Happy Christmas

Getting to Excellent has survived a tempestuous year – with the economy taking a nose dive under the carpet and refusing to come out, and now the weather being a little over enthusiastic here in sunny Berkshire. But in between there has been much to discuss, debate, agree and disagree on.

But now Christmas is dawning across the world. The ultimate deadline is making the most determined business person stop and draw breath. And rightly so, because no matter what your religious beliefs Christmas is a time to catch up with old friends, see family and make time for being with people. There are no performance charts, no KPIs, no need to do anything except relax and share with those most important to you.

So Getting to Excellent is taking a break and will be back in the New Year a few pounds heavier and a little better rested. I’d like to thank everyone who has visited fleetingly, those that have visited regularly, and those who have entered into the debate. Happy Christmas!

Keeping Energy Levels High

Looking back over a year of Getting to Excellent I have had a somewhat mixed reaction to my attempts to improve personal energy levels. I think there is a feeling in business that personal energy levels are not a business issue – providing you do your work then whether or not you have a hangover isn’t anyone else’s concern. And to some degree that may be true, but only to some degree.

Yet for an organisation to do well, so must each of its departments, and each individual within those department. And this is even more important in small businesses. So keeping energy levels high IS a performance management issue.

It has taken me three attempts to give up caffeine. In my usual blasé style, I thought it was going to be easy. I was wrong, oh, so wrong. It’s been difficult, but I'm almost there. In 12 days’ time (yes, I’m counting) I will have gone 100 days without caffeinated beverages. The desire for a cup of tea is now pretty much gone, and the benefits of better sleep and fewer headaches are definitely worth the price. So with an admittedly small test sample of precisely one, I’d say it takes at least 70 days to form a new habit: much, much longer than I had guessed and longer than some other articles suggest.

My return to the gym was less successful. 2009 has been a busy year and I can’t honestly say that exercise is a habit yet. But I’m convinced that this will pay big dividends on the energy front. Getting back in the gym, however, has been massively instructive in managing performance. I’ve written before about the importance of seeing how far I’ve run or cycled, or calories burnt, in keeping motivation levels high. I don’t believe work is any different. Measurement is a great tool in helping and encouraging better performance.

Of course there are other areas to consider in improving energy levels, such as reducing alcohol (I don’t drink much but then it doesn’t really agree with me) and eating better (and eating less).

At the beginning of this post I said I’d had mixed reactions to these initiatives. That would be something of an understatement. Whilst there has been a big interest in my attempts to give up caffeine on the internet, family and friends have been less convinced. One other person has gone cold turkey and given up caffeine completely (and is happier for it) but on the whole everyone else I know has been mystified. But I guess everyone reacts to things differently.

There are clearly different levels of managing performance: personal, departmental and company-wide. However, at a personal level, keeping energy levels high is something that can be measured and managed: and pays dividends for doing so. Keeping off caffeine, getting more exercise and improving diet are all, therefore, on my resolution list for next year. Just so as you know.

All snowed up and no place to go

Like many other people in the South East yesterday I got snowed up. It took me two hours to go round one roundabout and come back to work. No roads were gritted, and cars were sliding around in their unreasonable and unrealistic hope of getting home. In my short journey I must have seen 3 or 4 blue flashing ambulance lights and multiple roadside rescue vehicles skidding around like everyone else. The radio reported one serious accident that the ambulance was unable to get to because roads were gridlocked. Chaos is too neat a word to describe what was happened on Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire roads yesterday.

But, as Scarlet pointed out, tomorrow is another day so after a makeshift night at the office I’m up to see whether today brings brighter weather and passable roads. Surprise, surprise, after the complexity of the argument about measuring the performance of local councillors, the local Reading Transport web site hasn’t been updated since 15.30 yesterday. I guess they were too busy getting home, or maybe they thought there was no point as stranded cars don’t have internet access anyway. I doubt it’s the responsibility of part-time Councillors to update the web site, but between full time council employees, and local Councillors, basic services like information and gritting were not available.

It seems every year that the local authorities get caught out, which means that every year we get caught out. After the fiasco that has been Eurostar over the last few days, and the complaints about lack of information, even if gritting lorries couldn’t get out you would have thought that someone somewhere would have made information a priority. But even though it’s taken me a full 30 minutes to tone down this blog post, the latest traffic information is still missing.

I have no doubt that it's not much fun being in the firing line when the snow starts to fall, but winter happens approximately once every year and preparing for it seems a sensible precaution. The only gritting lorries that were seen yesterday weren't working. It may be performance under pressure, but surely tax payers deserve better?

7 Immutable Laws of Getting to Excellent

Getting to Excellent is almost a year old and it’s the end of the year: a natural time for reflection and review. During my first year of blogging I’ve thought quite a lot about what improves performance. My views have changed little during the year, if anything I've become more convinced of the importance of performance management in business.

So here are my end of year 7 immutable laws of performance management:

1. The Law of Knowing what Excellence is
2. The Law of Planning for Excellence
3. The Law of Measuring Excellence
4. The Law of Excellent Binary Milestones
5. The Law of Excellent Visibility (showing visible progress)
6. The Law of Excellent Reviews
7. The Law of Recognising Excellence (when good work is achieved)

Each one is a great deal easier to say than to do, and each one contains a wealth of opportunity or pitfalls.

As 2010 approaches, and a brave new decade dawns, the 7 Immutable Laws of Getting to Excellent provide a checklist in striving for excellence in our work and our businesses. Or have I missed something? In which case, let me know ....

No one ever got a pig fat by weighing it

Andrew Templeman of the Cabinet Office is quoted as saying:

“No one ever got a pig fat by weighing it.”

Wise words which are well worth remembering as we focus on improving business performance through measurement and evaluation. All the measurement in the world is useless unless the work gets done, and to a high standard. The measurement is only there to help, motivate and enable problems to be identified. So reporting and execution must be hand in glove (that’s execution of the work, not of the person doing the measurement).

As I rattled through my work this morning armed with a report that helped me measure the task (not a job I particularly enjoy doing) I thought about how I get through my exercise routine. I don’t enjoy that either, and certainly not when I’m out of shape as I am right now. But seeing the counter click forwards to my goal keeps me going – whether on the exercise bike or my report. Getting closer to my target, and that magical green traffic light, was enough to get the job done.

Fattening my pigs (or slimming them down) requires solid work over a period of time. Someone once quipped that dieting is like project management: it’s not much fun, goes on a very long time, and no one notices the results. But measuring the results at least keeps the task, project or pig going.

So although no one ever got a pig fat by weighing it, they did get a good meal by making sure the pig got fed every day. Which is really what performance management is all about: measuring the scraps of work that bring us closer to the goal (or lunch).

Measurement is fundamental to performance

I was faced with a task today where I had no immediate way of measuring my progress. Not being able to clearly see my way through a job is frustrating and does not encourage me to perform at my best. It got me thinking about how important it is to be able to see how we are doing vis-a-vis expectations.

It would be a little like driving a car without a speedometer or the ability to measure distance. “Are we there yet?” would be met with “Oh, I think so, a bit further maybe. We will recognise it when we see it!”

We are so used to everything being measured – from the miles that we drive to the hours that we work – that we barely give it a second thought. But the frustration in getting to Birmingham when we don’t know how fast we are going, how far away it is, or how far we have travelled would be significant. Imagine not knowing how much money is in your bank account, or what time your favourite television programme was on. The hit and miss fiasco that would be the weekly budget, or trying to guess when to tune in would be farcical.

Yet how many jobs at work do we tackle without measuring them? Quite a few. How many could be improved through some form of measurement? I would suggest, quite a few.

“The odds of hitting the target go up enormously when you aim at it” is attributed to Mal Pancost. I’m guess he was taking as read that we know how far away the target is.

Visual performance indicators for knowledge workers

I think it was Peter Drucker who first coined the term “knowledge worker”. It is now a term we know and understand well. At least, we understand vaguely what we mean by a knowledge worker – someone who does something that we don’t quite understand. Knowledge workers are a difficult group to manage, as their output is often long term, difficult to measure and not totally understood by whoever is “managing” them. I say “managing” them, because so much has to be done on trust and on outcomes, some of which will be influenced by a myriad of different factors.

However, employee engagement and job satisfaction has been shown to rise when people clearly understand the organisation’s mission, and are actively involved in improving performance: whatever level in the organisation, and whatever the work.

So the key is to ensure that appropriate and visual performance indicators are displayed for people to see, challenge, discuss and use in their work. Without that engagement it is too easy to allow people to slip into thinking that no-one cares, no-one is watching and no-one is interested, which is mostly very far from the truth.

Of course, creating good visual performance indicators requires careful thinking, but it can and is done very successfully by many companies who understand how important it is to keep everyone engaged.