Top Performers Need Purpose and Plan

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Top performers want to belong to an organization with purpose and a plan.  In a survey done to evaluate what employees value most in an organization; the number one quality cited was the “feeling of being in on things”.  It wasn’t a higher salary or time off employees wanted but rather the sense they were engaged in meaningful work. 

Work is more fulfilling when it’s building towards something that’s growing and expanding.  Top performers in an organization want to know the game plan and they need to see how they’re contributing to it in a meaningful way.

It’s not uncommon for a disconnect to exist between the purpose and plan in the mind of the business owner and that of their employees.  The leader often “assumes” his people know where the business is headed because he’s shared that vision.  The biggest problem with communication though, is the illusion that it has taken place.  And that problem is especially true in a growing organization as the complexity of communication grows exponentially with each new employee. 

This reality drives home the need for every leader to ‘over-communicate’ the purpose and plan for the organization.  Ideally that message is being delivered and reinforced on a quarterly or even monthly basis.  Helping employees stay focused on that vision will go a long way towards insuring they stay connected and have the feeling of being engaged they desire.

Key to Performance Management is Accountability

The key to performance management is accountability.  Accountability requires each person in the organization to be able to point to what they have personally done to move the organization closer to its preferred future.

Holding individuals accountable for results is what brings discipline to a culture.  A focus on results that matter is what gives individuals the guidepost they need to make daily decisions about how they use their time.  The single biggest obstacle for every employee is the plethora of competing priorities they face every day.

Determining results that matter requires us to be clear about expected outcomes and engaging individuals in defining what it will take to accomplish those outcomes in a detailed Action Plan.  An accounting of progress against the Action Plan needs to happen on a monthly basis ideally using a consistent, transparent process for creating and sharing monthly Progress Reports.

Monthly Progress Reports provide the accountability every individual needs to stay on track with their performance.  Time spent between a manager and their direct report reviewing monthly Progress Reports can be focused on problem solving, evaluating resources and making course corrections.  Everyone in the organization needs to be able to connect their daily work with the long term goals of the company.  Although it may initially feel like another ‘to do’ on a long list, that accountability is actually the key to performance management.

Employees Favor a Metrics-Oriented Culture

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Well designed metrics strengthen performance by improving morale, promoting accountability and encouraging creativity.  The key is identifying measures that provide relevant information which can be used to guide and modify activities and behaviors.  Well designed metrics provide insight for decision making but there is a point of diminishing returns.  As Theodore Levitt observed, “The more abundant the information, the less meaning it will yield.”  

Well designed measurements in an organization benefit employees in several ways:

1. Measurement is good for morale: it may seem contradictory, but people want to know what is expected of them and they want to know how well they’re performing. Quantifiable measures give employees reliable feedback in a consistent way.

2. Measurement promotes accountability & transparency: even the best performers will tell you they do better when they know their performance is being monitored and measured. It enables them to identify issues and make changes before problems get too big.

3. Measurement promotes creativity: in an odd way, metrics actually promote learning & creativity, because an individual can try new things and determine whether or not they’re working and how they might need to be tweaked.

Creating a culture of measurement is an important part of any business strategy and every role in an organization can be enhanced by attaching meaningful and applicable measurements.  

Sales Process Critical to a Successful Strategic Plan

At the heart of every good strategic plan is a well conceived and diligently executed sales plan.  After answering the question, “why does this company exist?” a strategic plan answers the question “how big do we want to grow?”  But identifying the revenue goal is only the first step of the planning process.

Once you’ve identified your overall revenue goal, the key to a successful sales plan is a break-down of the sales process.  This requires an analysis of past sales data to determine your success rate at each step of the process including:

1)     Number of initial contacts needed to create desired number of opportunities.

2)     Percentage of opportunities that will develop into proposals.

3)     Percentage of proposals that will successfully close.

Understanding the success rate of each step enables you to set goals around the weekly and monthly activities that advance each step of the sales process.  If your revenue goal dictates you need ten sales a month at $80,000 each, and you average a 50% success rate on proposals, your plan needs to call for a minimum of 20 proposals per month.  This analysis continues with each preceding step to identify the activity level needed to create the desired outcome.

Ultimately the key to a successful strategic plan is the inclusion of a detailed sales plan which breaks the sales process into manageable and measurable incremental steps.  

Avoiding the Overloaded First Quarter Plan

Albert Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”  Yet why do we tend to load our yearly planning with a massive amount of first quarter projects?  The tendency is natural because at the beginning of the year everything seems “urgent” and “important”.  In reality there is an order to the prioritization of projects and careful planning now will prevent the feeling of failure and being overwhelmed later.

You might remember the concept from Algebra called “Order of Operations” which says that certain math functions in an algebraic equation have to happen first (such as those in parenthesis!)  The same is true with critical tasks and projects in your business which have a natural flow based on available resources including time, people, and money.  In reality most of us can only successfully handle two or at most three major projects/initiatives in a quarter with a maximum of nine a year.

Engaging your team in the process of scheduling and prioritizing these projects is critical because they will live with the deadlines.  In this context, we’re looking at initiatives that extend beyond day to day and would typically have significant capital and expense budgets associated with them, and take multiple months to complete or may be significant one-time projects that provide additional capabilities or capacity.  A helpful visual to use in planning discussions is a circle divided into four quadrants representing each quarter.  While discussing timing on these projects, also identify a break-out of the 5-7 major milestones that occur within the project.  This can help to identify the best sequencing and overlapping of initiatives.