Change and performance management: two crucial and interlinked leadership capabilities

Successful change starts in the minds of people. If your people don’t understand the need for change or how it will benefit them, creating the desired behaviour change will be extremely challenging.

To run a thriving business in today’s rapidly changing world, your leaders must be excellent at leading change and your people change ready. And yet research firms, like McKinsey & Company, have found that 70% of change initiatives fail.

Why?

• Too many initiatives at the same time that aren’t synchronised

• Ineffective communication

• Employees don’t believe in what you are trying to achieve

• Employees don’t understand the benefits of adopting new processes, technologies and tools

• Employees aren’t equipped with the tools they need to be successful

• Leaders aren’t equipped to lead change or manage resistance effectively

To help employees make the mental and behavioural shifts needed for change to achieve high-performance, they must understand business and labour’s ‘intertwined destiny’. They need to know how the economy functions, the reality of your current operating environment and how the business profit model works. When people understand what they want as employees and they also understand what the business needs to be successful, there will be an appreciation for and a willingness to work together towards this. Once they “see the bigger picture” it is much easier to develop united, engaged people, that are able to execute your strategy and deliver a winning performance.

Bottom line: people won’t do differently, if they don’t think differently.

Once you kickstart this conversation, it is important to maintain it through an ongoing cycle of structured and meaningful dialogue to review performance and set goals, underpinned by your business’s purpose, values and vision.

There are three key steps to kickstart and sustain this process:

1. Mobilise change influencers: Identify and equip key influencers on all levels to drive change and a high-performance culture. This creates a common change language, promotes long-term sustainability and ensures that a winning culture becomes the “way of doing things”.

2. Build a critical mass of understanding and commitment: Align a critical mass of employees to a shared vision, focused on their intertwined destiny. Use people and culture processes that mobilise your people around commons goals – engaging, empowering and equipping them with the skills and tools to make the behavioural shifts required to build further momentum. Our YOUnite programme accomplishes steps 1 and 2 in a very short space of time, by helping your people understand the WHY, WHAT and HOW of the change with an appreciation for WIFM (What’s in it for me), while gaining their valuable input and commitment to action plans.

3. Continue to develop the right attitude and effective teamwork: In today’s fast changing and virtual environment, the need for and frequency of effective team dialogue has increased significantly. A recent McKinsey & Company agility study also identified a Network of Empowered Teams as one of the five trademarks of agile organisations. Therefore, it is key to ensure that teams have structured daily discussions about work and implement team effectiveness processes that support future fit standards of alignment, accountability, transparency and collaboration. TeamConnect®, our tried and tested team performance methodology, uses structured team meetings as well as on-the-job coaching and mentoring to do just this. By engaging teams in regular goal setting, action planning and reviewing, it becomes an effective vehicle through which leaders can continuously manage change and performance.

TeamConnect®, a team performance methodology that works

My 35 years of developing people, leading change and enhancing performance have revealed that effective team meetings follow a distinct cycle of four steps: Reviewing performance, Goal setting, Improving Team Fitness and Execution. (If you’ve ever wondered what ‘WTF’ stands for… it means to walk the floor i.e. visible and engaging leadership.)

Together these steps ensure that the process of team meetings in your business becomes a continuous and agile cycle of structured discussion and execution.

Learn more about how YOUnite, our high-impact employee engagement and change readiness programme – together with TeamConnect® - can take your business to new heights www.2collaborate.com

In the next blog post, we are going to explore how structured conversations can help leaders tackle the challenging situations they are not getting to because of Covid-19 fatigue. If you’ve enjoyed this read, be sure to sign-up for our quarterly newsletter bringing you tips, tools and the latest industry thinking https://www.2collaborate.co.za/subscribe

About the author: Tjaart Minnaar, CEO and Culture Improvement expert at 2Collaborate

Tjaart has spent 35 years in business and consulting conceptualising, designing and implementing solutions to improve business and individual performance. The success has been highlighted by several of his clients winning Deloitte’s Best Company To Work For Survey, overall or in their industry categories.

Get to know more about Tjaart on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjaart-minnaar/

Building a thriving and sustainable business through leadership consistency

The balance between organisational and operational effectiveness as core leadership capabilities is the key.

To thrive in a highly competitive market, businesses need their leaders to spend their time and energy doing the right things effectively. However, the challenge facing most businesses is that their managers are often operationally strong but organisationally weak - focusing much more on operational processes than on people and culture processes.

Put simply, operational effectiveness is all about achieving operational goals and targets through managing people resources and establishing and extending best operating practices. It’s about using the combined efforts of people and technologies to achieve goals and continually do things better. It is about delivering operational results (cost, quality, service) today and every day.

Organisational effectiveness is about aligning the organisation with your strategic intent and aligning the hearts and minds of your people to your brand and intent. It’s about creating a growth mindset and building people capabilities and culture as a competitive advantage. This combined creates depth and sustainability in the long run.

How do your leaders compare?

• Low on organisational and operational effectiveness. Managers in this quadrant pose a serious risk to your business. You need to understand how they got there, is it due to an error of judgment or because of gaps in your organisational systems. Rethink your recruitment, selection and development processes if you have people like this in your business.

• High on organisational effectiveness but low on operational effectiveness. Managers in this quadrant are usually younger and more inexperienced. While they have the credentials and theoretical knowledge, they are not yet street-wise. They can be moved along the horizontal axis through coaching and mentoring to channel their energy and potential.

• High on operational effectiveness but low on organisational effectiveness. Managers in this quadrant know how to get the job done. They achieve weekly and monthly targets, driving short-term profitability, and are often promoted due to their technical expertise and ability to deliver results. However, they are ill-equipped or lack the will to lead others and are not focused on developing the people and behaviours needed to build a long-term thriving culture.

The reality is that they commonly become untouchable because their leaders are afraid to rock the boat and would rather maintain the status quo than risk losing the functional capabilities. This results in them becoming leadership role models, thereby perpetuating the situation. These managers can add far more value to building a sustainable organisation if you can move their knowledge, understanding and skills into the top right-hand quadrant.

• High on operational and organisational effectiveness. This is where you want your managers to be. As the custodians of your leadership standard, they are responsible for ‘walking the talk’ and setting an example of how things should be done. They understand that a strong culture creates sustainable operational performance and tend to spend more time on people and culture processes - such as engaging, empowering and developing their teams - so that their people can deliver the operational results. They have the ability to operate in both quadrants and dive deeper into each when required.

Managers who visibly and credibly lead effective people and culture processes, from talent and performance management down to how team meetings are conducted, will create a trickle-down effect and establish a consistent culture and value system in your business. When these managers become the role models it perpetuates sustainable success.

How do you move the majority of your leaders into the correct quadrant to make your business a sustainable and thriving one?

1. Define your leadership standard; the behaviours and practises you expect of leaders that will determine your company culture over time.

2. Assess them against this standard; create continuous feedback loops and put development plans in place.

3. Ensure that your incentive schemes support the right behaviours; balance your incentives to make provision for organisational and operational achievements.

4. Set up organisational systems to support the right behaviour; for example, build your performance management system on an underlying philosophy of care and growth versus “rank and yank”.

To know more about how to move your managers up the effectiveness axis and develop the right kinds of capabilities – talk to us. In the next blog post, we are going to explore how to mobilise your people and review some useful tools that can help you kick-start a high-performance growth culture.

If you’ve enjoyed this read, be sure to sign-up for our monthly newsletter bringing you tips, tools and the latest industry thinking https://www.2collaborate.co.za/subscribe

About the author: Tjaart Minnaar, CEO and Leadership Development expert at 2Collaborate

Tjaart has spent 35 years in business and consulting conceptualising, designing and implementing solutions to improve business and individual performance. The success has been highlighted by several of his clients winning Deloitte’s Best Company To Work For Survey, overall or in their industry categories.

Get to know more about Tjaart on LinkedIn ttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tjaart-minnaar/

World War II planes and making better business decisions

Tough economic conditions have left many organisations fighting for survival. In this complex, volatile climate, businesses will need to consider all the information available and fully understand the context of the situation if they are to survive and achieve long-term success.

The reality, however, is that businesses are dealing with an enormous amount of pressure and are often quick to rely on information already available to them or that they can easily obtain. For example, what made our competitors successful? What was their secret recipe for surviving the first wave of COVID-19? And what lessons can we learn from them to reinforce our business?

In fact, we are often so fixated on surviving that we overlook a host of important things.

This is a well-known cognitive bias referred to as “survivorship bias”: the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that make it past a selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because they lack visibility.

For example, music from the past is often thought of as better than contemporary music. This could be because only the best music from the past is replayed, while today’s music, good and bad, is far more accessible. Thus, survivorship creates perception bias.

But what does this have to do with business and making better decisions?

To explore this, we need to go back to World War II when the US recognised that countries didn’t win battles with bravery alone. The victors were usually the side that made marginal gains by receiving 5% fewer hits or using 5% fewer resources at 95% of the cost.

To achieve this, the US founded the Statistical Research Group in 1942 – a classified project consisting of the brightest statisticians to help in the war effort. Enter the scene, Abraham Wald, the son of a kosher baker from a small Transylvanian town who possessed an exceptional talent for mathematics.

The US army knew that they needed to protect their planes from a highly efficient anti-aircraft weapon called the ‘The Flak’ but they didn’t know how. After mapping out the damage, the initial recommendation was to strengthen the planes’ vulnerable areas. In particular, the tail, body and wings.

Seeing beyond the data, Abraham made a game-changing observation: they were only analysing the damage on planes that returned. To be fully informed, they would need to consider all the places where no bullet holes appeared. From this, they quickly surmised that the planes that went down were hit on the cockpit and engine.

By looking at the bigger picture, they were able to reinforce the most important areas and save countless lives.

We see the same perception bias in business: an organisation tries to replicate a product, process or structure that worked well for a competitor but for some reason fails. Why? Because we only have half of the picture. By focusing on the successful outcomes, we discount the barriers and failures along the way.

So, how do we move beyond survivor bias in business?

There is no secret recipe to business success. Building a high-performance company requires discipline, continuous improvement and growth in marginal increments. Identifying and reinforcing the vulnerable areas in your business is essential. However, it is equally important, if not more important, to know what you are good at and what is going well, and to consistently build these value drivers.

At 2Collaborate we have designed an effective and easy-to-use High-Performance formula that can assist you on this journey – underpinned by nearly 30 years of application and testing. Built on the notion that performance is a culture, not a programme, this formula acts as a blueprint to create your business’s Way of doing things. Adjusted to your needs, it can help you identify and improve areas of vulnerability while reinforcing the value drivers that will ensure your long-term success.

About the author: Hennie Brittz, Director and Head of Marketing and Technology at 2Collaborate

Hennie has spent 12 years in business and consulting conceptualising, designing and implementing large-scale performance improvement processes.

An entrepreneur at heart, he founded the design and internal communications agency, Elevate, in 2019. Shortly, thereafter he co-founded GameChangers, a business consultancy that brings you the best from the sports field and boardroom.

Get to know more about Hennie on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/henniebrittz/