Set up a performance monitoring project
Set up a performance monitoring project. Select an important performance area that is not currently tracked (e.g., response time to customers, shipping schedules, quality of service calls). Ask members to give you a rough estimate of their performance in this area, then challenge them to track their performance for one month. Teams often significantly overestimate their actual performance. Watching a trend line veer away from an overly optimistic performance estimate can be sobering experience.
Conduct a performance analysis. In this tactic the steps of a work process are outlined on a flowchart and the team then identifies performance steps that are prone to errors and bottlenecks or are overly complicated. One reason that performance analysis is a great motivator is that it opens up processes to review by and feedback from a broad cross section of your organization. As a team motivational tool, performance analysis is particularly useful when:
• Members are stuck at a performance plateau because of poorly designed or overly cumbersome processes.
• Members have difficulty identifying performance problems because they are too close to & process. They have stopped paying attention to the problems created by inefficiencies and have fallen into the habit of working around ineffective processes.
• Problems are partially hidden because they occur at cross-over points-points where work flows across the boundaries between your team and other groups. Each team assumes that the problem is the other’s responsibility.
Create a Sense of Urgency
Strategy Management: Overcome Inertia
Create a sense of urgency. The first tactic for helping your team overcome inertia is to convince members that their survival and success depend on their ability to act now to make dramatic improvements in their performance. The importance of creating a sense of urgency can’t be overestimated. It’s a key tactic applied by some of the world’s best organizational change strategists.
The difficult question is how to generate a sense of urgency within a team that has become complacent. I don’t think that this can be done by passing along the latest executive memo on the state of the organization or by the use of thinly veiled threats and intimidation. Threats and grandiose statements about the need for greater productivity are not effective motivators. Instead, try the following tactics:
- Give team members the opportunity to discover for themselves how important it is to meet the organization’s rapidly changing perfor¬mance expectations.
- Make use of the close-call phenomenon. Perhaps you know of another group or division that has already experienced considerable difficulties (staff or budget reductions, loss of management positions) as the result of performance problems like those just beginning to plague your team. If so, put your team in touch with these groups to discuss their lessons learned. Afterward, pull your team together and discuss how to avoid these problems.
