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Management Observation Program Best Practice 16 – Don’t Tolerate Substandard Observations

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StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Best Practice ArticlePeople, processes, and technologies are not perfect. And if they were, you’d still have something to write about.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Middle Management – The Leverage Point for Performance Improvement

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Over 30 years of management consulting has made clear that the locus for a breakdown in performance improvement lies in middle management. Organizations focus on building executive teams with mixed records of success. First-line working groups tend to naturally coalesce as teams as they are doing the same work, share the same view of the organization, their customers, etc. But, the middle is often a desert between these two groups.

Middle managers oversee several functions which do not naturally come together as a team as is the case with front line groups. They are often not in the know and lack consultation regarding strategy by the executive team, so there is no shared reality there either.

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About the Author

William DannWilliam Dann is founder and president of Professional Growth Systems, LLC, (Anchorage, AK) and author of Creating High Performers: 7 Questions to Ask Your Direct Reports.

For more information visit ProfessionalGrowthSystems.com.

Resolve to Improve Your Company or Career in 2016!

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The start of a calendar year is usually a great time for evaluating the leadership and growth of your organization, and ways to take your own career or company to the next level. What better way to start off the New Year than assessing areas that need improvement and establishing new goals for the immediate and long term future. For many executives, especially ones who are already somewhat accomplished, this task is easier said than done. From time to time, we could all use a little help figuring out next steps and how to get there, yet not everyone can afford to hire their own personal leadership coach.

Below are a few key lessons from The Strategic MVP on cultivating a personal brand and unleashing one’s ‘inner nerd’ to help you become a true MVP.

1. The Importance of a Personal Brand

Similar to the brand of a company, your personal brand is the feeling and experience that people have when they interact with you, think about you, or talk about you. Do you have an identifiable personal brand? Managing your personal brand can be one of the most important things you do as you progress in business. What do you want to be known for? If your personal brand is authentically focused on your career aspirations, then the right people will think of YOU when the right opportunity arises. Your personal brand should articulate your values, story, message, and things that are important to you.

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About the Author

Dr. Brandi StankovicDr. Brandi Stankovic is a professor, organizational change expert, motivational speaker and mommy who inspires firms globally with her models of leadership, engagement and award-winning education. Her clients include billion dollar organizations, trade associations and non-profit foundations.

The Strategic MVP (co-authored by Mark Thompson) is an interactive guide offering motivational lessons from the world’s top CEOs (Warren Buffet, Sir Richard Branson, Martha Reitman, Ingrid Vanderveld, etc.) and ongoing workshop-type exercises. These exercises help readers identify challenges specific to them while offering solutions to help develop important business skills that will take their career and/or organization to the next level.

Four Types of Business Performance Assessments

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Business performance assessment programs are comprised of periodically scheduled and event driven assessments. Because these assessments are not performed on a continual basis, they are inappropriate for the monitoring of rapidly changing conditions. Circumstances for which periodic and event driven assessments are performed can be described as:

Scheduled Assessments

  • Foundational: assessments occurring at a given frequency within a defined time interval typically focused on core business risks, operational goals, and organizational values. These assessments target those critical organizational functions and characteristics which present significant risk, must be performed with precision, or require continuous improvement to maintain marketplace competitiveness
  • Situational: assessments targeted at specific high-risk activities to ensure risk mitigating behaviors and mechanisms are present during these critical times. These assessments include reviews of the integrated training, execution, and follow-up improvements associated with these events

Unscheduled Assessments

  • Even-based: assessments performed after a significant performance expectation violation that sets a dangerous precedent or causes significantly adverse impacts to the organization. The assessments scans a broad number of organizational groups, especially those performing similar operations to that group in which the violation occurred, so to identify the extent of condition of the undesired deviation and to broadly reinforce adherence to proper management standards. Note that the self-assessment and corrective action programs should also be examined to determine why precursor deviations were not identified and corrective action taken prior to the event’s occurrence
  • Random: assessments reinforcing desired behaviors performed at the discretion of the self-assessment program manager and/or senior organization leaders. Such random assessments reinforce with employees the need to be ever vigilant to the adherence of workplace standards because their compliance is monitored at all times

As illustrated by StrategyDriven’s Information Development Model, business performance assessments belong to the third tier of performance data refinement. Performance reports at this level benefit from human intelligence added to supporting data during: initial data synthesis, basic trend identification and analysis, multi-trend synthesis, and basic model application. It is the infusion of human knowledge and experience at these points that makes these assessments broadly integrated and highly insightful.

To learn how to maximize the value of your business performance assessment efforts:

Register for StrategyDriven’s FREE Maximizing the Value of Business Performance Assessments online training series

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

How Leaders Drive Resolution of Their Company’s Most Pressing Issues

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Want to drive resolution of your company’s issues while enhancing organizational alignment and accountability?
 
StrategyDriven Corrective Action Program ForumStrategyDriven is launching a Corrective Action Program Forum; uniquely providing expert advice and best practice methods to help leaders programmatically drive resolution of key issues and execution of work requests aligned with their organization’s goals.

StrategyDriven was founded on the principle of making the advanced practices of leading companies affordably available to small and midsized business leaders. As such, StrategyDriven Advisors compiled their decades of corrective action program experience into a library of best practice methods and tools easily accessible from our online forum.

Corrective action programs encompass the identification, reporting, evaluation, resolution, and trending of an organization’s issues and work requests. Effective program execution ensures timely resolution of a business’s most pressing issues while fostering a high level of individual and organizational accountability.

Contributed to by highly experienced business leaders, StrategyDriven’s online Corrective Action Program Forum provides actionable methods and tools executives and managers can use to implement and enhance key components of their corrective action program including:

  • Identification – Personnel at all levels of the organization recognize conditions deviating from established standards and expectations, adverse trends and events, and other needs for action.
  • Reporting – Individuals identifying conditions meeting established issue and/or request reporting criteria notify the appropriate managers verbally and in writing, via condition reports, of the situation.
  • Evaluation – Qualified personnel assess each reported issue and request individually and collectively to establish its priority and identify needed corrective actions and due dates, typically documented within a work and/or service order(s).
  • Resolution – Management reviews, approves, assigns resources, and monitors response actions assigned to issue and request resolution. Management’s actions are commonly documented on the associated work/service order(s).
  • Trending – Metrics and associated management reports provide a picture of overall performance based on tags characterizing each condition report and work/service order.

StrategyDriven Advisors possess decades of experience helping leaders of small to Fortune 500 companies define and implement the complex, mission-critical projects needed to improve operational effectiveness and reduce costs. Isn’t it about time these people were working for you?

For more information and to schedule your free corrective action program consultation, visit: www.strategydriven.com/cap.