Strategic Discipline Blog

Shannon Susko, author of 3HAG WAY, Metronome Effect, and Metronomics refuses to accept a customer who won’t participate in Daily Huddles with their organization.

Why? Because if your people don’t know what’s expected of them every day, how can you produce the results you want?

I’ve shared this quote before from Ralph Stayer former CEO of Johnsonville sausage, “Do the people in your company know how well they’ve done before they go home every night? People perform what they measure – help the performers to measure the “right” stuff.

The biggest obstacle to getting the performance you want in your organization, and retaining your team, is the lack of clear expectations.

RESPONSIBILITY

The responsibility for clear expectations begins at the top of the organization. Do you as CEO know your responsibilities? What are you demanding and expecting from your leaders, and they from their team?

It’s irresponsible for you to place the blame for a lack of employees, or failure to achieve goals on your people.

What gets inspected, gets respected. Any shortcoming in your organization is due to the lack of clarity, monitoring, and reinforcement you as the leader are doing/not doing.

Aubrey Daniels, Performance Management Consultant, and author of Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement, one of the best books every written-on employee performance, can go into any organization and immediately see what is being reinforced. He simply observes what people are doing. What they do during the workday is what is being reinforced.

Vic Dingus, a technical associate at Eastman Chemical Co, believes a company is always perfectly designed to produce what it is producing. If it has quality problems, cost problems, productivity problems, then the behaviors associated with those undesirable outcomes are being reinforced.

This is not conjecture. This is the hard, cold reality of human behavior.

If your organization is not getting the results you want, what’s the problem?

YOU.

You’re either not reinforcing the behavior you desire, you don’t know how, or you simply don’t care.

In far too many organizations it’s the latter. Everyone is so focused on doing the job, they never ask why the job isn’t being done to their expectations.

They blame people rather than the system.

PATH TO IMPROVEMENT

Want to begin changing your organization? Start with your own Job Summary Scorecard. What’s expected of you? Once you’re clear on what’s expected of you, move to the next person who reports to you. Create their Job Summary Scorecard, and make sure they agree, as well as understand what their expectations are. Move through everyone who reports to you, and to those who report to them, until you have clear expectations from everyone. Once you’re clear on expectations your daily huddles, weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings will be more meaningful. Everyone is clear on what to produce. You must also work on the company purpose, core values, strategy. Can your employees answer these two questions?

1. What should I be working on?
2. Why is it important?

Do you know the answer to these two questions? What percentage of your team knows these answers?

Take a survey right now. Walkthrough your team. Ask them, “what should you be working on?” Then ask, “why?”

Are you be surprised by the answers? Did they know and are focused on the right things?

As Jim Collins noted in Good to Great, Success in Business is the Right People Doing the Right Things Right. What behaviors are you reinforcing? Are expectations clear in your organization? What are your company’s problems? Right now, your company is perfectly designed to produce this outcome.

Need to change?

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M+) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Small Habits Make a Big Difference

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. If you can get just 1 percent better each day, you’ll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one year. We’ll explore powerful lessons on habits from, Atomic Habits, next blog.