Posts Tagged ‘Performance’

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Getting the most from next generation workers (part 2)

Friday, February 18th, 2011

In part one, Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia presented two strategies for getting the best from NextGen workers: treating everyone as individuals, and keeping the job interesting and fresh. Here she raises two equally important challenges: creating a fast track, and giving quality performance feedback.

Create a Fast Track

Non-NextGens remember a world where gratification could be delayed. They may remember writing physical letters that were sometimes sent via ship overseas, using telephones with cords and dials and spending hours in the public library to find books and look up facts. In that world, supermarkets were closed on Saturday afternoons as well as Sundays and public holidays, homework was hand-written, and there was no internet, no text messaging, no Twitter.

We all recognise the world has sped up, and NextGens simply do not understand the need for things to take time. Email, mobile phones, Facebook, the internet, extended shopping hours, etc. all provide for a world where the pace of life is not constrained.

Add to that a belief that ability, not tenure, is what adds value to an organisation, and you get a generation of workers who expect to be fast-tracked if they perform. The traditional notion of putting in your time and being rewarded for tenure is just not something appreciated by NextGens; in their world meritocracy is what prevails, and all ideas are equal, whether they come from the senior most or junior most person; those whose ideas and performance merits it, should be rewarded, regardless of their tenure.

So, create a fast track. Deliberately steer high-potential employees towards a greater diversity or depth of experience than others and make it clear they are being fast-tracked. Also make it clear what the expectations are and what they will need to demonstrate in each of their fast-track moves to retain that status and fast-track momentum. The combination of clarity of performance measurement, expectation setting, and orchestration of the set of experiences should help foster great talent for the organisation! And because you are clear about the criteria, it will be a fair system even though some are fast-tracked and others are not.

There are definitely jobs where experience is highly valued and where career milestones may still be appropriate after fixed timeframes (e.g. two years as an analyst before becoming an associate, two years as an associate before becoming a manager, etc). We all know that in reality, some people will soak up what they learn and be highly competent in two years, and others could work there for five years and never be ready for the next step.

So, another way to structure this is to more clearly define the competencies and experiences that should be acquired in the job before moving up. This will provide a framework for directing people’s learning and attention to the key elements of mastering their role, as well as give them interim milestones to achieve along the journey, thus helping the NextGens feel they are making progress.

Figure 1: Fixed timeframes for career progression

Click to enlarge

Figure 2: Progression based on experience / competencies

Click to enlarge

Regular Feedback

Another side effect of the modern culture of instant gratification is that NextGen employees expect immediate feedback (and lots of feedback). Gone are the days of the annual performance review. And that’s probably a good thing. Regular, constructive, clear feedback is critical for developing top talent (as any professional athlete will attest to) and so the onus is on managers to make time to notice what is working and not working and to provide feedback as they observe something, and otherwise in regular one on one meetings. Performance reviews should confirm the items that have been raised and monitor progress, not become meetings where issues are surfaced for the first time.

Most people appreciate praise, and this can certainly be done publicly. Criticism is harder and so I would advise all managers to arm up on the latest techniques (there are numerous ones) for how to provide feedback, coaching, mentoring, and constructive criticism as well as develop action plans. Having a range of techniques in this arena is simply good management, and NextGen managers will become very skilled in using these for their employees. The key is to provide the feedback in a way that the person understands it, is able to effectively respond and takes action to improve.

Conclusion

NextGen staff are highly desirable and can make a difference in your team and organisation. To help them thrive and get the most from their efforts, I have suggested four practical tips:

  • Treat each person in your team in a tailored individual way
  • Keep work fresh and interesting for your staff
  • Create clear expectations of what constitutes outstanding performance and facilitate a fast-track for those who meet those expectations
  • Provide regular high quality feedback for people so they can learn from their job and achieve their full potential

Finally, the best overarching advice is to try to enjoy managing NextGen teams. It is an experience that can challenge you, help you see new ways of working and develop your repertoire of management skills. And I believe those who master NextGen management will be poised to be terrific leaders for the future.

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Edition 36: Business21C Summer stories with Helen Everingham

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Business21C Weekly is now available through the iTunes Podcast directory. To subscribe directly via iTunes, go to the Advanced menu in iTunes and select Subscribe to Podcast. Then paste in the following URL: http://www.business21c.com.au/podcasts/feed

Business21C Weekly is broadcast on Sydney’s 2SER 107.3 fm radio station at 9:00 am each Monday morning.

Today is the start of the Business21C Weekly “Summer stories”. We talk with Helen Everingham, coordinator of ‘The Centre Within’ and ‘Self-Esteem’ courses, which are designed to give you the tools and techniques to achieve what you want out of life. Why are such courses so useful to some people?  How effective have they been in helping people develop coping strategies, and how have the techniques in the courses helped Helen overcome personal personal challenges?

Helen first took Bert Weir’s ‘The Centre Within’ course in 1983 and has been teaching the course alongside him since 2003. She has experienced personal tragedy and loss and shares her experiences in dealing with trauma. She discusses why teaching others the techniques in these courses are so valuable for dealing with hardship and loss.

Helen’s vibrant personality comes through as she joins us in the studio to speak about her experiences teaching in communities all around Australia, especially in rural areas where there is high incidence of depression and suicide.

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Is your organisation what it says it is?

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Is your organisation what it says it is? How do you know? How do you let your customers know? Darrall Thompson, Senior Lecturer and Director, Teaching and Learning at the UTS School of Design, has explored the question from the educational perspective. Does it have applications for business?

Businesses trade on what they deliver to their customers, and on what they stand for, their values. And focus on values has become more intense. Perhaps it’s fall out from well publicised cases like the James Hardie asbestos scandal, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the levels of fraud and unethical dealings that contributed to the global financial crisis which continue to continue to emerge. Perhaps is it’s the ease with which customers can now communicate dissatisfaction via social media platforms magnifying the impact of small brand hiccup, and globalising and personalising larger scale disasters.

So, how does any organisation turn all the talk about values into something tangible and measurable by its various stakeholders?

It’s a question the education sector has been grappling with and Darrall Thompson, Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Design has had particular focus on the issue for the past eight years.

‘In the design school, challenging creative boundaries is a ‘risky’ thing to do, so we explored how the high level of risk taking, valued in graduates by the university can be constructively incorporated into the assessment criteria for student assignments, rather than marked down.’

The outcome, is a web-based software application, Re:view.

Originally designed to promote deeper learning, by engaging students with course assessment criteria, it’s finding resonance in the wider academic community and is being commercialised by UniQuest and digital marketing company, acidgreen, as an online assessment interface for educational organisations.

‘It’s proven to save marking time for teachers, increase ten-fold student engagement in work feedback and it has market potential beyond universities, for a myriad of selection and measurement applications, from staff recruitment and performance review, to business development.’

Thompson says as well as providing developmental feedback for students Re:view ‘helps academics focus on key assessment criteria in their subjects, to ensure students are being assessed according to development in the key course areas, grooming them to meet the needs of their future employers, or indeed, become great entrepreneurs.’

‘Ultimately, students will graduate with an official, longitudinal record of their performance in key attribute areas, over the duration of their course.’

In an employment environment that looks favourably on graduates with proven track records in a range of unmeasurables like creativity, innovation, versatility, adaptability, empathy with other cultures, communication skills, the potential for this measurement tool in the wider business world is still to be revealed.

Managing director acidgreen, Mike Larcher is investing in the commercial development of Re:view:

‘The benefits of Re:view are not limited to student learning and development, as the system also provides employers a means of measuring a graduate’s capabilities based on meaningful assessment. This creates enormous business world potential.’

CEO, Association of Financial Advisors, Richard Klipin, agrees.

‘When investors look at investing anything, they need to be sure they’re investing in real companies, with real people, that have realproducts, and it’s not just some esoteric idea that’s a bit out there,’ he says.

Klipin says, senior executives have this issue on their radar:

‘Their brand has to stand for something and their brand has to be consistent and authentic.

‘If you’re going to value a graduate attribute, it needs to be made explicit in the assessment process.’

Klipin says if Re:view can live up to its promises, it has real business potential.

‘We have report cards for kids at school and tertiary education, so having a system that allows a student and obviously academics and perhaps prospective employers to be able to assess and track and review, with the aim obviously of tracking performance and hopefully improving performance, has to be a sensible thing and a useful tool.’

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What goes around…

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Brandkarma sources value judgments from the crowd and uses them to depict whether companies are doing good or not. BP and Apple show how quickly things can change, reports Craig Davis.

If there is anything the Wikipedia generation knows, truth emerges from conversation. Social media provides a platform for that conversation, and Brandkarma is a platform for truth-finding around brands.

Brands live at the heart of the global economy and affect us all. We created Brandkarma to make it easy to see brands holistically and so that you can share your opinions about them whenever you’re on the web.

It works like this: you choose the brands in which you are interested from our list of hundreds – in this case, BP and Apple. You have your say, good or bad, flippant or serious. Mark your brand against our five ‘karma criteria’ – planet, customers, employees, suppliers and investors – as good, bad or somewhere in between.

What does an oil spill do to your karma?

The impact on BP's karma of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, April 2010

Our algorithm creates an individualised ‘brand flower’ for each brand: an aggregate of the socially assessed truth of the good, or bad, each brand is doing the world. The greener the petal, the more good karma. Black? Oh dear.

The brand stories that run across this page are clear. Pollute the Gulf of Mexico with the worst oil spill ever and you are unlikely to have many good things happen to you in the near future – the essence, surely of karma. On the other hand, produce a new category of product with excellent customer reviews and sell millions of that product within months of launch and karmic credibility flows your way.

iPad and Apple's brand karma

Karma ebbs and flows, as stakeholder sentiment changes

A brand’s karma, it seems, is a very fragile flower, blossoming tentatively in the warm glow of social praise; withering as soon as positive attention is withdrawn.

Of course, the interplay between most brands and their perceived karma is more subtle than the brutal parables of BP and Apple might suggest. But the growing and withering flowers driven by the will of the crowd show that there is no arguing about the fact that people attribute a karmic value to the brands they follow.

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Personal sustainability

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Sustainability has to be more than just a corporate buzzword, says Paula Drayton; it must be embedded deep within the individual.

What does the term ‘sustainability’ mean to you? Would you describe your ‘personal sustainability’ differently to your sustainability as a manager or leader? Does it mean something different again in relation to your family or community?

The term ‘sustainability’ is ill-defined and complex. To make it come alive, it must be related to the deeply personal: to the very way you live your life, from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment your head hits the pillow at night. In order to achieve that, I believe, the ideas behind sustainability benefit from a marriage with practical life coaching, giving individuals a truly practical approach to achieving sustainability in their lives, including in their work and organisations.

In recent years, sustainability has been quantified and rationalised as corporations, governments and institutions seek a means of benchmarking, measuring and monitoring performance. This economics-oriented approach presents a way to reduce current social and environmental issues to numbers and statistics – a neat way to compartmentalise and push these issues aside, away from hearts and home.

Sustainability has become anything but personal. And, if it is not personal, we as individuals, groups, communities, organisations and a global village are less inclined to do anything about it. Grassroots sustainability activism is usually motivated by real or perceived impacts on our personal lives: when people are touched by a threat to something they value, they are motivated to defend culture, rights, ecosystems, forests, threatened species and more. Rarely do we see that kind of fervent response or collective initiative within our corporate institutions, yet these bodies possess great power to effect real change in the world.

What more might we be imagining, creating and executing if our sense of sustainability was generated from deep within and aligned with our personal values and behaviours?

Coaching connects the personal and the political

Translating awareness of issues into action requires a different kind of intervention: a sustained, long-term one that works deeply in the area of an individual’s values, beliefs and passions.

Coaching helps to bridge the gap between behaviours and deeply held beliefs. It puts mechanisms in place to support new behaviours, offering individuals (the ‘coachees’) new perspectives and the drive and motivation to initiate ‘big ideas’. Reconnecting coachees with their inner wisdom, passion and purpose offers infinite potential, both for the coachees and for their impact on the community.

‘Sustainability Coach’ achieves this by developing in users a sense of optimism, using guided questions and affirmations to assess the coachee’s sense of personal sustainability.

Like the ‘Wheel of Life’, a popular coaching technique, Sustainability Coach has developed the ‘Sustainability Wheel’, which encourages users to explore various facets of life and career to determine current levels of satisfaction. The tool then invites users to reflect on the results and identify ways to improve their satisfaction ratings in the areas most important to them.

The role of setting goals as a tool for self-improvement has long been recognised. Master motivator Anthony Robbins said: ‘Goals are a means to an end, not the ultimate purpose of our lives. They are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction. The only reason we really pursue goals is to cause ourselves to expand and grow. Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it’s who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the most long-lasting sense of fulfilment.’

Sustainability Coach was created to take individuals, executives and organisations on a self-discovery journey – to enable the user to reconnect with his or her inner genius and with a personal sense of sustainability that motivates and inspires action for a better world. The potential for personal, local and global initiatives cultivated through focus and inspiration is limitless.

The eight elements of personal sustainability

There are eight elements and 24 subfactors that individuals use as a basis for reflection. If each of the test questions is read as a sequence, they could moonlight as a ‘sustainability affirmation’.

The eight elements of the Sustainability Wheel are:

  • wellbeing: your sense of physical and emotional health, the quality of your relationships and your actual and perceived quality of life;
  • engagement: the level of involvement you have with your life direction and its alignment with how you pursue your goals and dreams;
  • ecology: the relationship between you and your physical and social environments;
  • presence: your ability to be ‘in the now’ and to make decisions based on your sense of clarity, open-heartedness and open-mindedness;
  • intention: a course of action you choose to follow and the aims that guide you in such action;
  • connection: the relationships and associations that exist within your personal identity, with others and with the world around you;
  • abundance: your level of prosperity in terms of the supply of life’s necessities and wants available to you; and
  • career: your chosen pursuit; the progression or course of your working life.

Sustainability assessment

Start Now!

The Sustainability Wheel at www.sustainabilitycoach.com is free of charge to all users. Sustainability Coach refrains from telling users what to do to remedy a low score; instead, it encourages reflection and personal insight into why; into how an unsatisfying result may improve; and into how it might look and feel in the future. Coachees are offered a vast range of tools and resources dedicated to supporting their journey and deepening their understanding of the subject matter, including access to a coach. Any data collected by Sustainability Coach is treated in confidence and in strict accordance with their privacy policy.

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Dr Happy and Mr Percival

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

On Thursday July 15, the Business21C community was treated to a hugely entertaining, uplifting and enlivening double act: Dr Happy, aka UTS Adjunct Professor Dr Timothy Sharp, and his friend and inspiration Darren Percival, otherwise known as vocal artist Mr Percival. While Dr Happy appealed to the intellectual side of the audience, presenting well-researched and reasoned arguments for the practice of happiness in everyday life, Mr Percival just did it – giving the audience something to smile about there, then and afterwards.

Happiness is a choice we make everyday. It’s a matter of practice, active positivity, of looking for the bright side, of not settling for just OK. Happiness is not necessarily about optimal human functioning. It’s about thriving and flourishing despite whatever context you’re in. It’s about enjoying the good times, but getting through the bad times as well as you can.

Psychology has traditionally focused on fixing the negative – ensuring an absence of distress or anxiety, depression or other psychological problems. Positive psychology aims for better than well, to ‘play above the line’, in the parlance of Dr Happy’s Happiness Institute.

He believes that a key obstacle to many people’s happiness is ‘the tyranny of when…’ the addictive but destructive belief that ‘I’ll be happy when… I have more money, a bigger house, a better job, when I get that promotion, when I lose some weight, when I find the love of my life or [insert pretty much anything you like here!]’.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with aspiring to be and to have more, the problem is that many people never achieve their goals because they’re too focused on the future and not focused enough on the here and now; and even if they do achieve their goals, many then think of something else that they ‘need’ before they can really feel happy. Does that sound familiar?

Dr Happy has developed a new approach; an approach that involves getting happy first. The premise is that by creating positivity in the first instance you’ll be more likely to achieve your goals. And there’s even more good news; this idea is supported by well-conducted, valid and reliable scientific studies. It doesn’t just sound good, it actually works. The aim of the game, says Dr Happy, is to have at least three positive emotions or experiences for every three negative ones.

‘The greatest risk is not that we will aim too low and hit, but that we don’t aim at all, too many people stumble through life, wander along… do you want to live an okay life, stumbling across happiness every now and again, or do you want to create a great life, a meaningful and purposeful life, one one in which we connect with others?’

To add to all this practical advice, Dr Happy invited a special and inspirational friend, Mr Percival, a vocal artist of national renown, to provide the audience with practical experience in creating happiness – there and then.

Darren Percival has achieved an outstanding reputation in Australia as an artist, musician, vocal coach and jazz singer of talent, imagination and skill. With over twenty years of professional experience, he has worked as an entertainer, recording artist, singing teacher and innovator with resounding results. A childhood spent in Mexico inspired the canvas for Darren’s ‘spontaneous vocalisation’, and recording monthly cassette tapes for family and friends back home in Australia propelled his fascination with recording the human voice and being able to play it back.

The Business21C audience experienced live, first hand, the inspirational impact music and practical positivity can have on their lives.

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