Archive for July, 2009

Close Escape Hatches

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Close escape hatches. Whenever you challenge your team to test its performance, you are likely to encounter resistance from some members. Quite frequently this resistance will not be presented directly at the start of a job assignment or project but will begin to emerge subtly only after a work effort is well under way and the performance pressure begins to build.
Closing escape hatches means anticipating the types of excuses and rationalizations you are likely to encounter for the team’s failure to achieve its goals and eliminating these excuses well before they have an opportunity to delay or derail a project.
One of the best methods for closing escape hatches is to have your team play the role of devil’s advocate and for each stage of anticipated project identify the following:

  • • The types of problems or roadblocks it is likely to encounter.
  • • How these roadblocks or problems might affect the success of the project.
  • • The types of actions that could be taken to prevent these problems from occurring or to get around them after they’ve occurred.
  • • An agreement regarding when and how you will alert each other to changes that could affect progress on a project.

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Management Strategy: Challenge the Limits

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Raise the bar. This tactic involves raising the bar, that is, setting more difficult performance standards.
In my consulting practice I frequently encounter managers who say that they’ve made efforts to raise the bar for their teams but have seen few payoffs. Upon closer observation, these failures can always be traced to one of these factors:
• The manager’s message that the team must raise its performance level wasn’t credible. This manager is like the angry parent who, upon receiving a poor report card from his child, issues vague threats that “this better not happen again,” only to forget entirely about the incident until next time it occurs. The child, knowing the game well, learns to lay low until the entire situation blows over and things return to normal.
• The new performance expectations were unilaterally presented by the manager with no input from the team.
• The new performance standards were too vague or addressed performance factors that were well outside the team’s control.
• The team felt that the manager’s new performance standards were completely unattainable.
• The manager created consequences that were at odds with desired performance.

To overcome these roadblocks, consider these two steps. First, dramatically raise your expectations on a few key performance measures. Focus your efforts on the vital few performance areas most important to your teams survival.
Second, select performance goals that can be measured. The performance goals you select should include a definite time frame, focus on discrete performance areas, be quantifiable, and be worded in such a way as to be relatively free from ambiguity. If you aren’t sure whether your performance goals meet these criteria, ask your team and a trusted associate to help you troubleshoot them.

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Overcome Inertia Strategy

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Strategy: Overcome Inertia

Benchmark your team’s performance against other teams in¬side your company or other organizations. Toyota executives recog¬nized that to make the transition to luxury cars, they had to first show their employees the more demanding customer requirements of the luxury car market. To drive home this point, they transported busloads of employees to the Nagota golf course and encouraged them to examine closely the Mercedes, Porsches, Jaguars, and BMWs in the parking lot.

By encouraging the examination of everything from paint finishes to metal frames, Toyota made a very eloquent statement about the performance jump that was needed to produce a car of comparable quality.
Remove yourself as a buffer. If a team doesn’t seem committed to change, it may be because members have been insulated from exposure to performance problems. If you find that you are being overly protec¬tive of your team, try the following tactics:

  • Let your team hear directly from your customers about the need for performance improvement. This may require meetings with your customers, visits to customer sites to see firsthand the difficulties customers are having with your products or services.
  • Show your team the result of performance problems. The production manager of a manufacturing company accomplished this by taking engineering and production people through his shop’s quarantine area (the area reserved for defective products) and then explaining the amount of money that was being lost through these defects.

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