Moving Performance From Compliance to Engagement
A top-down, command and control performance environment can get things done and generate success. But it often cultivates a culture of employee compliance and negatively impacts overall employee engagement. Let's take a look at the difference between a compliance-driven organization versus a purpose-driven, employee engaged performance environment and ways we can make a personal shift to greater individual and team engagement.
Compliant Behaviors
Performance is managed
Blame and justification
Task-focused
See obstacles
Waits for things to happen
Engaged Behaviors
Lead your personal performance
Seek understanding
Purpose-driven
Seek possibilities
Make things happen
Consider yourself fortunate if your organization is creating and cultivating top-tier performance through a sustained, employee engaged performance model. For those of us not so fortunate, how do we step up, lead where we are, and begin the shift from performance compliance to active engagement?
Personal Shift One - Begin by taking control of your performance and leading it by proactively setting expectations with your manager aligned to organizational purpose and vision. Once you set expectations, conduct monthly performance feedback sessions with your leader. If you don’t want your performance managed semiannually and/or annually, then engage by actively managing your personal performance and begin to reimagine performance management as performance development.
Personal Shift Two - If you see and hear blaming and justification then stop and seek understanding first, get clear and get aligned.
Personal Shift Three – Transform from task-focused delivery to purpose-driven engagement.
Personal Shift Four – Where you see obstacles and potential failure, turn it around, seek possibilities in everything, and create options and recommendations.
Personal Shift Five – Stop waiting for things to happen to you, go out and make things happen, stop playing the waiting game.
Break free of a compliant performance environment by actively engaging, leading and cultivating your own personal performance, change, relationships, and accountability. If you want better employee engagement, you better engage in your own personal performance.
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.
PART II: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we introduced a client case study of a 130-year-old oil and gas organization and their journey to enhancing employee engagement throughout the Finance and Accounting (F&A) organization. In the introductory blog we highlighted one key to more effective employee engagement was to CARE more! Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enable. To change the current performance environment to better reflect the aspirational culture statements found displayed throughout the organization we had to establish greater clarity to an organizational purpose and align the entire F&A organization to that greater purpose.
This purpose allows people to move past “task-focused” activities to “purpose-driven” action and performance. It encourages everyone to no longer accept the status quo and to boldly challenge the future and transition from silo-ed functional teams to collaborative, connected, and highly engaged teams and individuals contributing to a common greater purpose. We have gained that clarity and alignment by creating employee-led engagement teams chartered to redefine the F&A performance environment and establishing ongoing clarity and alignment through education, connection, and relationship.
Greater employee engagement is already happening with these efforts, but this is only the foundation, the very first step. The key is sustaining and even enhancing this engagement long term. We now move to leverage the 'R' and the 'E' of CARE: Resources and Enablement. The organization is applying resources that develops every F&A leader and employee to “lead where they are”, to enable greater personal and team accountability, to lead change, not manage it, and, to empower personal and team performance. They are turning outdated performance management into the future of performance development. They do this with innovative training, coaching, reward and recognition, and engagement teams that create ongoing reinforcement activities introduced every month that ensure sustained engagement at every level. And they are rapidly moving from the task of compiling spreadsheets and the reporting of numbers to providing compelling insights from those numbers that make a positive and dynamic impact.
The organization is quickly becoming a model for gaining and sustaining employee engagement. You want better employee engagement? You better engage the employees and CARE more!
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.
PART I: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we faced the difficult truth that most organizational stated cultures are aspirational at best and often do not reflect the true performance environment that each of us walks into each day. So, it was time to “get real” and identify whether our performance environment actually reflects our stated culture. Trust me, if there is a disconnect then it will be very difficult to enhance and sustain organization-wide employee engagement. This week we are highlighting for you one of our client’s path to enhanced engagement and their efforts to align their culture and their performance environment.
Destination Success – For this organization it was time to CARE!
They are a successful oil and gas organization located in Houston, TX that has been in existence for over 130 years, but like most companies in this industry, it is having to reimagine itself to effectively compete for the future. As part of building a new foundation of success they brought in a new CFO with a new vision for the Finance and Accounting (F&A) function.
“We want to move from completing tasks to creating a meaningful purpose. Evolve from delivering “walls of numbers” to providing great insight and impact from those numbers, and to come in each day with the intent to make each other each other great at what we do.”
The F&A organizations' previous year employee engagement scores lagged behind the rest of the organization and where the signs around the building said "We Are Bold" and “One Team,” this CFO saw an organization resigned to the status quo and would over hear statements like “We have always done it that way.” Instead of “One Team,” he experienced functional silos within the group and rather than strategically partnering with the executive and operations teams they were relegated to a back-office support, executing daily tasks and delivering those walls of numbers! Sound familiar? We find pockets of this in just about every organization!
This CFO reached out and asked us what options were available to change a 130-year-old performance environment. Our answer: You and the organization need to CARE more. You need to provide greater Clarity and Alignment to your F&A vision and the aspirational culture the organization is promoting, then we can focus on the necessary Resources to assist in the evolution, and finally determine what it will take to Enable and sustain this performance environment transformation leading to that ever illusive, greater employee engagement.
We teamed up with the CFO and his leadership team on this CARE journey, currently conducting interactive, functional team workshops designed to define what “Bold” is and is not, as well as what “One Team” means and what it will take to enable that. These sessions layout specific action plans including the formation of employee engagement teams that, from the front-line employee level, own the go forward F&A vision and which partner with leadership to redefine the performance environment. We are creating and communicating with greater Clarity and actively gaining organizational Alignment in a number of ways including the workshops and creating a next generation performance environment where every F&A employee is actively leading where they are.
Next week we will highlight the R (Resources) and E (Enable) in the CARE model and how this organization is redefining the work they do, how they do it, and most importantly, the “why” they do it, tied to a meaningful purpose, not just a task to be completed!
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: Leading Relationships - Take Action
Over the last two success blogs we have been focusing on our current state relationships, who they are, and the relative impact each of our connections have. With limited time available to invest in each of our connections, it is important to create a relationship development plan that enhances our sphere of influence impact and better leverages the most important commodity, your time!
Look at your completed sphere of influence and relationship types. What percentage, as a whole, are transient? What percent are transactional? And what percent are authentic? Now look to your “Critical 20%”, the connections you identified that produce 80% of your productive value. These critical 20% are where you can take immediate action and put a connection plan in place to move any transient or transactional relationship into a more authentic relationship by investing in and cultivating it. Here is a solid framework to use in your relationship planning. Start with relationship CARE – Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enablement.
- Define success for the connection or relationship.
- What is your role in achieving that success?
- What do you expect or need from the other participant(s) for a successful relationship?
- How do the other participants define relationship success?
- What do they need from you to assist in that success?
- Mutually define roles and expectations to ensure connection success.
- What other people, processes, or technology do you need to enable and sustain the success for the relationship?
- Summarize your personal actions and behaviors you know you will need to ensure relationship success.
- Commit to holding yourself accountable to doing what it takes for this relationship to grow and remain authentic.
- Don't forget to reward success and milestones along the way!
You have all the tools needed and a framework to lead any relationship going forward. Don’t let a relationship 'just happen' or drift, it takes a plan and an investment up front. If you will do this periodically for all your connections, your valuable time will be focused and your overall value and impact much greater.
Get started today leading your relationships and move from communicating with 'bits and bytes' to building and cultivating true authentic and more effective transactional relationships.
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.