A VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS | Call or text now for a FREE consultation: +1 (770) 765-3692 | 
Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 6 – Massaging the Message for the Boss
Constructively critical business performance assessments often present executives and managers with a difficult to accept performance message. While intended to improve overall organizational performance, leaders may take these assessments as an affront to their authority or condemnation of their performance and some leaders may even retaliate against assessors. (See StrategyDriven Evaluation and Control Best Practice article, Don’t Break the Mirror) Additionally, lead assessors and team members seeking to gain the approval of those executives and managers who may positively influence their careers might themselves be overly concerned about the evaluation’s messaging.
Hi there! Gain access to this article with a StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription or buy access to the article itself.
| Subscribe to the StrategyDriven Insights Library
Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually). Not sure? Click here to learn more. |
Buy the Article
Don’t need a subscription? Buy access to Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 6 – Massaging the Message for the Boss for just $2! |
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.
Organizational outcomes evolve from management decisions and employee actions. Understanding what shapes those decisions and actions provides causal insight to why particular outcomes occur and reveals those things that can be changed in order to produce different results.
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.
Effective evaluation and control programs rely on a set of underlying behaviors promoting continuous performance improvement. While positionally dependent, these behaviors foster the continuous identification and resolution of performance improvement opportunities and shortfalls.
Using procedures drives consistency, reducing risk and increasing quality. Whether an activity is performed by different individuals or multiple times by the same person, proper procedure use and adherence ensures the prescribed activities are performed in the same manner, in the same order, and from the same starting conditions every time thereby yielding the same expected result. Furthermore, past operating experience can be incorporated into procedures so that lessons learned information is passed from user to user helping ensure mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future. All that said, procedures only drive this type of desired performance if used and adhered to correctly.
Business Programs