In this blog series we are exploring the components that come together to create Sustainable Performance. Using the Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework as reference, we will explore how elements come together and have a causal effect that builds into healthy work cultures that enable performance and productivity in organisations.
As a reminder, we define Sustainable Performance in the workplace as “the ability of an organisation, team, or individual to consistently achieve high levels of productivity, effectiveness, and well-being over the long term, without compromising future performance or the health of its people.”
In part 1, we started our journey by looking at Building Foundations of Wellbeing. Then in part 2, we built on these foundations and looked at how to create personal ownership, build social connections which allows us to form high performing teams. Part 3 saw that creating a culture of open feedback, combined with psychological safety, allows us to have successful challenging conversations that correct poor behaviour or output to enhance performance levels. In the last blog, we looked at how to create a culture of continuous growth, and saw how a culture of a growth mindset also builds resilience and mental toughness in our people in a virtuous circle.
This final part of our blog series on the Journey to Sustainable Performance investigates the ultimate activities and behaviours we need to truly turn the healthy, positive, inclusive culture we have developed into successful execution of our organisational objectives, delivering on what we see as important to us in a productive and timely way.
Organisations exist to add value to a “system” that we see as important. This can be to create revenue and profit, to create efficiencies or to provide a service that is needed to a community. No matter what type of value you intend to deliver with your organisation, the achievement of your goals in the manner you expect and hope for is your perception of “performance.” It doesn’t matter whether you work in central government, the charity sector, manufacturing or commercial, you will have defined what performance looks like for you. It is a standard of achievement in a timescale of your choosing. It is the mission of your organisation.
And organisations exist, just like a living organism, within an environment. Our environment is constantly changing. Planning to deliver what did last year will not be enough as the world constantly evolves, be it from a technological, public expectation, geopolitical or economic point of view. For this reason, we need to evolve as organisations, just like Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands, to keep in front of the waves of change. Evolving needs to involve everyone in the organisation. This is why our last blog focused on a growth mindset. This set of behaviours paves the way for us to seek out micro and macro changes that improve our ability to perform in our organisations. Whether it is revolution or evolution we need, we need our people to think out of the box to give our stakeholders what they want, or maybe do not know they need yet. Henry Ford famously said that “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Deploying all your people to challenge their working practices to innovate creates the ability for organisations to move forward in ways that deliver performance. And by involving and listening to your people you sustain levels of engagement and motivation in your workforce now and in the future.
Therefore, in this last blog of the series, we focus on the seeking and embracing of change and innovation and the behaviours for the delivery and execution of our goals that brings collective achievement, and sustainable performance.
The two components from the Tap’d Sustainable Performance framework for this blog are:
1) Continuous Innovation
2) Delivering Excellence
As before, let’s delve a bit deeper into each to understand what behaviours and skills can enhance these areas in our organisations.
Continuous Innovation
An innovative culture has many building blocks. The previous four blogs have taken us on a Journey to Sustainable Performance, linking cultural, behavioural and skill components together in a causal way to show how a performance culture is layered. Some of the key components directly affect the ability for an organisation to be highly innovative. These include:
- Psychological Safety and Mental Toughness: These components give permission and allow unusual ideas to surface and be verbalised with a lack of negative consequence of either being shouted down or manifesting a feeling of failure if the idea does not turn into reality.
- Growth Mindset: The seeking of opportunities to learn breeds curiosity as a cultural trait meaning that ideas for change are found more readily and easily.
- Ownership: By feeling a responsibility to deliver your part of the organisation’s goals, your focus and attention to detail will spot areas that could be improved for greater performance.
- High Performance Teaming: By fostering good emotional and relational dynamics within teams, there is a higher acceptance of accepting overarching and larger divisional goals. Inter-team collaboration is more likely because of the establishment of high-EQ intra-team behaviours.
This last point on collaboration is a key topic in many organisations. Senior leadership often identify collaboration as something that they want more of in their organisations. It is perceived to be a blocker to greater performance for many. Internal initiatives are created to get organisations talking outside of silos and explain what they do to each other as a way to foster greater collaboration. Awareness increases but frequently not so much the collaboration. This is an issue because an innovative idea germinates into a value-add action through collaboration. So why do we struggle with collaboration in organisations?
The Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework shows us how a performing culture is built. Blog one shows us that sustainable performance all sits on a foundation of wellbeing, psychological safety and trust. Almost every component since the first blog has referenced one of these as an antecedent for that component. Therefore, logically, if there is a collaborative culture shortfall, rather than setting up awareness activities, an investigation might find that perceived wellbeing, psychological safety or trust might be the root cause of a lack of collaboration. The Amherst Wilder Foundation’s Collaboration Competencies highlight “Mutual respect, understanding and trust” as a key competency. Organisations wanting to develop collaborative and innovative cultures might need to reset the deep behaviours that drive a sustainable and healthy people-centric culture first to obtain better collaboration.
Even when collaboration is present, sometimes innovation does not still happen, or employee suggestions sometime seem like random, non-useful and irrelevant to the business, especially in larger organisations. Innovation is an idea for the organisation that has a degree of newness and a degree of value-add for the organisation.
Larger organisations can suffer from aspects of bureaucracy. This manifests itself by a substantive part of the workforce becoming mentally separated from “the coal face” and/or the key stakeholders by a number of layers. Innovation can fail if there is a shortfall of understanding of the critical goals of the organisation and an understanding of what the organisation REALLY values. If you are detached from understanding real organisational value, how will you know where to focus your creative energies in your role. Leaders need to ensure everyone shares an understanding of the importance of the direction with great examples to bring it to life. Not just once a year at a town hall, but in weekly and monthly messaging that inspires and motivates a change in behaviour in the right direction.
In short, innovative behaviour drives long-term survival, growth, and relevance in a changing world. To innovate, your people need to know what’s important and to have all the components of Sustainable Performance in place to create an environment where value-add ideas are shared in a safe way and are recognised in a way that strengthens future innovative behaviour. Then finally it comes down to executing the organisation’s important goals on time and to a level of quality that is viewed as high performance, or “delivering excellence.”
Delivering Excellence
The final chapter in the story of Sustainable Performance has to be totally focused on the achievement of the organisational goals. This set of behaviours is best summed up by the word “discipline.” Team members, line managers, senior leaders and business owners need to all align and make decisions that allow everyone to work with the minimal amount of distraction. A number of previous components on the Journey to Sustainable Performance could be described as removing mental, physical or emotional barriers from work to allow high performance. Stephen Covey in his well-quoted book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” talks about the organisation’s North. If you can align all your people to head North then you are productive and performing. Stephen’s son, Sean Covey, co-wrote the book entitled “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” which is a solid framework for delivering excellence. It summarises some of the key traits of this Sustainable Performance component: Focus on the wildly important, act on the lead measures, keep a compelling scorecard and create a cadence of accountability.
All four disciplines involve an aspect of communication of information from leaders through line managers so everyone is aligned to deliver without waste or confusion. Being explicit and clear on the expectations of what is seen as “performance” is a key first measure. Any misalignment here can quickly lead to poor execution and wasted output. Identifying what the key measures are, and making sure everyone has access to this, allows self-regulation to strive for personal and team results. Peter Drucker famously wrote “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” In other words, if something is critical to your organisation’s performance, you must be measuring it. Likewise, if you can’t measure it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
All this activity allows us to develop a sense of accountability in our teams. Accountability to key to delivering excellence. Holding people to account for results through regular meetings, or a “cadence,” creates an extrinsic motivation for performance as there is a defined consequence of non-achievement. However, in our remote and hybrid world with dispersed teams, self-accountability is the ultimate goal. In blog 2 we defined ownership as a component of Sustainable Performance. Ownership is the feeling of responsibility towards a task or role, it is a “before-the-fact commitment.” Accountability is a personal willingness to answer for the outcomes produced, the “after-the-fact accountability.” It is the acknowledgement that no matter what happens, it rests on your shoulders. Creating self-accountability comes from giving stretching but achievable tasks, giving autonomy where ever possible through delegation to promote self-motivation, role modelling your own accountability through “walking the talk,” recognising the right behaviour, along with the Sustainable Performance component of quality feedback. Creating self-accountability is hard to achieve in others. The Journey to Sustainable Performance will maximise your chance of obtaining it, and delivering on your organisation’s strategy over the long-term.
This concludes our blog series of the Journey to Sustainable Performance. The Tap’d Sustainable Performance framework is supported with a diagnostic tool which can help organisations understand where they need to focus on their own journey to achieving Sustainable Performance. It can work at an individual, team, division and organisational level and can inform leadership development activity and can be used in team building programmes. You can take the diagnostic questionnaire yourself for free and receive a “basic” results report to your e-mail. Click HERE to access this.
To find out more about the solutions behind the Tap’d Sustainable Performance framework then click HERE.
We hope you enjoyed this blog series. Any comments and feedback would be gladly received via info@tapdsolutions.com.
