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