We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit

Aristotle (384BC – 322BC) summed up perfectly the reason why so many improvement initiatives fail; it is because they are just that, initiatives.

I once joined a company where one senior manager repeatedly used the phrase “keep taking the aspirin”. When, after a short while, I asked what he meant he explained that the culture in the business was akin to having a thorn in your foot and, instead of removing the thorn, repeatedly taking aspirin to dull the pain. Some years later, in a different organisation, the Quality Manager complained “we never have time to do the job right, but we always have time to do the job twice”.

#3 in How do we create a High Performance Culture?

So we agree that KPIs are important and they need to be used correctly. They need to be owned, but how ?

How often does a boss tell (or maybe ask!) someone to do something? How often does a boss ask someone, ”What do you actually do?”

Defining KPIs is very much about understanding what people do to achieve their objectives, targets etc. as required by the strategy communicated from above. Once this is understood a practical metric for the KPI can be defined and a source of reliable data is identified or created. Do this for the small number of activities critical to a person job and you are on the way to success!

Try my new game, find the leadership!

I have spoken to a number of people recently where the term ‘change management’ has been mentioned. I found the image above on Google and it is consistent with a number of such images.

In my 10 year corporate life at DuPont I was on the receiving end of three change programmes. They were much the same thing, new name, new consultants, and none of them delivered the results. All were process lead and while culture and leadership got a mention no fundamental behavioural changes were noticeable amongst the leadership teams so nothing really changed.

Targets That Are Shoulding You in the Foot

How do you feel when you hear the word ‘target’ at work? Nervous? Anxious? Excited? Motivated? Competitive? That’s the funny thing about targets: we often have an emotional response to them, based on whether or not we believe we can meet them. Is that healthy?

Some targets trigger anxiety and feeling not good enough. It’s hard to be creative, and patient enough to find real and lasting performance improvements, when we feel anxious or we like a failure because we’re not already performing at target.