Throughout our work with several organizations to help automating their strategy execution and performance management processes, we’ve encountered some common obstacles, which stood as rock-hard barriers, delaying, and sometimes preventing the start or progress of the execution process.
Unfortunately, we are not talking here about external factors such as fierce competition, poor market conditions, financial limitations, etc. Rather, we are talking about internal challenges raising out of mindsets within the organization, which refuse, or at least, are not able to overcome the traditions of classic management style and the old-school performance management methodologies.
Those mindsets are victims of myths that have been around for a while. They were born out of techniques and approaches that were effective and worked well for a quite long time. However, things have changed, and what worked perfectly in the past doesn’t necessarily work in the present.
As humans, we are biased towards completion and perfection. We always strive to ensure things are running smoothly and flawlessly as they ought to be. We want ourselves to be highly-recognized in our social and professional communities, we want our children to be the best among all, we want our lives to be financially ideal, and so on.
This mindset serves positively in many situations in life. Without it, there won’t be an ambition to grow or improve. However, when the aim to perfection stands as a hindrance against gradual progress, then we have a real problem.
Perfection might be our motivator to improve and perform better, but it shouldn’t be the target itself. Satisfying our appetite for perfection will require multiple rounds of planning, practice and refinement accompanied by many successes and many other failures.
When setting up your strategy framework or performance system, you shouldn’t spend a very longtime planning, without trying to put your plans into action, at least once. Especially with the fast-paced era we live in, spending an extensive amount of time setting up your plan, trying to consider all factors, and to cover every single detail, you would never finish. New changes arise almost every day, and modifying your plan continuously based on those changes is impossible. It is a never-ending task.
If you insist to keep working on your plan until it is completely perfect, then you will be forced into one of two directions:
I am not trying to exaggerate here; believe it or not, this is the sad truth. We’ve worked with some organizations that kept revising their plans continuously with the aim of perfecting them before launch. Those plans were never finalized and never came to life, although the period they were set for has already passed!
In this case, you may finish the task of setting your complete solid plan within the deadline. However, once you put it into action, you will find that it is already obsolete since there are tens of updates not taken into consideration. Unfortunately, you will have to re-work everything from zero again.
Both scenarios are painful enough that you don’t really wish to experience. After all, your strive to perfection shouldn’t lead you to such disappointment. You’ve already spent enough time planning, and it’s time to start enjoying some achievements.
Don’t worry about failures. The only ones who don’t fail are the ones who do nothing. Start launching your system. Roll out your plan gradually and you will start to see results. Test them, evaluate them, learn from your achievements and failures, and keep refining as you go.
This, in some form or another, is a consequence of the desire to perfection. It revolves around the obsession of having everything under control by trying to measure everything.
To put it in practical terms, I will refer to a company we recently worked with, who wanted to implement a strategy execution system that connects their strategy, operations and people’s performance. The components that interact in this model are basically a set of priorities, objectives and strategic KPIs under the strategic plan. Those are achieved through a couple of initiatives and projects, executed by the company’s units and individuals.
The framework looks perfect, since it considers and connects all factors of execution which will give the company a clear comprehensive view of their performance. The challenge was, however, in trying to measure everything about every component mentioned above.
Let’s have a look at a specific example. When it came to people’s performance, HR has set around 15 – 20 KPIs per employee. In addition to those, they requested all employees’ tasks to be recorded on a daily basis. This created a huge burden on the HR personnel collecting and analyzing the data, and also on the employees who had to make sure they track and report all this information.
Our advice was to reduce to the number of KPIs per employee, to a maximum of 5, by filtering out the non-important measures and focusing on the ones that really mattered. Of course, under the effect of the Control Myth, this was not accepted. Our client, like many others, insisted that none of the KPIs could be eliminated because each one of them measured something important. If it was not measured, it will be missed, and control will be lost.
We had multiple sessions with our client, convincing, coaching, guiding, and working together on refining the KPIs. Finally, we were able to reduce them to a maximum of 5 per employee. This was a great step which unveiled immediate effect on the efficiency of the process, the reporting accuracy, the employee engagement level, and above all, the performance levels. Employees became more focused on the most important. They know now what matters most and recognize that their efforts must be directed towards certain core measures.
In our previous exercise to reduce the count of measured KPIs, it was important to first eliminate the influences of the Symmetry myth, which dictates that all measures are equally important. Under this concept, all measures tend to be treated with equal importance and weight; they are considered equally significant to achieve the required progress.
To overcome this, performance specialists need to first ensure that what they are measuring are results, not efforts (more about this in the article: Results Vs Efforts and the Communication Gap). Out of this exercise of segregating results from efforts, total measures will be cut down into a smaller count. To further refine the list, measures should be filtered based on their different types.
To do this, ask yourself a few questions:
Those questions will help you assign weights to your results, where the most important ones will get the highest weight. I am going to cover this in more details in another article.
For now, you can follow the below simple guidelines:
Bottomline, free yourself from those myths and let simplicity be the guide. Remember, the core of effective performance is focus and clarity, which can always be achieved by less, not by more.
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