Tag Archive for: business results

What’s a Key Driver of Performance?

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If you’re serious about improving performance and driving growth, focus on how happy and engaged your people are. That may seem very mamby pamby, but there is growing evidence that it’s not such ‘soft stuff’.

Here are a couple of Gallup statistics to consider:

 
Actively disengaged employees erode an organization’s bottom line.  Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone. (Source: Gallup website) 

Beyond the significant differences engaged workgroups show in productivity, profitability, safety incidents, and absenteeism versus disengaged workgroups Gallup’s research shows that engaged organizations have 3.9 times the earnings per share (EPS) growth rate compared to organizations with lower engagement in their same industry. (Source: Gallup website)

Now the question is what really drives engagement? Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School Professor and Steven Kramer researched that question. What they determined is this — of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important is simply making progress doing meaningful work. In a September 4th New York Times article, Anabile and Kramer note “As long as workers experience their labor as meaningful, progress is often followed by joy and excitement about work.” Interestingly this positive ‘inner work life’ (as the researchers call it) has a profound impact on creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality.

The leader’s role, then, is to help people make progress — remove obstacles, provide support, recognize progress and provide feedback on what’s not working. Unfortunately, almost all managers don’t see making progress as a compelling motivator. When Amabile and Kramer asked 669 managers from around the world to rank five employee motivators,they ranked ‘supporting progress’ dead last. Ninety-five percent of these leaders failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is a far more important motivator than raises and bonuses.

So, next time you are trying to create motivating environment, don’t automatically think about traditional rewards. Think about whether your people feel like they are moving up the mountain or if they feel like their pushing a boulder up the mountain only to have it roll back down on them.

Leadership and Market Performance

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The Institute for Corporate Performance (i4cp) just released a study correlating leadership competencies and market performance.  These findings are among the first that I know of that show which leadership competencies make a real difference in business performance.

Interestingly, these findings support both my Leadership in the Next Decade findings and the focus of a new leadership development program I am offering through my partnership with Michael Maccoby and Personal Strengths Publishing, Becoming a Leader We Need with Strategic Intelligence.

Key findings from i4cp’s research are:

  • Only 23% of those surveyed describe their companies as being strong at developing future leaders.
  • The most popular competencies used are not correlated with market performance.   Among business competencies, only “strategy execution” was both popular and correlated to market performance.
  • The top business competencies correlated with market performance are:

o   Strategy development
o   Having a global mindset
o   Decision-making from a synthesis of internal and external
     influences
o   Organizational development
o   Strategy execution

  • The top relationship/communication competencies correlated with market performance:

o   Verbal communication skills
o   Collaboration
o   Building relationships outside the organization
o   Building organizational capacity

Becoming a Leader We Need with Strategic Intelligence focuses those in Director and above positions on building these key competencies.  For more information about or a more detailed overview of the program, call me at 978.475.8424

Powerhouse or Albatross?

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At its heart, sustained competitive advantage is a people issue. If you have the right people in the organization defining a clear vision and differentiating strategy, developing products that people will buy, serving customers in a superior way, creating the right culture, your organization will produce results and high performance.

The key to that statement is the right people. Is your organization full of powerhouses or albatrosses?

Performance Matrix

The Powerhouse: High commitment to the organization and its goals; highly capable. Personal motivation and the organizations values are aligned. The benchmark for high performance.

The Cheerleader: Highly commitment but doesn’t have strong skills and abilities. A strong believer in the organization but not making the contributions you need to get results.

Flight Risk or Secret Weapon: Highly capable but not engaged. If you can tap into their motivation and get them engaged, they are your secret weapon. However, without engagement, they are a flight risk.

Albatross: Low commitment and low capabilities make them a drag on the organization

What Butler’s Final Four Appearance Can Teach Us About Competition and Leadership

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 Anyone who’s watching the NCAA basketball tournament and was watching on Saturday saw Butler pull out a huge win over Florida in overtime to move on the the Final Four.  This isn’t their first trip to the Final Four. Last year they were not only in the Final Four but in the National Championship game.

As someone who went to college and grad school in Indiana, Butler University is a familiar name to me just not as a basketball powerhouse.  They are a school of 4,500 students in Indianapolis.

Florida has 50,000.  Before beating Florida, they knocked out Wisconsin and #1 ranked Pitt, the odds-on favorite for many to win the tourney.
What can Butler teach us about being competitive when others have more people, deeper pockets, more supporters and a legacy of winning?

 They have a clear, burning goal — to win.

  • They believe in their ability to achieve that goal. Butler’s star senior is a guy named Matt Howard.  People say he doesn’t look like a star player.  He’s described as ‘a hell of a basketball player with a weird skill set and surprising strength.’It’s said his teammates say he is quirky.  He’s also describes as someone you always believes they are capable of winning in any situation. And that adamant belief causes other to believe, too.
  • You don’t need a lot of people, you need the right people. They are a school of 4,500 people.  They are not a marquee name in the world of college sports (though I’m sure that’s changing).  Yet, they found and cultivated the group of talented athletes that have made it past teams 10X their size.
  • They persevere. In those four tournament games they’ve won up to this point, they’ve beaten their opponents by only 13 total points.   They overcame an 11 point second half deficit to win against Florida.
  • Strong, strategy-focused leadership adds to competitive advantage. The Butler coach, Brad Stevens, is 34 years old and this is his second trip to the Final Four.  He is measured and balanced in his approach.  He has a strategy for the game and plays to that strategy.
  • They work as a team. Trite, I know.  They are a basketball team after all. But not all team sports revolve around the team.  Look at some players in professional sports teams and it often seems the play is about shining their light the brightest, not shining a bright light on the team.  As Nick Fasulo or Beyond the Arc said when comparing Butler to the last non-BCS team to be in the Final Four, UNLV in the early 90’s Instead, “[Butler] is the embodiment of a overachieving group of athletes dedicated to one single goal, led by one of the brightest and boldest coaches in all of sports.” They are a clear example the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Go Bulldogs!