Category Archives for "Performance"

Makeover Your Business

As a smart business owner, you show your clients the pretty face of your business. They never know that you are flying by the seat of your pants, your documentation is disorganized, some of your operational compliance is being neglected, and your technology is out of date.

But who can blame you? You haven’t had enough time to do everything that is urgent, let alone enough time to start improving things.

Depending on how much help you have, you can reach the point where you are too busy running to get your feet under you. You are too busy to get unbusy!
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Great Organizations are Built Inside Out

Are you an organizational leader who can’t seem to move the needle on performance? Here’s a counter-intuitive suggestion: stop pushing.

The fact that you have to push should tell you something: either your people aren’t naturally willing to perform at the level you are asking (your culture is off), or they don’t have the natural capability to perform at that higher level (maturity is low).

Either way, pushing from the outside only steers your organization in a negative direction. And any performance increase that you achieve won’t last anyway. After a temporary uptick, the slight decrease in employee engagement (that resulted from your “push”) will probably result in decreased performance. The opposite of the result you were looking for!
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Why You Fail at Performance Improvement

If you want to save a ton of money, time and grief at your company, it’s as easy as this: don’t try to implement performance improvement.

As a performance improvement consultant, why do I say this? Because practically every performance improvement mechanism out there (Six Sigma, PMO, ITIL, Sarbanes Oxley, Malcolm Baldridge, 4DX, etc.) assumes that you have supportive layers of workforce empowerment in place that you probably don’t have. And even if you do, you will likely ruin those layers of support if you begin focusing on results at the expense of your people.

If you understand this, you’ll be ahead of 95% of other leaders.

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