Achievement beyond expectations: your people are the key to breaking through Achievement Beyond Expectations: Your People Are the Key to Breaking Through

Innovate. Think beyond. Test assumptions. Ask questions. Change. To realize breakthrough achievements requires people, at all levels. People can drive your greatest gains. People can expose you to your greatest risks. Consider these four steps to better connect people to business performance:

Step 1: Getting what you expect – define expectations

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde

How can you achieve goals that don’t show up specifically as line items in your financial statements, but truly have an impact on your business?

You likely have goals in your Strategic Plan that you know are important but you haven’t found a way to translate them to your financials or internal budget. In that Plan, is there language about innovation; new ways or new products that will lower costs or increase revenues? It is there because time and again great companies have proven that innovation, combined with nimble market research and timing, imparts a huge favorable impact on the financial bottom line eventually. And you want that favorable impact.

Here’s a secret: Companies achieving greatness through innovation do more than simply write about innovation in their Strategic Plan. They empower people by defining what is expected, communicating behaviors and activities desired and providing support and resources so that innovation flourishes.

Defining what you expect is the first step in getting it, and a prerequisite to exceeding expectations.

Go back to your Strategic Plan.

Define every goal in measurable terms.

For example, a “strategy” stating, “We are recognized as innovators…,” which has no clear definition, might change to this: “Over the three year period of this Strategic Plan, we will introduce entrepreneurs in the operations division, train and coach these entrepreneurs to be mentors and in turn train the division in innovation. We expect to introduce at least one new product with a 90% or better customer satisfaction rating, achieve a 10% increase in revenue from new products, and increase our idea pipeline by 100% with a turnover (turning ideas into actions) of 4 times per year.”

Do not stop there.

Now that your strategic goal is defined, you must communicate it to those who will need to take action to execute it. If a strategic goal cannot possibly end up as a line item of the annual budget (income, expenses and capital projects), and is not otherwise and clearly communicated, you can be sure you will not get what you expect. You must communicate your goals to your people.

Step 2: People make the difference – communicate expectations

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” Robert McCloskey

People can (and do) drive your greatest gains. And people can expose you to your greatest risks. When people understand how they can add value, they thrive. And you get what you expect.

Communication is the act of conveying useful and actionable information.

Information is not simply data. Data becomes information when it is timely, complete, accurate, accompanied by relevant context and presented in a format that can be used by the receiver.

The goal of business communication is to improve performance and reduce risk.

At a leadership conference held by the Tom Peters Group, it was found that only 6% of communicators, HR managers and executives believed "strategic communication" should include the "strategic design of information people use to make decisions" while 89% defined it as "delivering our strategic plan."

You will find that your people need communication that they can use to make decisions every day. And this level of continuous communication is just what the leaders in most admired companies do. A one-time telling of the strategic plan is not going to get you what you expect.

Here are a few actions you can take right now to better communicate your goals:

1. Translate your newly defined strategic goals (Step 1) into meaningful performance measures for every center of responsibility that can affect these goals.
   
   For example, “A 90% or better customer satisfaction rating” may translate to “Survey customers within 30, 60 and 90 days of launch” for customer service, to “0% defects” for the production line and “100% attendance and quiz pass rate for new product training” for the sales team.
2. Develop and implement a communication plan to ensure understanding of these measures
   
   Note: Including a performance management process that communicates performance progress, as measured at least weekly, is a great way to quick wins. This means organizing and delivering goal information in a way that the people held accountable can see trends and correlations, analysis and explanations... and are empowered through new kinds of learning and communication… that they have among themselves, not necessarily restricted to senior management.
3. Follow up with surveys, assessments, process checks and reviews to identify across all levels commitment (and continued understanding) of these goals.

You will find that communicating in a way that is frequent enough so that patterns and trends in the information become easily recognizable will yield better results.

Communicate, measure and follow up – often.

Remember communication is two way. You need to give your people a voice if you want to get what you expect. Once you start achieving success in meeting expectations, and people at all levels including executives operate at a higher degree of trust, you are ready to go beyond expectations to breakthroughs.

Step 3: Beyond expectations – achieving breakthrough performance

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” Galileo Galilei

Congratulations! Having taken the first two steps you have enabled a shift in thinking. People are actively seeking ways to improve performance. You recognize that people at all levels – through their actions, writings and words – are in control of the day-to-day actions required to execute strategic goals.

This third step frees up even more thought and actions. People are now considering what “could be.” This step moves beyond getting what is expected. It involves a higher level of communication. People now not only understand the specific goal, they can make explicit changes needed in their daily work to reach and exceed that goal.

The consultancy 1000ventures puts it this way, “The five classic result measures – performance, quality, timing, financials, and development costs – tell you what happened, but don't tell you why. For example, an 8% drop in quarterly profits accompanied by a 10% rise in service costs does not tell a customer service team what its service technicians should do differently on their next call."

Caution! To move beyond expectations to breakthrough achievements, driven by innovation and forward thinking, requires confident leaders willing to engage their people. This involves trust and active listening skills. If people are not comfortable speaking up – up to the level of the strategic decision-makers – good ideas will be lost.

“If they (leaders) send signals that they are open, interested, and willing to act on subordinate voice, it is logical to expect that subordinates' motivation to do so will be increased; conversely, where subordinates perceive leaders' behavior to indicate it is either unsafe or futile to speak up, they are less likely to do so.” HBS professor Amy Edmondson

Here are a few actions you can take right now to show your people you are open to their ideas:

1. Listen. The main problem why most communications fail is inability to listen well.
2. Ask direct but nonthreatening questions to show you are interested in another point of view. Direct questions prompt more than a simple yes or no. Be interested in what your people say. Be alert to the details of what they say.
3. Repeat what you have heard and ask questions to show that you have really been listening. Better yet, take notes. A leader taking notes of a subordinate’s ideas is hugely rewarding – to both.
4. Smile – sincerely. Your smile shows attention to others.
5. Give people the time and means to express themselves, even if you or another decision-maker is not readily available – at any time and from anywhere that the idea, comment or question comes to them. Technology can help! You can follow up later – and the idea, comment or question is not lost or forgotten.

Step 4: Technology enables every step – to get what you expect and more

“I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.” Bill Gates

It has been said that managers focus on doing things right and leaders focus on doing the right things. Do the right things and do them right. But how can a leader cascade this strategic thinking throughout the workforce? In Steps 1, 2 and 3, I described how to translate strategy into action, to meet and even exceed expectations.

Technology can be leveraged to enhance communication from top down, bottom up and laterally, to achieve great things even faster. Following are a few ways to consider using technology and to what end:

1. Assessment. An assessment tool is useful when a process change is desired, yet it is unclear how to get there. The current state, and the steps required to the desired state, must be clearly understood. Technology can help streamline the survey, planning and reporting process. Such a tool helps you discover what is happening and it will engage those doing the work to rediscover and rethink current processes. Included are survey forms, quick reports for assessing readiness and training needs, action plans based on the results of each survey (reiterated until the desired state is achieved), and management reports.
2. Employee Survey. Employee surveys help assess the impact of change on behaviors and attitudes, identify training needs, take a general satisfaction “pulse,” and uncover risks.
3. Employee Performance Review. Employee performance is too often reviewed but once a year (if that) and may or may not be tied to compensation. In most admired companies, employees are reviewed throughout the year. Their performance, pay and promotion opportunities are clearly linked. While the latter is highly recommended – and required to achieve Step 3 – the right technology is greatly benefits employee performance and your company. The data is collected in a database so that trends in performance, as well as risks, can be identified. It is an excellent way to connect individual performance into the corporate performance management scorecards and dashboards.
4. Balanced Scorecard. To reveal actual progress as compared to strategic goals, a Balanced Scorecard is one of the best methodologies. Automating this methodology so that the data can be collected and transformed into useful information with less effort has made it practical and beneficial for organizations of any size. Using a Balanced Scorecard, all strategic goals, (usually) grouped into four categories representing learning and innovation, internal process, customer and financial perspectives, can be accounted for – and then cascaded through the organization to all people who can impact those goals. Used correctly, this is a hugely powerful tool to get what you expect and support breakthrough achievements.

Summary

In the success of any organization, people are what matter most. Their actions, motivations and communications can drive the greatest breakthroughs; they can also expose an organization to risk. To get what you expect you need to communicate your strategy in a way that people understand what they can do to add value. To exceed expectations, it is imperative to harness the power of your people through engagement and empowerment. Give your people a voice, and with the right technology you will achieve beyond your expectations.

About the author

Lori Evans is founder and CEO of Abrige Corp., a thought leader in performance management. Abrige offers software, consulting and coaching to connect people to business performance. Contact Lori at lori@abrige.com.