Performance-enabling leaders:
- Pay attention to what’s actually going on in the business, rather than relying on the supposed indicators of performance that find their way onto “scorecards”, “dashboards”, and the like.
- Recognize that organization is ‘wiggly’ - that is, things don’t happen in the neatly packaged and controllable ways that conventional management wisdom suggests they should.
- Expect surprises - helping people to anticipate and respond creatively to what actually emerges, rather than to those things that might have occurred if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions.
- Maintain high expectations of people’s willingness and ability to contribute.
- Help people to ‘see better’ (i.e. provide vision) through their day-to-day interactions - what is meaningful gets done.
- Deal directly with the few people who consistently under-perform, rather than tying everyone up in a web of catch-all rules and regulations – i.e. make sure that trust is spelled: T-R-U-S-T, not T-R-U-S-S-E-D!
- Foster personal response-ability – that is, ensure that people are able to respond to events without constantly having to seek permission.
- Translate account-ability as the ability of people to account, in an informed an insightful way, for the Whys, Whats and Hows of their work.
- Enable people to grow their contribution in line with their developing capabilities and emerging challenges - flexing roles to make the most of people’s talents rather than shoehorning them into fixed boxes.
- Use measurement to facilitate movement rather than as a basis for passing judgement – ensuring that locally meaningful information is available to support people’s collaborative self-management of their own work processes and performance.
- Make sure that scorekeepers and commentators aren’t seen to be more important than the players.
- Demonstrate and encourage openness and candour, to expose policy issues, process weaknesses, and poor practices as a basis for ongoing learning and improvement.
- Understand that high-quality practice will often be accompanied by unsuccessful outcomes - and that some positive outcomes are likely to be due more to luck than judgement.
- See performance management as an ongoing conversation, punctuated by periodic structured events to frame issues, take stock, and unblock progress.
- Take with a pinch of salt all claims that a particular action or intervention can be proven to have led to a measurable improvement in overall business performance.
- Remain confident in the knowledge that the best that they (and everyone else) can do is to muddle through the complex, uncertain and ambiguous challenges that they face – while striving to do so with purpose, courage, and skill.
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