Business and Marketing

Redefine achievable performance. An important tactic is to encourage members to raise their expectations for their own performance. You may find benchmarking a helpful tool for accomplishing this perceptual shift. Benchmarking can force members to challenge their assumptions about the best possible performance that can be expected within a given area and to identify the best practices that are consistently used by the top performers in a field.
As an example, one step that led to the revitalization of Xerox was its decision to compare its copiers to those made by its Japanese competitors. Xerox found that the Japanese companies could produce copy machines at a much lower cost, even when such factors as labor costs were taken into consideration.
To apply benchmarking as a motivational tool:
1. Identify an organization that has a function similar to your own and that is recognized for having demonstrated world-class performance. This function need not be in the same industry but should face challenges similar to your own.
2. Clearly determine the criteria that you will use to compare your operation with those of the benchmarked organization. If you are comparing your performance on delivery schedules, you could measure from the point a delivery order is received to final delivery or from the time a package leaves your shipping dock. Clearly defining your measurement process will keep you from attempting to compare apples and oranges during your benchmark study.
3. Measure the performance gap between your team’s performance and that of the benchmarked organization.
4. Identify those best practices used by the benchmarked organization that could be successfully adopted by your team.
5. Reach agreement with your team regarding the time frame that would be required and the improvement actions that would be needed in order for your team to close the performance gap.

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.

Model limit-busting in your own life. If you want your team members to raise their own performance expectations, you must be able to show them you are willing to take risks and challenge performance limits in your own life.

To model limit-busting for your team, do the following:
1. Set challenging goals for your performance. During the next month, create a wall chart for tracking your personal performance in a selected area and include on the chart a clearly delineated performance goal. Share your goal with your team, and be honest in conveying your progress toward the goal. If you find that to reach your goal you have to put in additional effort or modify your procedures, share this with your team. When your team sees that you are testing your own limits, it will be more willing to follow suit.
2. Use the language of success. I’ve found that the language you use shapes your personal perception of the world. If you use words that convey powerlessness and hopelessness, you weaken yourself. On the other hand, language can be used to empower yourself and strengthen your team.
3. Volunteer to temporarily perform the jobs of your team members. This technique provides a number of benefits.

First, it shows employees that you are trying to see through their eyes the problems and difficulties they encounter on a daily basis.

Second, if you aren’t well acquainted with the jobs they perform, this approach shows that you are willing to shift, when needed, from the role of skilled expert to novice. It shows your team that you are willing to deal with the uncertainty of working outside your comfort zone.

Keep things in perspective. When people become anxious and stressed out, they tend to view all irritations and problems as critical. If you become emotionally drained over small, inconsequential problems, you will deplete energy resources that would normally be reserved for dealing with critical challenges. In this respect, you will perform like a marathon racer who exhausts herself by running a series of high-speed sprints before the race is even under way. To conserve your energy, learn to keep your problems in perspective by identifying those few work situations that truly require a high level of vigilance and effort.

Make decisions during low-stress periods. Although it’s impossible to predict with 100% certainty the types of situations that will trigger excessive stress, if you carefully track your stress over a period of days or weeks you will probably find that you experience a stress cycle of predictable highs and lows. For example, your stress level may build immediately before you are to meet with your manager or certain customers. Highlight on your weekly calendar any upcoming events or responsibilities that are likely to create stress for you. If possible, avoid making key decisions during these periods, and save important decision making meetings for times when your stress level is moderate and your attention is fully focused on the task at hand.

Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about recognizing situations in which you are not emotionally and mentally prepared to wrestle with difficult work issues. Regulate your level of work direction. Managers experiencing excessive stress tend to have difficulty balancing the degree of supervision they provide to their groups. Some managers intervene too quickly, resulting in micro management and nervous hovering. Others go to the opposite extreme, procrastinating about acting on stressful work situations until their stress level builds up to the point where they overwhelm their group with critical feedback on a variety of problems.

Strategy 1. Adjust Your Leadership Behavior
Don’t create needless stress. Avoid adding needless stress to an already stressed-out team. Some of the leadership behaviors that tend to trigger work stress are listed below. Note any of those behaviors that pertain to your performance. In addition, because most people are not accurate observers of their own behavior, consider using this checklist to ask for feedback on your leadership style from a trusted team member or work associate. Do you:
•   Vacillate on decisions, procrastinate on decisions, or rush into decisions without first having sufficient information?
• Create arbitrary deadlines for projects? That is, do your dead¬lines take into account real job requirements?
• Generate conflicts by encouraging win-lose competition among members?
• Criticize members in public rather than in private?
• Make comments that make people feel threatened about the loss of their jobs?
• Intentionally withhold information from members?
• Pit people against each other?
• Use force and threats to win discussions with members?
• Gossip about members behind their backs?
• Withdraw your support, assistance, and energy from your group?
• Create conflicts between your team and others and then thrust your members into the middle of these problems?
• Become loud and vocally abusive whenever you discover a work problem?
• Monitor your stress level. Don’t use your team as an outlet for your own stress. If you find yourself ready to climb the walls because of something your boss or your supplier finds, avoid taking your frustration out on your team.

Instead, before interacting with your team, give yourself time to recover, and carefully think through the following questions:
• How much of what I’m upset about is directly within control of my team?
• Are they really the target of my anger?
• Am I angry with my team or just anxious about my job?
• If I blow up, am I really going to move the job along faster, or will I simply create more problems?
• Do team members really understand the full context of my anger and frustration? If they don’t seem to understand the significance of a problem, is it because part of the situation is outside of their visibility?

Next series from Performance and Organization. At this point you may be thinking, “Okay, even assuming that excessive stress does lead to poor performance, what am I expected to do about it? I’m not a trained psychologist or therapist.” That’s right, but, unfortunately, you are struck with this situation. You depend on your team to meet your objectives, and you can’t afford to wait until your organization becomes less stressful. Like it or not, you play a pivotal role in helping your team successfully cope with work stress.

Since the early 1970s, abundant research has shown that one of the most critical factors for coping successfully with stress is the presence of a solid support system-those networks of interpersonal relation ships that, during periods of stress and trauma, provide emotional and social support and assistance. Support systems offer a sense that one isn’t alone with one’s problems, that there is someone out there who is willing to help.

Research has shown that when people are exposed to severe stresses, such as illness or the death of a spouse, those who have good support systems are much less likely to suffer from heart problems and other major stress disorders. Additional research has shown that the most effective buffer against work stress is not one’s friends, coworkers, or spouse but one’s manager. The actions you as manager take and the relationships you form with your team members thus directly influence their ability to cope with work and stress.

part 2 of Clone Your Superstars

One word of caution: keep an open mind regarding the best practices for any given activity. I know of a service manager for a car dealership who was surprised to discover that the repair technician with the best record for service call quality and response time actually took much longer than other technicians to initiate repairs. The reason was that the technician spent more time diagnosing a repair problem, resulting in greater overall efficiency in the repair process.
4. Determine the most effective way to transfer these unique skills to your remaining members. Possibilities include:
• Instituting formal training classes;
• Having top performers lead informal coaching or practice sessions
• Having selected members shadow top performers to observe how to apply certain skills.
• Assigning top performers to observe other members and to provide suggestions for improving their performance.

When organizations encounter tough times, performance standards rise, resources are strictly rationed, and jobs become less secure. As a result, the working environment becomes more stressful, and burnout emerges as a serious performance problem. In addition, during tough times many managers make the mistake of reducing communication with their teams, leaving employees feeling isolated and fearful about the unknown. Given these work conditions, it’s easy to understand why employees experience higher levels of stress and anxiety during difficult times.

Stress is a sign that excessive wear and tear are being placed on a system. While a moderate amount of stress is necessary for good performance, excessive stress does not indicate that a team is performing at its best. It merely strips a team of energy that could be more productively directed elsewhere as team members seek ways to buffer themselves against the adverse effects of stress. Like the Starship Enterprise after it has been hit by a blast of photon torpedoes, stressed ¬out members tend to shut down everything but essential life-support systems.

To understand the relationship that exist between work stress and performance, picture someone racing a car across the Utah salt flats on the hottest day of the year, saying, “Look at the temperature climb in my engine! Now I’m really getting good performance!” Now picture that person intentionally puncturing his radiator to produce an even greater increase in the car’s engine temperature. Sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it? Equally silly is the manager who says, “I’m really getting performance out of my group now; just look at them sweat!” Once again, excessive stress is a sign of poorly displaced energy. Teams attempting to survive tough times need to apply their energy in the most effective way possible.

Clone Your Superstars. When certain team members consistently outperform others, both the low performers and their managers sometimes begin to assume that these performance variations are natural, unchangeable, and the result of an innate characteristic of the superstars. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the most effective ways of challenging the performance limits that your team has set for itself is by grafting on to your team the skills and competencies of your team’s superstars. The following four steps can help you successfully clone your superstars:
1. Measure the gap between the performance of your superstars and your team’s average performance level.
2. Determine whether these performance differences are the result of nonskill-related factors such as:
• Unique conditions (whether your top sales person was given the most potentially lucrative sales territory)
• Specialized technical skills that require extensive training (the engineer who specialized in advanced metallurgical processes)
• The fact that the top performer has been rewarded differently from other members (receives more attention and coaching from you than do other members)
If you are able to eliminate these factors, you are safe in assuming that the performance gap is largely the result of skill differences between your top performers and the rest of your team.
3. Break down the performance area under review into discrete activities, and identify areas in which superstars consistently outperform other team members. If you are managing a sales team, you could ask yourself whether the superior performance of certain members results from their approach to cold calling or their method of qualifying sales prospects.