12 Principles For Successful Performance Management

Posted August 26, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

For many years now we’ve been helping organizations develop and implement effective performance management systems. Here are ten principles that form the foundation of our approach. I welcome input to help us add to the list. I’ve you are interested in having us elaborate on what each of these principles mean for you or your workplace, feel free to contact me.

1.  Change “performance” to “success.”

2. Change activities to results.

3.  Set high standards and make your expectations for success clear.

4. Distinguish between “operational” and “leadership” accountabilities. Operational accountabilities are unique to your specific job. Leadership accountabilities belong to everyone: they are promises to live the espoused values.

5. Demands and support need to be kept in balance. Results have a much better chance of growing in the soil of trust.

6.  Communication should be so frequent that there are no surprises in the success review.

7.  Give corrective feedback early.

8. Without passion, accountability is drudgery; without accountability, passion is fantasy; passion with accountability is destiny.

9.  Negotiate consequences before you have to.

10. Stay positive in public and keep the negative in private.

11. Hire slowly; fire quickly.

12. Have a clear, explicit process for follow up.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Finding Balance And Health In Your Culture: Wisdom From A Yogi

Posted July 12, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Did you ever have a bad day where everything seemed to go wrong? Although our tendency is to blame something in our external environment, it is the state of mind that you bring to your work or your life that determines whether the day is “bad” or “good”. You can train your nervous system to be depressed or angry or pessimistic, just as you can train yourself to be hopeful, loving, and optimistic. That is, you can teach yourself to let life get you down or choose to use whatever life sends you to find a lesson that will move you forward.

The same is true with cultures. Have you ever been in an environment that is not as productive as it could be or living up to it’s potential? How often have you been in an organization where you found that there is far more talent, brainpower, wisdom, and resourcefulness than the job required or even allowed? Just as people can be ruled by emotions, cultures can take on an emotive “state,” because cultures are made up of people.

Culture is essentially an interplay of energy and yoga, the practice of moving into stillness and focusing your energy, can be instructive in understanding organizational culture. According to yoga there are three basic qualities or energies: rajas, tamas and sattva. Rajas is the energy of action, change and movement, while Tamasic energy is associated with a state of inactivity and inertia, heaviness and darkness. Sattva is light and uplifting and indicates a state of harmony and balance.

In order to find balance, we must start on a journey towards sattva We do need rajas and tamas energy, but in their proper proportion and at their proper time. If we didn’t have rajas we would not have energy to move towards sattva.  If we have only tamas, we become “lazy” and never get anything done. However, we all want more balance and harmony in our lives, both corporately and personally, so we must ingest more sattva both mentally and physically.

In Yoga, as in life, the greatest obstacle to our growth towards a state of sattva is the continuous fluctuations of our minds.  The mind is always busy and it can flow in two directions – upwards towards sattva or downwards towards negativity. Patanjali, a great yoga sage from 200 BC gives a simple method for turning to sattva. He says when negative thoughts are encountered we must immediately replace them with the opposite positive.  Simple, but not easy! This is a practice of the mind. It is hard work and takes practice!

This has many implications for corporate culture.  We must not entertain negative thinking.  Gossip, slanderous talk and negativity of any kind work to undermine a positive mental framework, and makes most of us ineffective and generally miserable. A first step, and something infinitely practical is to breathe. A simple practice of mindful, deep breathing can be performed in any office, anytime of the day, in any meeting, at any moment, and thankfully it can be instituted without scrutiny or negative consequence.

We all make a difference to the environments we live and work in. Having ways to connect with sattvic energy can be a way to positively impact those around you. A healthy, balanced culture starts with you.

Note: Thanks to Jeff Lichty, my Yoga teacher (www.ashtanga-yoga-victoria.com) for writing this article with me!

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Entitlement: Greatness Run Aground*

Posted July 3, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

I have noticed that every time a great culture is built, there appears to be an opposite and equal reaction to greatness: entitlement. It seems to be human nature. If you give your kids a lot, they want more. I grew up with telephone party lines, with one line for up to five or six residences. There were times when you had to wait 1/2 hour to make a phone call. Now I get impatient with my cell phone provider when I get a dropped call and have to redial with the push of one button. It used to take a winter to travel across this country on chuck wagons and horses. Now, as expectations have been raised, I find myself getting upset if a plane is thirty minutes late. Living in a great country, with world-class health care, education, law enforcement, and political systems seems only to increase our craving for more. Meet our needs with a high standard, and we raise the bar with a demand for more. I’ve seen the same dynamic in organizational cultures. The more the organization gives us what we want, the more entitled we feel. The best cultures I have worked with all experience the challenge of entitlement.

The reverse of this also seems true. My mother lived through the depression in a 900 square foot shack with ten siblings, enduring years of unimaginable poverty, and was void of entitlement. When she was close to death I asked her how she felt about dying. “After seventy-eight years, I accept death. I was fortunate just to have lived!” Joyce did not even feel entitled to life itself. Hard times are an ally in battling entitlement.

All the recent attention to building great cultures, empowering employees, and developing leadership capacity so people feel engaged seems to have unintentionally reinforced our love of entitlement. Living in great cultures has somehow fostered a belief that we have a right to get whatever we want without any obligations in return. Doing our own thing and expecting rights without service is self-serving. In the name of a great culture, we see people ask for such things as more pay, more freedom, greater recognition and privilege, more flex time or a risk-free environment without any reciprocating accountabilities.

This is simply wrong. Just because we are attempting to build cultures of trust that encourage you to find your authentic voice doesn’t mean you will get everything you ask for or have absolute security. Cultures of trust require a partnership, a commitment to a dialogue, not acts of concession. Accountable, authentic cultures of trust are based on reciprocal agreements. There are no licenses granted.

At the heart of entitlement is the belief that “my wants are more important than the culture and the culture exists for my sake.” At some point each of us needs to grow up and discover that our self-interest is better served by doing good work than by getting good things. Entitlement also rests on the belief that something is owed us because of sacrifices we have made. In reality, entitlement claims rights that have not been earned. It diminishes self-respect and constrains our freedom. The only way to reclaim what we have lost to entitlement is through acts of commitment and service to an entity larger than ourselves – the culture we work and live in.

When you see entitlement in the culture you live or work in, there are four steps to counter it:

1.     See entitlement as a sign of growth and greatness. You won’t find much entitlement in poverty and highly bureaucratic systems that have been suppressed for years.

2.     Identify the value or values you want to replace entitlement (e.g. self responsibility, service to others, gratitude).

3.     Find the allies in your culture who live by the values you are committed to and support them to foster these values with others who trust them. Like parenting, you only influence the values of people with whom you have a strong, trusting relationship.

4.     Get the values you want to instill off the wall and into people’s hearts through conversations and clearly defined actions. Then make a promise to live and work in accord with these actions, while being open for ongoing feedback and learning. Then shine a light an actions that are self-responsible, committed to service, and exude gratitude. Tell the story. Keep the renewed values fresh, making it difficult to be entitled.

*Thanks to Peter Block (Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, Berrett-Koehler Publishers) for his inspiration behind many of these insights.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Granting Grace – A Key To Building An Engaged Culture

Posted May 23, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

What if we could ask for what we need and want from each other? What if we could talk openly, in the spirit of good will and respect, about what would make us happy and loyal in our workplace? What if we could then negotiate what we can and can’t do to meet these needs? What would happen to our workplaces, our communities, and our families if we all practiced being a little more honest and direct with each other in a respectful way?

We can all learn to be more direct with each other, and it takes continual practice, but there’s something more. Farm Credit Canada, an organization that practices good culture, has taught me a very important concept around building strong culture. One of the key principles in their cultural practices and one they work at relentlessly, is the concept of granting grace in their interactions with each other. They hold each other accountable for creating a safe environment where people can speak up without fear of repercussion.

No long ago I spent three days with an amazing team at Farm Credit, and “grace” was a central part of our conversations. They work hard at talking straight in a responsible manner. They are committed to the success of others and hold each other accountable to not engage in “conspiracies” against people. They strive for patience with themselves and others but also respectfully acknowledge when they operate outside the expectations of grace. They don’t get it perfect, but they get it right.

This kind of commitment lends itself to learning to be open and direct with each other. I love the idea of “granting grace.” I also know that it’s an area I need to continually work on. I’m certainly not as graceful in my work and in my life as I could be, especially when under pressure or in the midst of demands and deadlines.

What does “granting grace” mean to you? How do you operate with “grace” in your workplace? What effect does “grace” have on engagement, commitment, and productivity?

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Creating A Remarkable Culture: Learning To Lead Without A Title

Posted April 25, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Do you work in a culture that you would call “remarkable?” Are you depending on someone else to make it remarkable, or do you take ownership to create a remarkable culture in the area where you work and can influence?The title of this blog is the title of some of my most recent presentations and workshops. Here are some of the key messages I have been giving to organizations these days:

Building resilient, vibrant organizational cultures is about building leadership capacity at every level and in every position. I define leadership as the capacity of human beings to shape and create a new future by inspiring and engaging others. Leadership is what transforms mediocrity into greatness.

You don’t get promoted to leadership. Leadership is about presence, not position. It’s not a title; it’s a decision. Every person in your organization is a potential leader.

Growing and developing the leadership talent of every single person throughout your organization is your greatest competitive advantage in a turbulent economy.

Learning to lead without a title is the responsibility of every employee.

I love what Dr. Martin Luther King said about personal leadership:

“If a person is called to be a street sweeper, they should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare poetry. They should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did their job well.’”

Even if you have a title, you have to learn to lead without one. One of my clients is very wise. Before he promotes someone into a leadership position, he assesses their leadership capacity by inviting them to work in a nonprofit organization (of their choice) for six months, to see how well they influence with no positional power. “If you can’t lead volunteers, you’ll never be able to lead with a title,” he proposes. Not a bad philosophy.

How do you help people in your organization – with or without positional power – develop their leadership capacity? I’d love to get your thoughts on this.

Categories: Leadership and Culture, Organizational Culture
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Protecting Your Talent – The New Challenge For Organizations

Posted April 19, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

As the economy turns, how do you protect your talent asset? After eighteen months of layoffs, wage freezes, and increased workloads, employees are feeling tired and disheartened, ready to jump ship for better opportunities. According to a recent survey by Right Management Inc, six in ten employees intend to pursue new job opportunities somewhere else in 2010, and another 21 percent say “maybe” and are already networking toward it.

This is a time you have to be conscious of and commit to re-earning trust. Even your engaged workers are aware of opportunities elsewhere, and your best employees are mobile. People are always attracted by career development opportunities, attaining work/life balance, or working for a creative culture. If leadership doesn’t provide these things, then workers will seek them elsewhere. Although there is a sense of entitlement with these demands, the good news is that this pressure can push our organizations to be better places to work.

How are smart employers going to inspire workers to stay and be engaged?

By being in touch with employees. Here are a few ways to establish and rebuild trust.

1.       Pay attention to your top performers – those that you want to keep – and don’t take them for granted:

  • Provide meaningful work. Restate the organization’s vision and how the contribution of these leaders – regardless of their position – is connected to the overall organizational goals.
  • Seek their input on how they feel about their job, management, and the organization itself.
  • Find out what they need to move from being worried to being completely engaged. Listen carefully to their ideas for making this a better place.
  • Support them to determine their future goals and highest aspirations, what matters most to them, and provide action plans to help them reach those goals.
  • Help them take on responsibilities that are aligned with their talents and passion.
  • Recognize your key people. Make it a point to let them know how much they are valued and how much value they bring.

2.     Be transparent:

  • Share corporate and financial information at monthly meetings.
  • Have “up close and personal” sessions, giving staff company news and updates, and allow time to field questions on any topic, from the organization’s growth to their vacation plans.
  • Let people know where you stand and why decisions are being made and enlist their input.
  • Get your key employees involved in critical decisions and discussions wherever possible. Help them feel they are a part of something and are needed to succeed.

3.     Ramp up your commitment to mentoring, and ensure that people are getting the support they need to succeed, grow, and develop pride.

  • Expose your best employees to senior leadership through opportunities for mentoring.
  • Consider job rotations to give employees experience in other areas.
  • Allow high-potential workers to handle special projects or work on high-potential accounts. Support your best people to take risks.

4.     Reconsider rewards. If your company was forced to implement pay cuts or a wage freeze that you can’t afford to reinstate, find other ways to compensate staff: days off, flexible working hours, or even product discounts. Get to know what motivates individuals, and do what you can to show your commitment to them.

Remember that your best people are the ones that can always get a job anywhere, but if they trust you to have their best interests at heart, they will be committed to the organization. More than anything, people want to belong and contribute to something that is lasting. The payoff is that as you see signs of life in the economy, you will see signs of life in your employees. It is inspiring to have people wanting to step up rather than step out.

Categories: Leadership and Culture, Organizational Culture
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Granting Grace – A Key To Building A Good Culture

Posted April 11, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

What if we could sit down and ask for what we need and want from each other? What if we could talk openly with each other, in the spirit of good will and respect, about what would make us happy and loyal in our workplace? What if we could then negotiate what we can do and what we can’t do to meet these needs? What would happen to our workplaces, our communities, and our families if we all practiced being a little more honest and direct with each other in a respectful way?

We can all learn to be more direct with each other, and it takes continual practice, but there’s something more. Farm Credit Canada, one of my clients and an organization that practices good culture, has taught me a very important concept around building strong culture. One of the key principles in their cultural practices and one which they work at relentlessly, is the concept of granting grace in their interactions with each other. They hold each other accountable for creating a safe environment where people can speak up without fear of repercussion.

I spent three days with one of their teams this week, and “grace” was a central part of our conversations. They work hard at talking straight in a responsible manner. They are committed to the success of others and hold each other accountable to not engage in “conspiracies” against people. They strive for patience with themselves and others but also respectfully acknowledge when they operate outside the expectations of grace. They don’t get it perfect, but they get it right.

This kind of commitment lends itself to learning to be open and direct with each other. I love the idea of “granting grace.” What does “granting grace” mean to you? How do you operate with “grace” in your workplace? What effect does “grace” have on engagement, commitment, and productivity?

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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The Art of Building A Strong Culture

Posted April 4, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Learning to build a culture is an art, and you can master building a culture if you are willing to invest the time and energy. The practice of any art, whether it’s music, carpentry, or athletics, requires four practices: First is discipline. To become good at something, you must undertake it in a disciplined way. Anything you do only if “you’re in the mood,” may be a nice hobby, but you’ll never become a master at it.

The second practice is concentration. Paradoxically, what you need to concentrate on to build a culture – which is about connection to others – is self-reflection: connection with yourself. If you want a better culture where you live or work start by developing a mediation practice or a practice of mindfulness. Make it a daily discipline  to go inside and listen to your needs, desires, and values. Make time for a spiritual discipline to pray, or create a community of people around you to share your life with, or  simply take time to think and reflect. Make any one of these practices a concentrated discipline, and you will see a significant change in your culture in a matter of weeks.

The third practice is patience. Anyone who has ever tried to master an art knows that patience is necessary to achieve anything. Patience is difficult in a society that demands instant gratification and speed, but without patience and perseverance, mastery remains illusive. To build a culture we must be patient with ourselves and with others. There is no prescription or quick fix to a better culture. An apprentice in carpentry must learn to be patient while learning to plane wood. A piano student begins by practicing scales. The apprentice in the art of culture learns by being still and listening to the voice inside and then learning to overcome self-centeredness, realizing that building a better culture begins with building a better you.

A fourth practice is that you must make it a priority in your life. When you make culture – the environment and key relationships in your life – a priority and then create concentrated practices around connecting with yourself and others while maintaining patience, you won’t just have a better culture, a better environment to live and work in. You’ll have a better life.

What practices do you incorporate into your life and how does these practices impact the environments where you live and work?

Categories: Cultural Transformation, Leadership and Culture, Organizational Culture
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Organizational Culture: Lessons From A High School Musical

Posted March 28, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

This past week our seventeen-year daughter, Hayley, performed in an amazing high school musical production of Les Misérables. Months of preparation went into this production. As these young people prepared themselves for a performance, I witnessed organizational culture at its very finest. Here it was: a group of ninety youth (from grade nine through twelve), all focused on a shared vision, all deeply engaged in the project, all passionate about their work, with high energy, and servant leadership. I sat back and just took in the buzz with absolute awe. I started to think, “What if we could create this kind of culture in a workplace?” With the right ingredients, focus, and leadership, I believe it’s possible because I’ve seen it done.

Here are some lessons from this high school musical theatre production that I believe can be applied to any organization.

1. Leadership with a vision. Merilie Stonewall, the artistic director at Hayley’s high school, had a vision to  produce this musical years ago when she first saw Les Misérables and was spell bound. Then she waited nine years after the rights became available for the special talent needed to cross the band room threshold. Everyone – from the actors to the crew and set designers to the tech staff, had a vision of the end result.

2. Leadership inspired by love. Merrilie has invested years of her life into her students at Cochrane High School. She cares deeply for her work and her students. She has never, in all her years of teaching, ever fallen out of love with her work or her students. It is inspiring simply to be around her. Merrilie’s credibility was earned long before the first audition. It’s built on her love and commitment to youth and to music. And everyone knows it.

3. Everyone’s talent was needed. Everyone in the production – from grade nine to grade twelve – contributed. Everyone made a difference. And everyone knew their important piece they played in the puzzle. When talent gets aligned with the vision, loyalty, passion, and energy is the result.

4. High standards of performance were set and expected. No one ever takes pride in doing something easy. Every person on this musical team was stretched and pushed beyond their comfort zone. Football players were inspired to sing in lead roles, work on technical support or paint sets.  Shy kids were coached out of the woodwork to bring their unique talents forward. High standards were set and reached.

5. Open communication. Conversations were going on continuously. Everyone seemed to be talking to everyone. Roles were clear and openness abounded.

6. Work was fun. Even in the midst of high expectations, everyone somehow knew that the goal of all this was to be in the moment of creative human expression. If we aren’t truly enjoying ourselves, what’s it all for anyway? Ms. Stonewall, like all great leaders, understands that the work is merely a means to a much higher end: the building of stronger, more confident youth. She, like all who watched this production unfold in the past months, knew that the experience and memory of being on this team will stay with these kids the rest of their lives.

7. Results. Results are essential as they are the ultimate measure of success. Hundreds of people in our community attending a sellout performance for five straight nights. Five straight standing ovations. It was as good of a product as you will see anywhere from an amateur theatre group. When a team produces these kind of results everyone wins, and everyone on the team knows they made a difference in making that happen.

What a vision to aspire to as we bring our passion and unique gifts to our work.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Organizational Culture and The Shadow

Posted February 19, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Not long ago I was hired by a church to help them with their culture. On the surface, the environment was lovely. People were very friendly and polite. Everyone talked about the sense of “family” that was highlighted on their value statements that hung in the sanctuary. Parishioners made a point, when I first met them, of talking to me about the strong “spirit” that they felt in the place.

But no one could put their finger on why attendance was dropping. As I hung around and started to really know people, a different conversation emerged. People started to open up about how the pastor was unapproachable, it was feeling like a hierarchy and losing it’s openness, the very reason most people originally came to this particular congregation. The toughest part was that there was no place to surface these concerns honestly because everyone felt that everyone else thought the culture was fine, which resulted in a fear of being honest. No one wanted to rock the boat. Genuineness was being replaced by politeness, and was turning into dishonesty, which was blocking the needed energy to sustain a great culture.

There are always at least two kinds of cultures existing in an organization: 1) the Visible Culture (e.g. the artifacts, espoused values, formal hierarchy, lines of authority) and 2) the Real Culture (e.g. the actual experience of working there, the stuff that goes on in the hallways and coffee conversations, the rumor mill, the informal procedures for getting things done).

Within the real culture lies the “shadow,” the hidden aspect where the culture’s creativity, wisdom, and interconnection are waiting to emerge. It is, after all, where a good deal of the real work — the work that means something — happens. While the visible culture is often focused on procedures, policies, job descriptions, and routines, the shadow system has few rules or constraints. Any good leader knows that to have lasting impact on the organization, you have to listen to the shadow. You have to make time to get down to the cafeteria or the places where people take their breaks and talk about what matters most. You have to listen to the hidden network. If you try to battle against the shadow by attempting to “overcome resistance” without respecting the shadow or pretending that it’s not there, it will eventually go underground and sabotage any opportunity for growth.

Wise and authentic leaders will not try to fight the shadow, but rather recognize it for what it is: a natural – and vital – part of the larger system. Leaders that have not faced their own shadow will avoid the darker side of their organization by hiding in their office, suppressing honesty, choosing polite affiliation over genuine alignment, or develop an over-dependence on surveys to assess the temperature of the culture.

But suppressing the shadow or pretending it’s not there is done at your own peril. The shadow will always come out. If it’s not allowed to surface directly, it will contaminate the system in the form of resistance, complaining, sabotaging new initiatives, exiting, disengagement, and apathy.

Alternatively, by acknowledging the shadow and allowing it to surface in open, respectful, responsible conversations, you can contain it without suppressing it and channel it into creative problem solving, genuine engagement, and renewed, focused commitment. The first step to healing is acknowledgement. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I’d love to hear about your experience with the shadow, and constructive ways you improved your workplace by facing the darker side of your organizational nature.

Categories: Leadership and Culture, Organizational Culture
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