardless of role or position, from an MVP player to a groundskeeper. The players will tell you, the goal each day did not focus on winning, the focus was on making each other great. If each of us will do that, then success and winning is the natural result.
Jeff then further enabled the organization by hiring A.J. Hinch, a leader that promotes and cultivates the very culture Luhnow was trying to develop. A.J. inspires, brings energy, connects with, and develops each and every player. He doesn't direct, control, or manage his players. He supports them and shows confidence in them even when they struggle. He knows and relates to each and every player, understanding that each brings a unique and special talent and contributes in different ways.
The right talent, guided by the right purpose, supported by the right leader, enables the right success.
Finally, A.J. enables success by letting his players lead, not controlling them. He is there to guide and support, not to micromanage them. The players go out each day with their task to contribute to a larger more meaningful purpose, to make each other great! And when new talent is added to the roster throughout the year, it is the culture and players that lead the way to guide and ensure success of each and every member of the Astros organization. The right talent, guided by the right purpose, supported by the right leader, enables the right success. The Houston Astros followed a very familiar blueprint for success; Employee-led, Leader Supported, and Organization Enabled. Want to know how this model for success might work in your organization? Click here to find out.
Congratulations to our Houston Astros, 2017 World Series Champions!
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.
Are you a 5 star performer?
It doesn’t matter your role or position in the company, from the very top to the most entry level, this week rate your performance as if you were an UBER or Lyft driver. At the end of every one-on-one interaction, group meeting, board or sales presentation, customer service call, etc., put down a rating for yourself on a scale from 1 (poor performance) to 5-star (exceptional performance). Make the rating from others' perspective, not yours, and be honest with yourself. If they had an app that could immediately rate you, are you producing 5-star performances where others are gaining tremendous value from you and want to interact with you? If you have a low 1-3 one time performance rating in a meeting or phone call, that is your call to action to make the next 4 interactions 5-star performances. Your goal this week is to achieve a 4.8 to 5-star average rating for all your performance impact opportunities. Good luck!
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.
Old Versus New - Which model are you?
The management model that has existed and thrived since the industrial age is rapidly evolving and shifting. In an era that lacked meaningful technology and real time information, managers had to plan, direct, control, and manage both people and processes to get work accomplished. Telling people what to do and how to do it was required and accepted for decades. Generations of leaders were trained and molded using this management model.
Fast forward to today and how work is organized and results are accomplished. No one wants or needs to be managed and the process of planning from the past takes too long and often the resulting plan is obsolete before it is even finalized. And very few, if any, people today want their time and efforts controlled and directed by someone else.
So have you and your organization made the shift from the old, ineffective management model to the new leadership model of inspiring, energizing, facilitating, and developing? In fact, rather than extensive time and efforts expended on management planning, do you inspire a purpose that leads to results through others? Think about it, Martin Luther King didn’t have a “I Have a Plan” speech, he delivered a “I Have a Dream” speech. In the future, it is not about having a detailed plan, it is all about having and connecting others to a purpose. Inspire results with a purpose.
Do you and other formal leaders create individual and team energy instead of assigning directive tasks? Have you developed a “lead where you are” culture where employee-led initiatives tackle the toughest issues and create the greatest opportunities? Don’t direct people, create energy by empowering, guiding, and recognizing?
People and their work product are not assets to be controlled as in the past. The successful leaders of the future facilitate and cultivate trusted, authentic relationships where active listening takes place versus orders given. Where change is not managed or controlled but environments and competencies are developed to proactively lead change and positive disruption is encouraged. Where creativity and innovation is more valued than management reports.
And finally, since no one wants to be managed, the critical leader shift from managing people to developing, coaching, and mentoring the leader in everyone is the foundation for success. People need clarity, alignment, and a clear sense of ownership leading to enhanced accountability. Stop managing people and make the shift to developing people.
The old versus new model, where are you?
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.