next level performance . .
High-performing teams are committed to continuous improvement. They set challenging goals at a new level leaving Team Leaders facing with the question - "How do I help my team stay motivated to push ahead when things are going well?"
Many Team Leaders and operational supervisors are promoted into leadership positions following a successful and well-regarded contribution in a technical/operational role. Our experience is that the development path in many companies does not provide adequately for this group. They are not always provided with the leadership development foundation to build confidence in tackling performance improvement in new ways.
During a team workshop looking at continuous improvement, people=positive™ gives team leaders experience in using tools they can then use back in day-to-day business with their team. We work with teams to help them find the 'imperative' to fuel that ongoing motivation. In this interactive workshop we explore the 'conversations' that impact on performance. We look at the 'panoramic' view from the stakeholders' perspectives and help individuals find new insights into their customer's world. We use structured creativity to make sure that engagement and innovation is encouraged.
Individuals leave with a clear understanding of their role in delivering success and with a renewed commitment to measuring their progress. The team leaves confident in knowing where it is going and how it plans to get there.
'Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.'
Miguel de Cervantes
Newsletter article – Sep 2009 – ‘Winning Tenders’
No prizes for second place
Steve Howe - Lead Consultant people=positive™
Long-lens sports journalism and high definition television give us the chance to look into the eyes of a competitor who comes second – the pain, the disappointment, despite years of training and preparation, are evident for us all to see.
They may have missed glory by a fraction of an inch, but it might as well be a mile – history doesn’t remember those who come second.
So it is with major commercial bids and rather like the Olympics it’s four years or more before the opportunity to win big time presents itself again.
Delivering a contender to the start line at the peak of their powers is the objective of all performance coaches and people=positive™ is showing organisations how to develop bid-winning fitness in their teams.
A major commercial bid process is rather like a hurdles race where the hurdles get taller and taller and the tallest - a test of convincing personal and team behaviour, comes just before the finishing line. This final barrier to success in the form of a behavioural assessment workshop is becoming increasingly attractive to clients clutching billion pound contracts, faced with a range of bidders whom they can’t get a cigarette paper between when comparing their commercial submissions. In short the behavioural workshop is the great tie-breaker.
What does a behavioural assessment workshop look like? I hear you ask. It may contain a mix of some or all of the following features.
· One or two days in length held at a neutral location.
· The requirement to work in collaboration with the client or competing bidders on a series of tasks.
· Developing a considered response to a client question on efficiency, safety, or training and development for example.
· A question and answer panel.
· Team problem solving exercises.
· Formal presentations.
· Observations made by the client and or their behavioural consultant.
The people=positive™ process for helping bid teams to clear this final hurdle is based high quality facilitation and aligning professional behaviour with the client’s expectations. Let’s be clear, this is no short term fix to just get through the behavioural assessment workshop, remember Ghandi warned us that ultimately “we leak the truth”. This is about coaching behaviour which enhances sustainability and business efficiency.
One bid team member involved in a two-day assessment workshop got it painfully wrong when talking to the client in the bar during an evening drink when he asked “are we still being assessed?”
Clients looking to place large contracts are not looking at behaviour from a welfare perspective or as the white knight of good manners. They know that employees who are treated with respect and who demonstrate respect for others are more fulfilled and creative in their work and are more likely to remain with their company – top of the list for client’s looking for management consistency over a four year contract.
Behavioural discipline has a much sharper edge to it as well, which ensures that groups explore all ideas and that collaboration, role definition and a results focussed approach are always evident.
None of this is new, but the people=positive™ approach to coaching teams in such behaviour is.
The approach uses a selection of exercises which allows the team to understand the client’s culture and recognise where they are currently aligned and where they may differ. Later in the process the team agrees and defines their company’s “diamonds” in relation to the contract on offer. Getting agreement on such fundamentals at an early stage goes a long way to ensuring a smoother passage in the behavioural workshop where priorities can be explored and disagreements highlighted.
As a client recently said after their behavioural workshop: “We received excellent support at short notice from people=positive™. It was clear from the beginning of the project that their cross industry experience was going to be valuable, and they brought a number of new ideas to the table. This, coupled with open and honest feedback and a tailor made approach to our specific project, delivered a really successful outcome for us.”
The fundamental priority for people=positive™ is to help organisations to win business. Our approach is working for an increasing number of organisations who have recognised that the lengthy and expensive effort of bidding for contracts deserves investment in coaching the teams who need to leap that tallest final hurdle.
Steve Howe
Lead Associate with people=positive™
KEEPING YOUR EYE ON THE ‘DASHBOARD’
– Performance leadership feature
Does great business performance happen by chance? There may be elements of luck at times, but just like in sports, having the right approach to developing ability, maximizes the chance of being successful. Putting that right approach into practice so it becomes part of a culture is the key. As Arnold Palmer once said, “the more I practice (the right approach), the luckier I get!”
It is pretty clear that certain practices make a huge difference. If you truly value simple but effective business processes like: Plan, Do, Measure, Learn, you have a good chance to continuously evolve and improve. But couple this with applying the value of Employee Engagement and you will have a winning formula.
Using input from over 13,000 employees in 210 business units, David Demski of Halliburton shows a definitive correlation between employee engagement leading indicators and business results lagging indicators. (Ref: SHRM Gulf coast conference, May 2009.) Also, Fortune Magazine has shown that shareholder return is significantly higher (than the average) in companies that are considered ‘the best companies to work for’.
The detail of these and other studies has reinforced what people=positive believes are important characteristics of successful organizations. We have created a simple ‘Performance Reckoner’ for any person or team to use to assess how well they practice the principles of good performance management based on 29 questions in five areas:
- Business Planning
- People Engagement
- Organization and Relationships
- People Support and Development
- Measurement, Review and Learning
The power of this tool will be where people at all levels provide a view, the results are debated and any areas for improvement are acted on.
Click on the Link below to try it out yourself!
Tony Mitchell
Business Performance Coach & p=p director.
Looking for a ‘FLAWLESS EXIT?
bridging the performance gapAs the emphasis in the north Sea moves towards decommissioning, our expertise in helping teams to achieve Flawless Start-ups has helped us to develop a powerful performance coaching based approach to achieving Flawless Exits.
In the last 20 years, people=positive™ has had the opportunity to be involved in some great development projects on and offshore in the Oil & Gas sector. In the early 90’s we worked with teams on the Gannet field development, on Curlew with the first ESP technology in the North Sea, on major re-development projects in the Brent field, Buzzard, Clair, and more recently further afield on Sakhalin Island with the start-up of processing facilities for Exxon-Mobil. During this time the focus was on ‘Flawless Start-up’ and in putting effort into bringing key people together as early as possible to avoid problems down the line when changes become increasing costly and time-consuming. We have gathered this best-practice and experience gained over the years into a way of delivering world-class execution we call smart-track Projects. We work with Project Leaders to design interventions at staged intervals throughout the project life-cycle, and provide performance coaching support to the various teams involved across the project. Getting the key relationships right is critical to success. It’s too late to have this re-confirmed in a Lessons Learned workshop: ‘ Failure is good. . . as long as it doesn’t become a habit.’
In the North Sea, the emphasis is now moving more towards De-Commissioning. We are already involved with a number of projects where the goal in now ‘Flawless Exit’. High performance remains the core goal, with safety seen as integrated and complimentary rather than separate and conflicting. The principles of smart-track Projects remain relevant, as teams of committed individuals take on responsibility for the final chapter in the life of platforms and installations that have been the backbone of our industry for many years beyond their expected lifetimes. Our intention is to provide support to these teams to ensure that these projects are safe and successful.
If you’d like more information on our work with major project teams across the globe, contact :
Barney Mackie, Director of Knowledge & Innovation bm@peoplepositive.com
growing gains’ . . . 2008
Performance coaching is a well established development tool for larger organisations, but it can also play a vital role in helping growing businesses to build solid foundations.
There is a perception that to justify investment in external performance coaching support, you need to be either a major player with a large number of employees, or to have run out of your own ideas. The truth is that coaching is now integral to many organisation’s performance culture. Our experience is that there are a large number of forward-thinking companies, currently experiencing significant growth, who recognise the value in taking time-out to make sure that they are building a sustainable foundation on which to build their growing business.
At people=positive™, we work hard at helping to ‘make the complex simple’. We’ve built a strategic planning toolkit that works as well for a small group of directors starting up a new technology business, as it does for a medium-sized enterprise about to make a significant move into a bigger global market. The principles of engaging people in making informed choices about what to do now in order to influence the future are not directly correlated to how much office space you occupy. In fact, many senior executives in large multi-national organisations are focused on how to get people personally connected to a strategy that sometimes appears only to be relevant to ‘head-office’ and senior management.
We know that taking a Performance Pit-Stop has impact on day-to-day business and it needs to add value to the business. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to listening well and asking really good questions. Very often, people are so close to issues and day-to-day activity that it takes someone with an objective viewpoint to ask the apparently ‘obvious’ question that everyone else assumes has an equally obvious answer. With sensitive facilitation and creative processes, exploring these questions can be extremely rewarding. When a team works together on topics that are important to the business, and goes about it in a way that is fun and stimulating, the team is also developing and growing. Relationships move forward and new opportunities appear that would have remained hidden unless the environment and ‘climate’ for discussion had not changed. Too often ‘teambuilding’ is seen as a separate activity rather than an integral aspect of performance development.
When we enter into a Performance Coaching relationship with any organisation, we’re committing to bringing all of the experience and resources of our global team to the table. The coach who works with you will agree up front with you what they can contribute to your development, and together you’ll design a framework – a rough Map that will become more detailed as the journey progresses. At all times, we’re centred on your needs. That doesn’t mean that we won’t challenge you, or ask you to support your ideas with more objective data etc, but it’s your agenda – not ours that is important.
So, if you’re creating change in your team or business right now, perhaps the time is right for some support in making that change stick.
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"Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things"
- Peter F Drucker
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How to make a workshop more than a talking shop
Principles for running an effective team workshop
Making it Clear:
- Spend time before the session clarifying the aims so that you can prepare effectively.
- Use an Advance Organiser to set out the process you will follow. This increases engagement.
- At the start, make sure you get agreement from all the participants about the purpose of the session.
Making it Consistent:
- Check that the issues are relevant to everyone not just one or two vocal individuals.
- Work in small groups to ensure input from the whole team
- Be disciplined with time
- Individuals with specific expertise can be used as champions for specific topics to help ‘keep the ball on the field'
Making it Personal:
- Right from the first invitation, encourage each team member to consider their personal contribution to the event
- Check-in using short time-outs where participants can work in pairs to share their experiences during the workshop, with partners presenting their thoughts back to the group
- Leave time to share commitments before leaving the session. Record these as follow-through actions.
Making it Stick . . .
- Capture key outputs in a clear and logical manner.
- Provide each participant with a record as a follow-through tool
- Send reminders to the team on a regular basis to ensure the commitments stay ‘live'.
Schedule a follow-up session to keep the momentum going. Make sure you add some fun – you'll get more buy-in!
Making it Stick! 2005
We are very proud to be associated with the Transocean 711's success in winning their “Rig of the Year” award. Part of the story has been creating a framework to sustain the focus on the conditions for success. We call it “making it stick.” Here are some simple steps that you can think about to help “make it stick” with your team:
- Involve your team in generating a detailed plan for success in the early stages of your journey, and make sure that this is revised and updated regularly. Have clear strategy for reviewing progress and adjusting strategy and tactics as you move towards your goals
- Develop a relationship with a performance coach to meet with the leadership team for regular “Pit Stops”, and to provide facilitation support as the team review their progress and adjust strategy and tactics. This “outside” support will help you to step back from the challenges and focus on your strategic leadership role.
- Make sure that different key team members are also involved in this forum by rotating attendance. This will ensure that the team remains engaged and that a variety of perspectives are reflected.
- Keep the wider crew involved by holding regular social and performance-focused events.
- The leadership team should always set the tone for success for other supervisors and team members, with consistently positive behaviour. An open and inclusive style will pay long-term dividends as individuals take personal ownership of the team's goals and plans.
Barney Mackie
bm@peoplepositive.com
Making it Stick 2006
Making the learning stick in training and development is a key factor in creating sustainable development within an organisation. The challenge is to create the climate for success – a climate where teams and individuals are ready, able and motivated to embark on their change journey. We always make a point of working with our clients to make sure that these conditions are present, for one simple reason: if they are not, then you can end up in worse shape than when you started!
So, when you are pulling together an organisational development programme, what exactly are the conditions for success? Conversely, and what is the danger of not having them present?
- Focus (or you will get confusion)
- The right skills (or you will get anxiety)
- Dealing with the right issues (or you will get frustration)
- Commitment form everyone involved (or you will get lethargy)
- A clear delivery plan (or you will get a false start)
Simple strategies for improving performance 2005
I want to share with you some of the great insights that Ferdinand Fournies outlines in his book “why employees don't do what they're supposed to do…. and what to do about it”
His work is based on over twenty-five years of research, which involved gathering information from over 25,000 managers. He started out by trying to answer the question: How do I motivate my staff? He concluded that there is no agreement on how to do this. In fact many experts believe that you cannot actually motivate someone – it has to come from within. I believe that. And I believe that what you can do is provide the right environment within which people are most likely to choose to become motivated.
So following this line, Fournies concludes two things:
Firstly he says that there are 16 reasons that cover virtually every eventuality of why people (employees) don't do the right things. I have grouped these into four main themes:
1. Purpose - Don't know what needs to be done
- Don't know why it needs to be done
- Don't know the relative importance
2. How - Don't know how to do it
- They think your way will not work
- They think their way is better
- They think they are doing it
3. Barriers - There are obstacles beyond their control
- No one can do it
- They have personal limits
- They have personal problems
4. Consequences - They anticipate future negative consequence
- There are no positive consequences for doing it
- There are no negative consequences for not doing it
- They may be punished for doing it (well)
- They may get rewarded for not doing it
The second thing Fournies says is that most effective managers are fundamentally ‘friendly' towards their people. He is not talking about being their best friends, but about having a respectful, open and friendly working relationship with people. It's all the little things that effective managers do that build the trust and respect of their employees.
To finish up: If a person isn't doing what you need them to do, you can have respectful and open conversation with them and use the above list to find out why. Then you can focus on correcting the specific problem(s) identified.
There is a lot more in the book itself, but hopefully this snapshot has given you the basics of a useful tool that you can get out and start using.
Tony Mitchell
tm@peoplepositive.com
Experiential Learning – more than just a load of old planks
Barney Mackie – Director of Innovation
With over 30 years of experience at the forefront of designing and facilitating experiential tasks, one thing we have learned is that when you design the right task for the right situation, the learning opportunity is huge. As the great American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."
At people=positive™, experiential tasks are central to the ‘discovery learning' process. They allow teams to put theory in to practice by experimenting with new ways of working together.
Whenever we use experiential tasks, we always remember to make sure that:
- They are totally relevant to the objectives of the programme.
- The learning is transferred back into the business context
- Everyone in their own special way has a contribution to make.
- They are designed to be sensitive to cultural, physical and gender differences.
We are very passionate about the challenge of designing new tasks to keep our approach fresh and ‘alive'. Watch this space because 2005 will see even more innovation.
Eastern Wisdom 2006
There are some great lessons in the success of our work with Exxon Neftegas in Korea.
For the last 9 months people=positive™ has been involved in facilitating a series of planning workshops in Korea for Exxon Neftegas to support the Hook-Up and Commissioning Team involved with the Chayvo Onshore Processing Facility on Sakhalin Island. This massive site will produce oil and gas to supply the Russian Far East and international markets. With construction well under way, the objective of the workshops is to ensure that the Hook-Up and Commissioning Team successfully transfer and install all modules and deliver a flawless start-up for the processing facility.
The Vision: ‘World Class Project Execution – Commit Yourself!'
A joint team from Engineering, Construction, Commissioning and Start-Up has been working together to create the best conditions for success – including an integrated schedule that will keep the process on track. Our role in these 3-day interactive workshops, has been to develop the team, introduce working processes and help to sustain momentum and energy. The last workshop held in Busan, South Korea, included a trip to the HHI shipyard in Ulsan where the huge modules were in the final stages of fabrication prior to being shipped on barges to Sakhalin. Video cameras were to create video-diaries of the tour around the modules to capture any observations that would help to prepare the team better for their arrival on-site in Chayvo.
The keys to the success of these interventions have been:
- Early involvement of all parties in the process.
- Strong, listening leadership from key players across the integrated team.
- A clearly focused agenda prepared well in advance.
- A balance between reflective and active sessions during the programme.
- Interactive and visual processes to bring the subject matter to life.
- Quality recording of the outputs and flow of the workshops to ensure robust follow-through.
Barney Mackie
bm@peoplepositive.com
