LSA Global Insights Newsletter: Performance Management

Showing posts with label Performance Management. Show all posts

October 29, 2022

How To Align Teams Around Goals

Too Many Strategies Do Not Get Consistently Implemented

According to research by IBM, 9 out of 10 business plans fail to achieve strategic goals. When leaders do not align teams around goals, our own organizational alignment research found that business strategies are 50% less clear to employees than to leaders.

Until employees have a clear line of sight to how their work directly contributes to strategic priorities, believe they are empowered to achieve the desired results, and feel that the entire company is fully committed to accomplishing what matters most, they will knowingly or unknowingly slow or even impede effective implementation of business goals.

Where is the disconnect and what can we do about it?

Begin with Leadership

If you want to align teams around goals, the first step is to understand that effective strategy execution starts at the top.

Strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing companies.

Not only must your strategy outline clear and compelling choices about where to play and what actions to take; but it must also be understood, believable, and implementable enough to all key stakeholders responsible for executing it.

Read Top Mistakes to Avoid if You Want to Align Teams Around Goals

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER

Patrick Resk

CFO

Porter Novelli

" LSA worked with our Executive Leadership Team to help create strategic clarity and alignment as we look to increase our growth rate and unlock innovation.

They masterfully handled very complex, challenging, and high stakes leaders, decisions, and cultural nuances to help us identify what matters most and move toward one unified direction.

Their practical, straightforward, and client-centric approach was refreshing. I highly recommend them to any executive team looking to get aligned to create even higher performance."

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Get Aligned. Stay Aligned.™

June 25, 2022

How To Better Set Goals across Your Company

High Performing Executive Teams Know How to Set Clear Goals Across the Organization

We believe that the role of leadership is to create the circumstances for their teams to perform at their peak.

And peak performance starts with strategic clarity. Leaders need to know how to effectively set and execute against goals across their organizations.

Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing leaders.

To create strategic clarity, leaders must start by creating shared goals that are clear, compelling, relevant, and aligned with people AND business priorities. Then, they must have a transparent process to collectively recalibrate as things inevitably change.

When done right, the process of co-defining, -managing, -tracking, and adjusting approaches to achieve important goals creates the synergy businesses need to win.

Read the 2 Research-backed Steps to Take Now

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER

Bindu Garapaty

VP of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Talent Development

Impossible Foods

"LSA has a tremendous ability to distill complex, multilayered challenges into meaningful, impactful, and clear strategies and action plans.

The time we invested as a leadership team to get aligned was well spent in gaining laser focus and identifying ways to prioritize what was meaningful individually and as a team. The facilitation and leadership style was direct, firm, and compassionate.

LSA provided the high-level thinking and support for our team to co-create in a rapidly scaling business."

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March 21, 2020

How to Make Goals and Accountabilities Clear During Crisis

Unfortunately, leaders cannot hit the pause button during times of uncertainty. Now, more than ever, employees expect their leaders to be clear, honest, transparent, and anticipatory.

While the natural inclination for many leaders in times of crisis is to be in command-and-control mode to make urgent decisions quickly, it is equally important to actively involve people in discussions and decisions whenever possible.

Crisis creates a wonderful opportunity for leaders to explicitly model and reference values that matter most, meet people where they are, and most of all listen.

Goals and Accountabilities Matter More During Times of Uncertainty

Good leaders create clarity during times of uncertainty; bad leaders allow ambiguity, misalignment, and frustration.

Even without a crisis, 42% of workers across every gender, age group, and function rated “having unclear goals” as their top source of stress – almost three times higher than having a “bad manager.”

When Goals and Accountabilities Are Unclear During a Crisis

Ambiguity makes it challenging for employees to feel confident about what matters most, to know how they are doing, and to understand when to seek help.

Unclear goals and accountabilities during a crisis directly lead to ...

Read the Rest of the Article Now

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

October 26, 2019

How to Drastically Improve Difficult Performance Conversations

Difficult Performance Conversations Are No Fun
Most managers (including me) dread difficult performance conversations with their direct reports and are willing to try almost anything to avoid them. Whether it is delivering bad news, discussing sensitive subjects, or firing an employee, the most upsetting performance conversations are the ones that evoke anger, yelling, accusations, defensiveness or tears.

As appealing as it may be to avoid a potential confrontation with a coworker, we have found that high performing team leaders face these conversations without dread. They are adept at managing conflict in a way that creates clarity, trust, and accountability. What do they do differently? .

There Are Countless Tools and Techniques Available
There are countless performance communication tools and techniques available to help make performance management discussions better. They range from better listening, to being more empathetic, to being more direct. Used correctly, they can all help make difficult conversations about performance more productive.

The Six Most Common Difficult Performance Conversation Mistakes
When we ask employees to list the most frustrating and ineffective aspects of ineffective performance conversations at work, six rise to the surface:

Oversimplifying the issue
Not showing enough respect
Getting too personal
Not gathering enough data
Making bad assumptions
Not having enough empathy or compassion

The True Root Cause - Bad Performance Expectations
Avoiding these common mistakes will certainly help. But we find that they often do not address the root cause of most difficult performance conversations - a lack of clear performance expectations.

Read the Five Attributes of Effective Performance Expectations

September 28, 2019

The Impact of Raising Performance Expectations

Raising Performance Expectations Can Dramatically Increase Performance
Done right, leaders know that raising performance expectations can dramatically increase performance. When people know that more is possible, they can lift their performance to higher, and often previously impossible, levels.

Hot Dogs and Performance Expectations
Joey Chestnut has been the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest winner for twelve out of the last thirteen years. There's no doubt he's the performance king in this arena. The question is what can we learn from this food eating competition master about raising performance expectations at work?

Here's how Joey drastically changed expectations about what was possible and the effect that it had on other contestants.

For 26 years (1974 to 2000), the hot dog eating record was between 10-20 hot dogs.
Then in 2001 Takeru Kobayashi smashed the record and ate 50 in one sitting.
From 2002 to 2016, after people saw that eating 50 hot dogs, once considered impossible, was possible, every new contestant was able to eat 50 or more hot dogs.
Then in 2016, Joey Chestnut consumed 70 hot dogs.

For decades, the performance target of 20 and then 50 hot dogs appeared impossible to beat. It was as if there was an invisible performance barrier which could not be surpassed. What happened?

The Performance Barrier Phenomenon
When performance barriers are overcome, people are often able to perform at heretofore unimaginable levels. They simply need to see someone else doing it to realize what was possible.

It is amazing what can be accomplished once one person crashes through the performance bar. Think about when Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier in 1954. Runners had been trying to break the record since 1886. But just 46 days after Bannister's "impossible" performance, John Landy set a new record with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds.

Then, only twelve months later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.

Since then, over one thousand runners have broken the 4-minute mile barrier - something that had once been considered impossible by the best athletes in the world.

We see this performance barrier phenomenon everywhere - in speed records, in computer chip sizes, in acrobatics, and the list goes on.

Something is only impossible until it is shown to be possible.

Read How to Apply These Lessons to Your Business Now