Effective leadership with performance conversations

Your development to provide effective leadership is very important. Or if you are happy for your business to remain small, you can continue to concentrate on the daily ‘nuts and bolts’ without worrying about personnel management issues. However, if you expect the business to grow, you inevitably have to employ people, and the ability to show leadership and to manage people more than effectively will be critical.

frontlineWe train leadership skills either on a one to one/monthly or intense basis for managers and bosses or if you have several managers we can deliver to you as a workshop internally with your company. We can also deliver in a location where there is more than one business that wishes to gain from the experience of these workshops and also benefit from the networking experience that inevitably comes with these types of local or national workshops.

A performance culture is one in which individuals at every level of the business take responsibility for their own and others performance and continually push the boundaries of what is possible. Each managers role is to increase business performance through coaching and developing their teams. This is not about compromising on standards but if individuals truly take responsibility the standards become very self-evident and individuals monitor and assess themselves. The role of the manager is to help them think through how they can achieve more and more, thus reducing the level of dependency, increase responsibility and as a result create higher performance.

One might conclude that managers are only one part of the equation and therefore it needs everybody in the team to think and act differently. Nevertheless, the managers’ scope of influence makes them pivotal in creating this shift in behaviour.”How do you measure in a performance culture? Contrary to many expectations, performance cultures are not flooded with measures. Many businesses misguidedly believe that if it moves, measure it. This does little to create a performance culture: instead people become preoccupied with conforming to the measures and lose sight of the end goal.performance

The simpler the measure the more efficient the performance: typical measure or KPI’s (key performance indicators) as they are often referred to, are:

  • Sales – are they on the increase or decrease and reasons why?
  • Number of customers
  • Number of transactions per customer & frequency of purchases
  • Sales conversion rate
  • Margin – are we making as much as we could or need to?
  • Culture/behaviour – the behaviour which characterises how the business works.

Fundamentally there is more of a focus upon team contributions rather than individual contributions to encourage collaboration and high performance. The more the businesses concern themselves about individuals the more the individuals tend to look after themselves and become pre-occupied with how they are doing rather than collaborating and working with others.

It is important to spend time looking at the following areas:

  • Which behaviours/cultures contribute to a performance culture – positive and negative?
  • How do you encourage others to take responsibility?
  • Regular feedback is key in a performance culture
  • Giving feedback in a constructive way, at the right time, in the right amount of quantity with a positive-negative ratio.
  • Identify the key challenges of any role in the business
  • Time planning
  • Location of meetings
  • Conversation framework – Clarify the purpose – Explore the current – Identify the options – Agree on the way forward
  • Questioning techniques
  • Listening skills – Active Listening – Content Listening – Tuning in – self-centred listening
=

 

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Instagram