Model for Performance Success - Clarity, Alignment, and Accountability
To lead your personal performance there are three core building blocks that lead to sustained performance success.
Clarity, alignment and accountability are critical to performance success in any environment or endeavor.
In fact, if you consistently gain and provide both clarity and alignment it becomes much easier to ensure accountability.
Lets start with the clarity.
You can achieve greater personal clarity by:
- Periodically reviewing and updating your formal job description.
- Identifying and documenting your personal purpose, vision, and mission.
- Each day review your key priorities and actions.
Now lets focus on your personal and organizational alignment.
How truly aligned are you?
Do you know...
- Your managers description of your role and their expectations?
- The purpose, mission, and vision of your organization and department?
- The key priorities of your organization and team?
Finally, are your personally accountable?
It would be very easy to lack some accountability if you lack any clarity or alignment from the above exercises. The key to enhancing your accountability will be to gain more clarity and alignment. In addition, measure yourself against these key accountability elements:
- Do you or have you placed blame or made excuses recently?
- Are there issues/problems either in your control or out of your control that just continue to drift where you have not intervened?
- Do you accept responsibility no matter what the circumstance might be to make positive things happen?
It is imperative to take control of our performance, don’t leave performance success and the measure of that success up to anyone else. Begin leading your performance today by gaining and achieving greater clarity, alignment and accountability, the core to performance success.
And don't forget to sign up for the latest Cornerstone Learning Online Course, Leading Performance! Out on October 24th!
Upcoming Posts
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OCTOBER 10 - Blueprint for Individual Performance
OCTOBER 17 - The Performance Connection
OCTOBER 24 - Leading Performance Overview
Leading Performance Release Date
October 24, 2017
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.
Make Traditional Performance Reviews Obsolete - Lead Your Performance
Over the next four weeks we will explore how by leading and cultivating your own personal performance model, both mid and end of year performance reviews become unnecessary.
No more end of year performance review surprises or “difficult” performance negotiations; move the conversation from ratings to performance impact. It has been well documented how much time and effort are wasting on traditional performance review processes. In fact, Deloitte found that creating and delivering performance ratings consumed over 2 million hours per year with little to no impact to actual performance.
In this blog series, you will gain both insights and tools that will replace “reviewing” performance with “pursuing” performance. We will provide tools so you can lead your performance, ensure role and activity clarity and alignment, and create a clear blueprint for performance that you can follow for enhanced personal and professional performance success. And lastly, we will provide a framework for creating and conducting performance connections that lead to meaningful performance impact.
We flip the model for leading performance. Just invest 10 minutes a week with us over the next four weeks. I can assure you it will make a difference!
Upcoming Posts
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OCTOBER 3 - Model for Performance Success
OCTOBER 10 - Blueprint for Individual Performance
OCTOBER 17 - The Performance Connection
OCTOBER 24 - Leading Performance Overview
Leading Performance Release Date
October 24, 2017
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.
Stop Fighting Change - Lead Your Change
Here are the top five areas each of us can lead change:
See Possibilities in Everything
Barriers, obstacles, and strained relationships are opportunities to lead change.
Think Disruptively
Don't succumb to the status quo. Think about opportunities differently.
Ask, What's Possible?
What is possible for you personally, in your career, and for your personal impact? "What's possible?" is a very powerful question that should be asked 5-10 times per day!
Act with Urgency
Don't let opportunities to lead change just drift. Don't wait for things to happen, make them happen, no matter where you are!
Don't Stop
Change is continual, even more so today than ever before. We can't rest on our past achievements or the opportunity to lead change will be missed.
We don't have time to fight change. If you will focus on these five Leading Change elements each day, your impact and personal growth will be greatly enhanced. Just try it for one week.
If you want to learn even more about leading change, get your copy of the new book, LeaderShift, today and turn the the sixth chapter!
Now Available!
LeaderShift is not a traditional leadership book that lectures instead of teaches. This book is a compelling fable that allows you to eavesdrop and learn how one leader built a successful team. You will discover a practical framework that will help decrease turnover, improve job satisfaction and improve your bottom line.
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.
What's the Purpose?
Why do I do what I do day in and day out, and to what end? Ever ask that question?
You know, most people unfortunately get up in the morning with the main purpose of going into work and delivering on a set of predetermined tasks, responding to the inevitable urgent fire drills and going home at whatever time you can complete that days' tasks.
It is no wonder that according to the most recent State of the American Workplace study conducted by the Gallup organization only 33% of U.S. employees are truly engaged at work. While 16% of employees are actively disengaged, that leaves 51% of us not engaged, showing up to work and existing to complete our daily tasks.
If this is the case for you and or your organization it is time to find your purpose! If you want better personal and organizational engagement you better get engaged! Once engaged, dig deep to find your personal purpose and then align it with your organizations purpose.
Unfortunately, often the main purpose heard throughout an organization may sound like, “Our purpose is to; (and you pick from the options) make a profit, drive shareholder value, or possibly be the best, low cost provider in the industry.” Now, while these are vitally important to any organization, they don’t drive engagement, they often do contribute to compliant, task-driven cultures and behaviors.
If you want better personal and organizational engagement, you better get engaged!
Without true engagement you and the organization will lose that “reason to believe” in the future and, over a period of time, the opportunity to sustain a profit and drive shareholder value will be lost while best and brightest talent leave to go to organizations that have a compelling purpose and connect it to everyone.
So what is your purpose? What do you believe in? What does or will excite you when you come into work each day? Do you believe that what you do makes a difference, if not, how can it? And finally, does the work you do help contribute to your personal purpose?
Without answers to these questions people and organizations tend to drift. Like a rudderless boat we drift from one wave to the next letting random currents steer our path.
So move from drifting like nearly 70% of the workforce, get engaged, define your personal purpose, actively work on an employee engagement team that defines, or refines your organizations purpose.
With a purpose, anything is possible!
To find out about purpose look to the fourth shift “From Drifting to Purpose” in the new book LeaderShift on sale now at Amazon.
Upcoming Posts
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AUGUST 29 - From Customer Duty to Customer Passion
SEPTEMBER 5 - From Fighting Change to Guiding Change
NOW AVAILABLE!
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.
Leading Personal Performance in a Lagging Performance Management Environment
It is well known that most performance management processes being used today actually promote and measure lagging performance. Goals and expectations are set at such a high level that by the time they get cascaded to the front line it can be days and weeks and with job specific clarity lacking or non-existent. Then the measures of that performance are “reviewed” either annually or semi-annually where little can be done to accelerate performance or intervene, if required, until it is too late to have any meaningful near term impact. Even more importantly, in today’s constantly changing business environment these goals are always a moving target throughout the year and can be completely irrelevant by the time they are actually discussed.
However, even working in a performance process that might be lagging in nature, you can lead your personal performance by doing these “lead where you are” activities.
1.
Proactively set expectations with your manager. Don’t wait for leadership to set them for you. Take the initiative and set time on their calendar to outline expectations with them.
Set what your manager can expect from you as it relates to your daily performance activities, team contributions, personal behaviors, et cetera that will enable positive and sustainable performance results no matter what the specific goals might end up being as they get cascaded to you.
2.
Set 20-30 minutes every 3-4 weeks with your manager to proactively lead the discussion on your performance results and how well you are delivering on the expectations you set. Highlight your areas of success and have a plan for closing any gaps that might exist.
3.
Create or update a personal learning plan that specifically enhances your eligibility (technical, leadership competencies), suitability (personal behaviors), and your viability (personal and team impact). Gain continuous performance feedback from others on your areas of strength to leverage and areas for development. Talk through your growth progress during your regular performance connection meeting with your manager each month.
To lead your performance, control what you can, and as a result, begin to influence what you can’t by your performance success. Don’t let lagging performance management processes hold you back from leading performance.
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.
Performance Management - Make it an Evolution, not a Revolution!
There is no question the current state of most performance management processes need to change. However, a rush to change can have a devastating impact on morale and productivity and in the end not produce the sustained performance every organization is looking for.
It is true, performance models like current day forced ranking systems tend to produce more negative morale issues than enhancing personal and team performance. And just think of the millions of collective hours spent reviewing, discussing, and justifying (often arguing) performance in those HR/Department “talent calibration sessions”. If those same hours were redirected to developing, training, and enabling performance versus “calibrating” it, think of the impact that would have. And what if people leader’s time shifted from managing, directing, and reviewing performance to facilitating, developing, and pursing performance?
And furthermore, what if the money currently spent on customizing, implementing, and maintaining very expensive and complex performance management modules in HRIS systems, that rarely deliver results as designed and end up documenting performance instead of developing it, was used to cultivate an employee-led, leader supported culture with targeted development activities and experiences.
The opportunity to reimagine and redesign performance management as we know it is here. However, it takes long-range vision rather than succumb to the ground swell for rapid and sometimes radical change in the short run. As with most change, the pendulum tends to swing too far and will eventually find the right rhythm. To that end, there is a tidal wave of quick fix feedback and coaching app’s rolling out every day claiming to be the next tool that facilitates performance success.
And while constant and real time feedback is a key to future performance success, an organization must prepare and cultivate an environment through training and practice to enhance an individual’s capability and capacity to self-assess, be accountable for personal and team performance, turn feedback into change, and how and when to provide good, objective, and most importantly, actionable peer assessment and feedback.
"...an organization must prepare and cultivate..."
Organizations must enable a culture that values performance development over performance documentation by assisting all people leaders in making the shift in their leadership style and competencies from managing performance activities and conducting performance reviews to developing and cultivating the leader in everyone by facilitating, not directing, ongoing performance connections.
Performance management can and should evolve, but care and caution should be taken to implement it properly. Enable organizational performance success with the proper clarity, alignment, and resources. Support it with leadership that inspires and energizes, not directs and manages, and create a powerful employee-led culture that takes ownership and leads both personal and team performance. Remember, it is an evolution, not a revolution.
"Performance management can and should evolve..."
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 toassist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
