“How many of you would really like to do a good job at work?” For the past 20 years we have been asking employees of organizations around the world the same question. The resounding answer from more than 99% of them was that they indeed wanted to do a good job. Upon further discussion with them they said that they not only wanted to do a good job but a great job!
During the same 20 years we have been polling senior executives and asking them if they were pleased with their organization’s strategy and the vast majority responded that they were. We then asked how satisfied they were with the organization’s implementation and execution of the strategy and fewer than 15% of those polled reported that they were satisfied with how their strategy was being implemented. These statistics confirm those reported by the Conference Board, Norton and Kaplan and other organizations that monitor such phenomenon.
Why is it that the vast majority of employees want to do a great job and yet fewer than 15% of executives are satisfied with how their strategy is being implemented and executed? What causes such a gap in performance? Our research has found that there are several reasons for this performance gap. The most commonly mentioned reasons are:
- Employees don’t understand and in many cases don’t even know what the organization endeavors to accomplish—the organization’s vision or mission.
- Employees don’t know or understand how the vision relates to them and what they do in their jobs.
- Employees don’t know what is most important for them to do in their jobs that will move the organization closer to its vision.
- Employees have too many job priorities at the same time—and if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority!
In a sentence, employees are unable to “operationalize” the vision or mission . . . despite being highly motivated to do so!
The Group Performance Associates (GPa) approach to addressing these issues is quite straightforward and simple—but not necessarily easy.
“Performance Management” The GPa Approach
The GPa approach goes directly to the veritable “DNA” of the organization—its values. When we refer to values we refer to far more than the moral and ethical values of the organization. We focus more on the operating or intellectual values.
These are the priorities that are necessary for the organization to realize its vision or mission on a day-to-day basis. Once these are identified we are able to make them explicit to everyone in the organization who we then help to operationalize the priorities. Operationalizing priorities means converting an important priority into actions and behaviors that enable the organization to accomplish a specific goal. By making the priorities operational for each employee, every employee can readily see how their priorities relate to the vision or mission of the organization, thus creating clear line of sight to the vision. More importantly each employee then knows specifically the most important thing that they must do to accomplish the goal.
Through our performance management process you can learn to build a high-performance work environment and effectively manage change. We welcome the opportunity to discuss working with your organization in developing a custom “Performance Management” process to meet your needs.