Leading Performance Without Positional Power

Transcription

1 Leading Performance Without Positional Power The three areas of mastery to lead others to meaningfully. STACEY BARR

2 What s inside Can you really lead a performance culture without positional power? 3 Lead a performance culture with PASSION, PEOPLE and PROCESS. 4 Lead with passion, not position; excercise INFLUENCE, not control. 5 Lead performance with people, not for them; inspire INITIATIVE, not compliance. 7 Lead performance with process, not content; facilitate IMPLEMENTATION, not activity. 9 Page 2 of 11

3 Can you really lead a performance culture without positional power? Leading a performance culture means leading people throughout your organisation to in order to dramatically increase the return on investment (ROI) of performance improvement efforts. It means leading them from the early stages of starting to, and gradually getting better and better at managing organisational performance until it becomes an unconscious competence. But the journey is usually several years, and often the top leaders can t do it, or won t do it. So it s up to you. Figure 1: Measure what matters to dramatically increase the ROI of performance improvements Performance measurement isn t yet recognised as a profession, but it absolutely should be. And when you recognise how it is indeed a profession, and that by mastering performance measurement like a professional, you will see how you can be the leader of a performance culture without having a leadership title. Page 3 of 11

4 Lead a performance culture with PASSION, PEOPLE and PROCESS. As a leader of a high-performance culture in an organisation, and particularly a leader without positional power, you need to develop strength to influence people s attitudes, to inspire them to take initiative, and to facilitate their implementation of performance measurement until it is integrated into the organisation s self-management. You need to set alight your own passion for performance before you can be influential. Passion can be just as powerful as position when it comes to leading people. You need to help people own the pursuit of high performance, and take the initiative to own their results and continually improve them, as part of their real work. You need to know your process of performance measurement thoroughly before you will successfully implement performance measurement enough to integrate it fully. Figure 2: Mastery in leading a performance culture has three parts This paper will explore this model of mastery for the aspiring performance measurement professional. It will offer specific tips for how to have influence, how to inspire initiative, and how to facilitate implementation, as the three overarching capabilities that a leader of a performance culture must have. Page 4 of 11

5 Lead with passion, not position; excercise INFLUENCE, not control. Modern-day wisdom says that nothing changes without leadership from the top. And that's the excuse many give for not pursuing performance measurement, despite how desperately needed it is, and how rarely driven from the top it is. Despite this modern-day wisdom, there is overwhelming evidence for the idea that anyone can be a leader, no matter their title or position or education or connections. Robin Sharma illustrates this richly in his story of The Leader Who Had No Title. Let's hold this to be true. Let's explore what it might take to lead a performance measurement culture from deep within your organisation, where right now you might be suffocating and stumbling around in the dark, waiting for the senior leadership team to open the doors and switch on the lights. Stop waiting. Reframe your situation to this: Lead with passion, not position; lead through influence, not control. Figure 3: Lead a performance culture with passion, to influence others to value performance measurement and improvement Page 5 of 11

6 Influence starts with your thoughts, words and actions. How you think about performance measurement will affect how you feel about it and what you say and do about it. Your first step is get clear about your own beliefs and attitudes about what performance measurement is about and what a performance measurement culture is. Then your words and actions can follow. Your words include the stories and explanations and advice and questions you reach out to others with. Your actions include how you live your philosophy of performance measurement and how you hold space and hold hands for others to try it too. When your actions and words and thoughts are aligned and coherent, then... Influence grows with your capability, confidence and credibility. Capability comes from practicing performance measurement for yourself and with others, in a way that is aligned with your beliefs and attitudes and knowledge about performance measurement. It creates a very powerful personal learning feedback loop, where the results from your actions can reinform your thoughts, and your reinformed thoughts can refine your actions. Confidence comes from practicing expressing your thoughts about performance measurement to others. This expression might be in the form of questions or advice or stories. The more you practice this, the more you reinforce your own position on performance measurement and the more authority you will feel on the subject. Credibility comes from practicing what you preach, taking your own advice, living your process. This is role-modelling and when people observe you behaving in the same way you're inviting them to behave, and see the tremendous results you're getting, they can't help but trust you. Lead a performance culture from amidst, not from above. When you continue to practice leading with your passion rather than wishing for a more powerful position, you'll have increasing influence. More people will notice you. More people will listen to you. More people will follow you. And that's leadership. Page 6 of 11

7 Lead performance with people, not for them; inspire INITIATIVE, not compliance. People come to work and give a big chunk of their time and energy in exchange for a wage or salary. And, inherited from the industrial era, we still behave as though money is the greatest motivator. But it isn t. In Daniel Pink s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he implores us to accept that money is no longer the primary motivator for performance. What he distils from the research for us is that autonomy, mastery and purpose are far greater motivators for modern-day workers. Figure 4: Lead a performance culture with purpose, to inspire initiative in continually improving performance Initiative is born from vision, values, and dynamics. A clear vision of what high performance looks and sounds and feels like is the starting point for nurturing initiative. It will be different for each team; they will be pursuing high performance in specific results that are both strategically important to the organisation and directly relevant to the work they do. A crystal vision of high performance becomes a bigger reason to come to work each day. The values held by a team and its individuals form a set of guiding principles that will help the team refine their vision of high performance and set healthy boundaries for how they pursue that vision. Values will also vary from team to team. These values Page 7 of 11

8 remind the team and its members who they are, what they stand for, and how to behave, particularly when meeting the challenges that are part and parcel of pursuing high performance. The team s dynamics are the ways they interact and work together to get things done. It s how they speak to one another, resolve differences, stay focused on task, and express their thoughts and feelings. A good leader knows how to observe a group s dynamics, feed it back to them, and intervene to keep them in a state of awareness and ownership of how they collaborate. When you are leading teams toward high performance with a clear vision, resonating values, and healthy dynamics, then Initiative strengthens with purpose, power and progress. A compelling purpose to high performance is strengthened when your teams craft a vision that aligns to the values they hold. This purpose is the WIIFM (what s in it for me) that people can connect with personally and it s the Bigger Why they can connect with beyond themselves. A team s power to pursue high performance is strengthened when you draw out the values that a team holds dear and let these values guide you to sensitively manage the team s dynamics the way they work together to pursue their shared purpose. When we focus on how the group works together, rather than getting caught up in what they re working on, it helps the team strengthen their autonomy. When the team exercises their autonomy, their sense of progress is heightened and this fuels the fulfilment of their vision of high performance. As they face the challenges that come with any high performance (and worthwhile) endeavour, they develop mastery in the act of making progress that matters. Lead a performance culture where people own the journey to high performance. When you lead teams to own their journey toward high performance, their initiative will flourish. Their sense of autonomy and purpose and mastery will become a reinforcing loop that brings them so much more satisfaction in coming to work each day. Page 8 of 11

9 Lead performance with process, not content; facilitate IMPLEMENTATION, not activity. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. We ve all heard this proverb. And it s at the heart of good performance leadership. Don t measure performance for people, but rather teach and guide them how to do it for themselves. Hold the space for them to implement, hold their attention to the process, and hold their hands as they practice. But don t hold the decisions about what to measure. As Peter Cook explains in The New Rules of Management, it s now a priority to create an implementation culture, where teams commit to projects that matter, where their results matter more than how much activity they re doing, and where finishing something well is more critical than delaying for perfection. Figure 5: Lead a performance culture with process, to facilitate successful implementation of performance measures Implementation depends on systems, methods and projects. The support for implementation of performance measurement, to reach high-roi targets, includes the people, frameworks and environments that are geared toward helping teams succeed. The people are advisors and champions and peers and doers. The frameworks are models of how performance measurement fits with strategy design, reporting, and performance improvement. The environments are spaces that Page 9 of 11

10 help people think, talk and create without the distraction of their usual work. The methods of performance measurement work best when packaged into a logical system of techniques that can be followed by any team, to measure any part of the organisation. The logical system of techniques needs to be practical so it s easy to implement, it needs to be rigorous so it reliably produces meaningful measures, and it needs to be engaging so people enjoy implementing it. Project-thinking is the fastest way of getting great measures implemented. There will be projects to develop new measures, to use existing measures to reach high-roi targets, and to refine or realign measures as priorities or strategy changes. These projects will happen at all levels in the organisation, from the executive level to the shop floor. Implementation is more successful when discipline, drive and delivery come together. Successful implementation of performance measurement essentially means that teams create and use measures that help them reach meaningful and high-roi targets. When teams know the methods for how exactly to create measures that do this, and they have the right people and frameworks and environment to support them, they will more easily find the discipline to stick with something that at first doesn t fit their idea of their real job. With continual practice at the methods of measuring performance and reaching targets, and where this practice is chunked into concise projects with motivating milestones, implementation becomes a game. And playing performance measurement as a game means teams can sustain a stronger drive to pursue high-roi targets. The reward for playing any game is the win at the end. And the win for performance measurement is knowing you ve delivered a big ROI by measuring worthwhile results and removing the constraints on those results. Lead a culture that relies on itself to perform, not on you. Performance measurement, and the act of routinely reaching high-roi performance targets, are capabilities that should be as much a part of doing business as setting strategy, managing the finances, and doing the core business. It can t be outsourced. As performance leaders, it s our responsibility to embed this capability to continually measure and improve within our organisations, so they can reach goals sooner and with less effort. Page 10 of 11

11 About the author Stacey Barr Stacey Barr is a globally recognised leader in organisational performance measurement. She has been leading with passion rather than position for her entire 20-year career in performance measurement. She leads teams at all levels in organisations. She leads a global community of performance measurement practitioners. She leads a team of independent performance measurement consultants. She s has achieved a rare level of mastery as a performance measurement professional. All Stacey s work in leading people to and through performance measurement helped her discover the endemic struggles with measuring business performance, and the bad habits that cause them. She created PuMP, a deliberate performance measurement methodology to replace the bad habits with techniques that make measuring performance faster, easier, engaging, and meaningful. And she helps performance measurement professionals master PuMP and lead performance from within their own organisations. Stacey is author of Practical Performance Measurement, publisher of the Measure Up blog, and her content appears on Harvard Business Review s website and in their acclaimed ManageMentor Program. Discover more about Stacey and practical performance measurement at Copyright Feel welcomed to or print this white paper to share with anyone you like, so long as you make no changes whatsoever to the content or layout. Disclaimer This white paper is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute specialist advice. Be responsible and seek specialist advice before implementing the ideas in this white paper. Stacey Barr Pty Ltd accepts no responsibility for the subsequent use or misuse of this information. Page 11 of 11