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Organizational Measurement and Feedback Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)

Guest post by: Jim Clemmer

Article Overview: Get teams to develop their own measures. Make sure they're broad, balanced, and simple. Get the measurement points as close and as immediate to the activities being performed as possible. Move your team and organization to a 360-degree performance feedback system - starting with you. 360-degree feedback involves gathering data and performance perceptions from the people reporting to you, the people you serve in the customer/partner chain, your suppliers, and the manager(s) you report to. Your role in helping others on your team move to this approach, is that of a coach. You will provide your performance feedback as one of the many sources for your team and individual members.

Organizational Measurement and Feedback Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)

"Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than the willingness to see one's equation written out." - George Santayana, American philosopher, poet, and novelist

Get teams to develop their own measures. Make sure they're broad, balanced, and simple. Get the measurement points as close and as immediate to the activities being performed as possible.

Move your team and organization to a 360-degree performance feedback system - starting with you. 360-degree feedback involves gathering data and performance perceptions from the people reporting to you, the people you serve in the customer/partner chain, your suppliers, and the manager(s) you report to. Your role in helping others on your team move to this approach, is that of a coach. You will provide your performance feedback as one of the many sources for your team and individual members. But your main job, is to help your team and its members gather, understand, digest, and act on the feedback they get from their customers, partners, and anyone reporting to them.

Be careful of using market share or competitive indicators too heavily. You could be making great gains in a shrinking market. A high performing leader often doesn't really care what competitors are up to. He or she is too busy blazing new trails, developing unconventional product extensions/uses, or opening up new markets. Competitors warrant attention and study to ensure that your company isn't falling behind in key areas, or to figure out how to exploit their weaknesses.

But too much attention to competitors keeps our focus inside traditional approaches and old (likely outdated) market models. Our company then becomes defined and bounded by industry standards. If it came down to a choice between studying, keeping up with, and trying to outflank our competitors, or knowing our current and potential customer needs so well that we can anticipate market changes and new market opportunities, choose the latter.

Benchmarking can be a powerful measurement and improvement tool. This involves finding competitors, processes, or functions that you can use as a point of comparison and learning. Here are a few keys:

Get outside your industry and find comparable processes or functions that are many times more effective than yours.

Benchmarking isn't "corporate tourism"; you benchmark a process, function, or organization with your own set of measurements, process maps, and the like. You're there to compare and learn, not visit and poke around.

Send out the teams that will be making the improvements and changes.

Exchange information with the companies you're benchmarking so you can both learn.

If you're just starting on a rigorous, planned organization improvement effort, don't benchmark yet. You're not ready. You need to have well trained teams, clear process maps, and core measurement data before you can effectively compare yourself with anyone else.

Have someone study and become an expert in benchmarking, hire a consultant, or use a well-proven approach to benchmarking.

Start small and grow the scope of your benchmarking with your experience.

When our son Chris was eight, we always knew exactly where we stood with him. He had two notes. One said "I love Mom/Dad" and the other said, "I don't love Mom/Dad." These were posted on the bulletin board in his bedroom according to what he felt we'd earned at that moment. Eventually, we convinced him that love was unconditional. But the example of highly visible and transparent measurement is right on the mark. Too many people in organizations (and relationships) spend a lot of time trying to read mixed messages, or figure out what's being measured (and valued) and why.

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  Feedback or look ahead?
  Measurement Traps
  Help Me Keith: My Feedback Makes People Defensive!
  Improvement Planning Infrastructure and Process
  Strategic Measurements Guide Change and Improvement
  Take control of projects with PMP certification
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  Just Because You Are "Listening" Doesn't Mean Your People Feel "Heard"
  Organizational Visioning Pathways and Pitfalls
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  Social Media Measurement Made Simple
  The Value of Feedback

Article Tags: leadership
Referred by: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com



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Re: How Important is Feedback in eBay? - Feedback is VERY important to me when purchasing on eBay and similar sites. If they don't have several transactions and a 100% feedback (or close to it) then I most likely will not purchase from them.
Patent information - I'm also interested in Part 2. Thanks.
HRPreneur - Hi everyone, I am new to the forum and I recently started my own Human Capital (HR) consulting firm called HRPreneur Inc. HRP focuses on making human capital a strategic differentiator for SME's. Below is a summary about HRP; Who We Are: HRP is a Human Capital consulting firm with 30 years of experience that becomes an extension of your company by providing a full array of services to help you create a highly engaged workforce focused on achieving strategic results in order to build a long lasting great company! Mission: HRP provides small and medium sized businesses a Strategic HR Business Partner to increase employee engagement, resulting in cost savings, increased productivity and results at an affordable rate! Vision: To inspire and warrant SME's reach their full competency! Cost Effectiveness: We provide over 30 years of experience at a fraction of the cost at a strategic executive HR business level You will save between 50% to 60% in costs per year on salary, bonus, benefits, training, office space alone We will provide you additional cost efficiencies through our services Services: • Strategic Human Resources Planning • Organizational Redesign • Change Management • Organizational Culture Development • Employee Engagement Programs • Leadership Assessment and Development • Compensation Design • Talent Acquisition • Assimilation and On-Boarding • Performance Management • Talent Management & Succession Planning • Human Resources Due Diligence • Human Resources Audit • Full Service HR Outsourcing
Patent Process - Interesting to hear your experiences with the patent process - what's Part 2?
Subject Line Etiquette - For myself, it's not so much "etiquette" as common sense. If you're emailing someone with a business offer or to strike up a relationship, you do not put "Hello" or "Hi" or something cryptic in the subject line. You make it clear what your email is about - just as you would on a message board. So instead of "wff" for example, the guy who emailed me a couple of days ago should have said, "Feedback on Your WFF Article" - so that I would have known what it was about without having to look at it and try to think...


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