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Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 5 – Identifying Mostly Strengths
All organizations, including the best of the best, have room for improvement and those not improving inevitably find themselves falling behind competitors. Self-critical evaluations are therefore critical to achieving continuous performance improvement and remaining competitive. Evaluations identifying mostly strengths offer little opportunity for organizational growth.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives 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.
Superiors often find it difficult to provide critical feedback to those who put their very heart and soul into their work. Individuals receiving such messages tend to interpret them personally; feeling disappointment, regret, and unappreciated. Rather than constructively improving their performance, these individuals become less productive and contribute substantially less to the organization. Consequently, business performance assessment leaders frequently seek plausible justification to avoid criticizing these individuals’ performance; recognizing their exceptional effort while ignoring the results achieved. Doing so, however, foregoes the improvement opportunities and sacrifices the associated gains that could otherwise be realized.
Continuous performance improvement requires focus on both near-term operational priorities and long-term strategic capabilities and initiatives. In order to be optimally effective, performance assessments must be performed in a timely manner such that the subsequent recommended improvement activities can be implemented and effective prior to key operational events. Furthermore, the right organizational resources – particularly personnel – must be available to successfully conduct any assessment. By using self-assessment planning calendars, program coordinators gain the prerequisite insight to schedule assessments and resources far enough in advance to achieve these two imperatives.
The value derived from performing business performance assessments directly correlates to the effectiveness of the program itself. In order to maximize its value, the self-assessment program must be efficiently administered, the individual assessments insightful, and the follow-on improvements recommendations actually implemented. Shortfalls in any of these aspects diminish the program’s overall return on investment. Therefore, organization leaders should ensure the self-assessment program is optimally executed much like the self-assessment program helps ensure effective, efficient execution of the organization’s other activities.
Effective performance improvement programs promote alignment of business operations with the organization’s vision, mission, values, and goals. Such programs consistently identify opportunities to improve high value-adding operations and to eliminate low value-adding activities. These programs themselves are highly efficient and capable of producing repeatable results. Documenting the business performance assessment process provides the framework necessary to achieve this level of focused execution consistency.
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