8 Great Performance Tips from the Animals of the Serengeti

8 Tips from the animals of the Serengeti on how to navigate the Performance Landscape

Through their performance the animals of the Serengeti have survived their ever changing landscape for thousands of years, which is why we use the analogy of these animals to learn from in our Performance Landscape programme. The following are some tips from them as to how you can best navigate your organization’s landscape in these uncertain times.

• Be prepared to migrate to greener pastures and ensure that you have a giraffe seeing over the landscape and identifying the direction for the other animals – together with any threats.

• Encourage all of your staff to be elephants, not by feeding them junk-food, but by communicating with them. Tell them the journey they are going on and trust them to use their intelligence to help you along the way – and encourage them to communicate with you too.

• Then use your large elephant ears and listen. If you ask your staff to communicate with you and then ignore them it won’t be long before they stop communicating.

• Be honest – the migration is not going to be easy and you need everyone contributing if you are to succeed, but be realistic. If it is possible that they may not all survive the journey, tell them. If you lose their trust then you will not regain it.

• Get all of your departments to imitate the wildebeest, by joining together as a super-herd and all going with you on the same journey.

• Learn from the lions; use the competencies of your staff and do not become internally focused.

• Like the zebras, know what performance you are going to measure and make sure that all of your ‘elephants’ know it too.

• Identify your rhinos to implement any changes you need to make. They will have to be thick skinned and resilient – and the giraffe will need to make sure that they are going in the right direction.

To help you to communicate with your staff and turn them into intelligent elephants we have developed a workshop and a presentation, dependent upon the size of the audience, for your own training staff to deliver. These packages are designed to use your resources to best effect, as it is cheaper to download either of these than it is to use three days of time for a member of your staff to research and develop a programme of your own. This is based on you paying your trainers the minimum wage and you probably pay them more than that, making your savings even greater.

Find out more at the Performance Landscape website

That’s OK but not if it’s in my backyard!!!!

As people start to recognise the impact of the cuts in public service spending and the new Performance Landscape starts to emerge, their reaction is becoming clear. We are entering the period of, what I call the ‘NIMBY cuts’. The majority of people accept that the country is over-spent and heavily in debt and they support reduced spending to get the country financially viable again. That is until one of the cuts in public services affects them personally. There is a two year pay freeze amongst employees in public services and yet look at the industrial unrest that is occurring amongst council workers, BAA, the fire service and BA.

And we are all as bad. I find myself reading about any proposed cut and what I am really looking for is, ‘is this going to affect me?’ To this extent we are no different from the animals in the Serengeti. When a pride of lions start stalking a herd of zebra the whole herd is frightened and it is not until the lions go away, or they catch another zebra, that the herd relax. Even though one of the herd has been adversely affected the rest are okay and that is what we do, to a lesser extent. As soon as I realise that the proposed cut isn’t going to affect me then I stop reading.

It is human reaction to change and people need to understand that, which is why we are covering it in our new Performance Landscape presentation that is being released on Tuesday.

Government spin on public sector pensions.

In March the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) reported that 60% of people considered public pensions unfair. Now Gillian Hibberd, the strategic director of resources and business transformation for Buckinghamshire County Council has written about the myths surrounding public sector pensions. This is well worth a read at the People Management website.

The government is creating a paradox around pensions. In one breath they say that the nation is finding it difficult to afford state pensions and then they criticise public sector pensions, many of which the employee has been contributing to for many years. We should remember that before the landscape changed it was the poor performance of some private sector pension funds that hit the headlines. My personal view is of a clear strategy emerging from the government to generate a perception to all those not in the public sector that public sector workers have been living a well paid life of luxury, supported by exorbitant pensions. This strategy will assist the government as they introduce cuts in public service spending and then introduce legislation prohibiting key public sector workers from striking.

Are the public of this country really that gullible?

My invitation to speak at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)  performance management conference 12th October 2010

I’m really pleased to have been asked to speak at the CIPD performance management conference on 12th October. This has come about from me writing my letter ‘Excessive bureaucracy hinders performance management’ and I admire the CIPD for asking someone to speak who has written a controversial response to their research.

I was pleased to see a couple of supporting letters and also a challenging one from Nora Hutson, from Surrey Police, who I will be speaking with. She pointed out the risk-averse legal advice that is given to public sector organizations and I will be using the analogy of wildebeest to demonstrate how the new Performance Landscape can no longer support this approach. Often a dispute is resolved with a payment to the aggrieved employee, on the basis that this is the cheapest option, which does not take into consideration the effect this has on other employees. Word of what has happened spreads rapidly around any organization and has a demoralizing effect and can damage employee engagement.

Organizations delivering public services need an engaged workforce and one way to achieve this is for each organization to ensure that all of their employees have a clear understanding of the new landscape and how their contribution supports it. It also needs to be made clear what level of performance is expected from each individual and that the organization cannot carry passengers.

Posted by Alan

The ever shifting Performance Landscape

The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has warned the UK economy faces a “choppy recovery” and it will be “several years before the economy adjusts back to anything we can call remotely normal”.

It has also been reported that the Bank lowered its economic growth forecast and said inflation would stay higher for longer than previously forecast. It now expects the economy to grow by less than 3% in 2011, down from its previous forecast of nearer 3.5%.

This comes at the same time as the news that house prices are falling again and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has released a research finding that 32% of employers are planning to cut jobs in the next three months.

All of this means that employees will feel even less secure in their jobs. It would be a fair assumption that this insecurity would encourage employees to work harder, in order to keep their position and in the short term this may be true. However, because we are human beings, with insecurity come distractions from work, a possible unintended climate of fear and this all results in an overall drop in performance.

Although there are opportunities for organisations to streamline their operation and perhaps dispose of some of their under-performers there is an essential need for strong, ethical leadership. Good leaders can navigate their staff across this difficult landscape in four ways:

• by good communication
• by treating their staff with respect and fairness
• by providing an inspiring vision of the future
• by demonstrating their integrity

Authentic use of these four elements acquires the trust of your staff, which is essential for good performance. Finally, you need to provide your staff with an understanding of how their contribution is helping the organisation, in the new Performance Landscape, to achieve success. To help you with this follow the link.