A System to Bridge From Ability to Performance
Many excellent companies focus famously on results. GE, Emerson, and others have been brutal proponents of "perform or out" for people and business units alike. A downside: sometimes such a focus on results alone has driven managers to manipulate results to ill effect. But some organizations (Toyota is a proponent) derive excellent results from their ability to discover and implement effective task processes, as outlined in the Sejits and Latham review above.
GP Deltapoint is working with clients to implement systems to increase task ability, with the goal of driving performance steadily but solidly upwards.
The first step in this is similar to a standard Goal Deployment whereby overall organizational goals are translated down annually to individual actions that are numerically linked to those top measures. Then comes a translation of key processes throughout the company to lower level processes at the individual or small-team level of responsibility. This is done using simple scoring matrices in a team environment, backed up by analysis and data. Those few lower level processes that are tightly linked to top level goals and are not currently steady and predictable, are deemed critical and thus worthy of special attention.
The second and crucial step is to manage and monitor the standard work that is done in each of the lower level critical processes. If performance falls behind in a minor process, its routine steps and guidances are reviewed and revised as is the learning that has taken place around those steps.
These two steps taken in an annual systematic cycle link top goals to the ability to complete tasks in the most appropriate ways and then link the task performance in turn back to aggregated performance via the micro measures of each critical step. This gives us what Latham seeks: "The assignment of ambitious goals with the means to succeed".
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