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Performance Principles™
Performance Principles is an e-letter written by Eric Herrenkohl that focuses on creating the business you want by building the organization you need. This is copyrighted material. However, you can copy, reprint, or forward these newsletters in their entirety so long as any use is not for resale and the following copyright notice is included intact: Copyright © 2010, Eric Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl Consulting. All rights reserved. www.herrenkohlconsulting.com, 610-658-9790.
Why Growth Leads to Regret
Some people say they aspire to live life with no regrets. Yet it is impossible to grow and develop in your life and career and not have some regrets.
When you develop as a leader, you might regret that you did not have the maturity and courage to lead earlier in your life. If you have recently done meaningful work, you might regret that you did not take advantage of such opportunities when you were younger. Today you realize what is really important in life, and may regret that you spent so much time in the past pursuing things that have no lasting value.
In all of these examples, our regret is a function of our personal development. We make progress, we gain perspective, and with our new perspective, we also gain some regrets.
Performance Principle: Regret is a natural part of development. It can be a positive sign of growth rather than a negative indicator of failure. Accept this and stop beating yourself up over things you did not or could not do in the past.
Questions to Consider:
- Where do you have regrets in your life and your career?
- To what degree are your regrets about things you wish you had done sooner or better or more quickly?
- Do you need to cut yourself some slack and realize that it was your hard work in the past that allows you to achieve at a high level today?
Involvement Creates Buy-In
A few years ago I participated in a capital campaign to raise funds for an organization’s building improvements. A fundraising consultant was hired to facilitate the campaign. One of his foundational principles was to involve as many of the organization’s members as possible in the fundraising process. People were tapped for both small and large jobs. Some people asked members for pledges. Others hosted informational meetings at their homes or invited people to attend these meetings. Some individuals did nothing more than create invitation lists. But most people were involved in some way in the capital campaign.
Not coincidentally, the campaign received widespread financial support from the organization’s members. The very act of being involved in the campaign created buy-in to the mission and a willingness to give financially.
Performance Principle: Involvement creates buy-in. If you want people to invest themselves in your organization, you must get them to take action in pursuit of your goals. It is the act of working with others toward a goal that causes people to identify with and support an organization. Here are two practical steps you can take to foster involvement that creates buy-in.
First, explain to people HOW the work they already do is important to the larger mission of your organization. Help them to “connect the dots” between their work and the organization’s goals. Many people don’t understand why their work is important. When they do, they take a greater sense of pride and ownership in what they do.
Second, find specific tasks at which individuals excel and ask them to teach and coach others on their approach. One person on your staff creates particularly effective sales presentations. Another does a terrific job diffusing tension with upset customers. A third has a particular knack for calling customers about overdue invoices and (nicely) getting the company paid. Each of these people has something to teach the rest of the organization. And, by involving them in teaching skills to others, you also help them to further buy into the company and its goals.
Questions to Consider:
- Are you creating buy-in by involving people in creating programs and making decisions?
- How can you cultivate greater support for your initiatives by involving people early in the process of creating them?
- How can you be more patient with people and give them time to make your ideas their ideas?
Delegation vs. Abdication
A friend of mine recently told me about her experience serving dinner to 50 teenagers in a summer camp. She was impressed by the cook’s ability to make a great meal for a large group using only volunteer help.
The cook planned, prepared and served a meal, while also delegating jobs to the various helping hands. Every once and a while the head cook would look up and say to her assistants, “How’s everybody doing?” Within a few hours the meal was cooked, served, cleaned up—a job far beyond the efforts of one person.
The entire evening was a great example of good management. No one person carried the brunt of all of the work and the volunteers had enough direction and freedom to get their jobs done. The head cook knew how to delegate responsibility for work without abdicating ownership of the overall project. This ability to be neither under-involved nor over-involved is critical for effectively leading a team.
Performance principle: Good managers delegate work without abdicating responsibility. Some managers want to do all the work alone, knowing they can do it better and faster. This works until managers become so overwhelmed that they “throw it over the cubicle wall” blindly hoping that the person to whom they have assigned the project gets everything done. Both extremes of over-involvement (do it yourself) and abdication (pray someone else gets it done) are unproductive. The best delegators stay aware of what their team members are doing while allowing people the freedom to get their work done.
Questions to Consider:
- As you think about your upcoming week, do you have a picture in mind for what each person on your team should be accomplishing?
- Are you checking in with people and essentially asking, “How’s everyone doing?”
- Have you taken time to make sure that you and your team are on the same page regarding goals, timelines, and deadlines?
Good People Need Good Systems
Since our move to Philadelphia about a year ago, my family has visited a number of churches. On one church visit, I dropped my one-year-old son off at the nursery where a very nice and professional woman was waiting there to receive him. Knowing the standard operating procedure for these types of situations, I waited for whatever would become the “claim ticket” for my son. But I was not given a wristband or any other kind of identifier. Instead, the woman said that she was very concerned about every child and would personally make sure that he left only with me.
I returned an hour or so later. My son ran to me, but no one checked to make sure I was his parent before we walked out of the nursery. The very nice and well-intentioned woman who had checked him in was nowhere to be seen.
This was a living example to me of the lack of a good system. The nursery volunteer was a great person who wanted to provide great service – but the situation was so busy and unorganized that despite her best intentions she could not do what she promised to do. What she needed was a system in which any individual could step into her place and deliver the same level of service she intended to deliver.
Performance Principle: Good people need good systems. Even the most gifted individual is limited in what he or she can do. Provide people with good systems, however, and you will see consistently better results. The right systems are tools that enable talented individuals to deliver great results, consistently.
Questions to Consider:
- What problems occur in your operation with regularity?
- What are the root issues behind these problems?
- Who are the right people to involve with you in creating a system for doing this activity correctly, ever time?
- What are the steps of this system?
Paying People for What They Know
A good friend of mine is a real-estate developer. He recently asked two contractors to bid on some work. The first contractor said the project was too complicated to bid and therefore he would only take the project on a ‘time and materials’ basis. In other words, he wanted to be paid for his time no matter how long it took to complete the job. The second contractor took a look at the work that needed to be done, offered a quick explanation of how he had solved similar problems in the past, and offered a fixed bid for the work. My friend hired the second contractor.
What was the difference between the contractors? Experience. The first contractor did not have the confidence to provide a bid because he did not have the experience to know what needed to be done. The second contractor had that confidence because of his previous experience. He knew what to do because he had done it before. In other words, the first contractor wanted to be paid to learn. The second contractor wanted to be paid for what he already knew.
Performance Principle: When you consider hiring or promoting someone, your job is to rule out the people who lack the experience to do the job. To do this, you need to find out what an individual has accomplished up to this point in his or her career. Ask people to describe for you in detail past accomplishments that are relevant to your open position. Listen carefully to their answers.
Individuals who lack first-hand experience cannot provide detailed, in-depth answers or a step-by-step description of how they solved a problem. Their answers are characterized by generalities and broad-brush statements.
In contrast, people with proven experience can describe their accomplishments in detail. They can give you an in-depth first person account of what they did, why it was important, and how they accomplished it. They are able to explain their personal role in creating these results.
Very few people have all the experience and accomplishments you would ideally like to have. But by following this approach to interviewing you will have a more realistic picture of the person you choose to hire. And this will allow you to obtain as much proven experience as possible in every person you bring into your organization.
Questions to Consider when promoting or hiring someone, you should know:
- What are their biggest accomplishments to date?
- What were the specific steps they followed to create those accomplishments?
- Why did they choose these strategies vs. other possible approaches?
