Articles tagged with: performance

Jan18

Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement #1

Culture is about how we do things around here

Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement  #1

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast!” I don’t know who first said it but it’s 100% true, certainly from my 20 years of experience it is.

Simply defined culture equals “the way things are done around here.”   People do things via their actions i.e. behaviours, and these behaviours are reinforced by processes and systems companies have in place.

These processes and systems are created for logical and I am sure good reasons - It’s to keep the organisation functioning in an orderly and consistent manner, and to a significant extent they end up determining the culture of the organisation. This happens because they shape the behaviour of the individuals.

Posted in Performance Improvement

Jul06

Managing Know How

Fix the processes before you try managing by objectives

Managing Know How

When Rudy is not changing the world of business for the better, he is busy changing the world of junior football for the better. Rudy is the president of “the most progressive junior football club in Australia”; I know the club is, because he told me!  Seriously Rudy is not given to hyperbole and relies on measurable data to support his claim. Over 600 boys and girls have directly benefitted from the dedication and commitment he has shown over the past three years.

Posted in Change Management

Apr05

If you build it they will come - the affect that beliefs have on performance

People who believe intelligence can be developed perform better

If you build it they will come - the affect that beliefs have on performance

 

Research on how high school students' beliefs about intelligence affect their math grades found that those who believed that intelligence can be developed performed better than those who believed intelligence is fixed.

The findings come from two studies conducted by researchers at Columbia University and Stanford University, and were published in the journal Child Development. Vol. 78, Issue 1 in 2007.

One study looked at 373 12-year-olds over two years of high school. All students began the study with equivalent achievement levels in math but the students who believed that their intelligence could be developed outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed. Furthermore, the researchers found, the gap between these two groups widened over the two-year period.

Researchers concluded that the difference between the two sets of students stems from the fact that students who believed their intelligence could be developed placed a higher premium on learning, believed more in the power of effort, and had more positive and constructive reactions to setbacks in school.

A second study looked at 91 12-year-olds in two groups, both of whom had shown declines in their math grades. One group was taught the expandable theory of intelligence as part of an eight-session workshop on study skills. Another group participated in the same workshop, but did not receive information on the expandable intelligence qualities of the brain. The students who learned about the intelligence theory reversed their decline and showed significantly higher math grades than their peers in the other group, whose grades continued to decline.

"These findings highlight the importance of students' beliefs for their academic progress," said Carol Dweck, one of the researchers and professor of psychology at Stanford University. "They also show how these beliefs can be changed to maximize students' motivation and achievement."

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts that teachers and parents alike can provide students and their children is the belief that they can achieve what they set out to do.

Posted in Change Management

Jan24

The toughest of all leadership skills

Performance management....not for the sqeamish

The toughest of all leadership skills

In my 20 plus years of management consulting experience there is still one skill that I see performed poorly or not at all.... PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT. I am not talking about remuneration or financially based incentive schemes for performance, that's easy. I am referring to the ability for a manager to give direct performance management feedback or coaching to their subordinates for the purpose of improving performance or reinforcing existing performance. There are two major reasons for this:

1 - Managers are not trained in performance management ie they don't know how to communicate feedback in a timely and specific manner;

2 - they, managers, don't know how to define and hence measure performance.

Posted in Business Management

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