Category Archives: Performance

The Practice of Competence

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“When you are in the hunt for a new team member,” I asked, “what are you looking for? You have a whole pool of people from which to choose. What are you looking for?”

“Experience,” Leo said. “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

I waited. “And what if that past behavior was incompetent?”

“Well, that’s different,” he replied. “I need someone whose past behavior was competent.”

“So, how do you tell?” I wanted to know.

“There is always skill,” Leo nodded. “If they have the skill, that would make them a good team member.”

“Have you ever known a candidate who talked a good game, but in the thick of battle became mercilessly useless?”

“Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “They have to be able to do more than talk. More than technical know-how. They have to be more than enthusiastic. They have to be able to do the work.”

“The best measure of performance is always performance,” I said. “So, what creates performance? Technical knowledge plays a role, it’s necessary, but not sufficient.”

“The best people on the team not only understand the technical part, but more importantly they practice. Day in and day out, until it becomes a routine grooved behavior.” Leo began to rock back and forth.

“So, when you ask about skills, you have to ask for more than technical knowledge. You have to ask about practice. What is your frequency of practice? What is your duration of practice? What is your depth of practice? What is your accuracy in practice? Because if you don’t practice a skill, what happens to competence?”

Life Happens or Does It?

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“I can’t believe what just happened,” Cora explained. “We have been waiting for six weeks for a special material. Today, it landed on our loading dock, and it’s the wrong material.”

“And?” I asked.

“It’s got a six week lead time. We’re two weeks beyond deadline already,” she lamented. “The customer calls me twice a day. Yesterday, I told them the material would be here today. And, now it’s going to be another six weeks. I checked the SKU number and saw the mistake we made in ordering.”

“It seems like this is happening a lot, lately?” I made a question out of a statement.

“I just don’t know what it happening to us. Bad luck, I guess.” Cora looked disoriented.

“Is that the way life is? A series of things that happen to you?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, isn’t that just the way life is?”

“Depends on the way you see things,” I nodded. “If you see life as a series of things that happen to you, things will continue to happen to you. If you see things as a series of accomplishments, you will behave differently.”

“How so?” Cora looked at the ceiling, then back to me.

“If this project is just something that happens to you, then the project will take its own twists and turns before it ends eight weeks late. If this project is a series of accomplishments that you personally drive, what changes?”

“You mean, we might double-check SKU numbers?” she smiled.

“Double-check SKU numbers, create a project schedule that accommodates real lead times on materials, call the customer before they call you to manage expectations. It’s all in the way you see the world and how you participate.”

Steps to Necessity

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“My question still stands,” Erica was insistent. “How do I get my team to the point where they believe performance is necessary?”

“It starts with competence,” I replied. “We cannot perform at a level where we are not competent. If we are not competent, then, not only will it NOT happen, it cannot be believed to be necessary. So, the first step in believing in the necessity of performance is to build the competence required.”

Erica was a good student. “And, competence is a combination of capability, skill and practiced performance?”

“Moreover,” I responded, “if we have the capability, possess the required skill and practice to the point of habit, then necessity follows. The habit of pace, at quality spec, produces the necessity of performance.”

Do You Feel Lucky?

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More than 30 years ago, I was interviewed for a job and one of the interview questions was, “Tell me about a time when you were lucky?”

Since then, I have determined there are many things that occur outside of our control. Working with CEOs, there are many things that occur, which have direct impact on the outcome, yet, are outside the control of the CEO. “So, do you feel lucky?” said Inspector Callahan in the movie Dirty Harry.

Many decisions are made based on data, and many decisions are made based on intuition. The best decisions are made somewhere in the middle. Based on the data in front of me, what I know, do I feel lucky?

How do we take advantage of luck? Two things – preparation and mental fitness.

We do not know what will happen in the future, so we have to be prepared, not just for what we think will happen, but for all the possibilities of what could happen. Gideon Malherbe speaks directly about this preparation in his talk on Scenario Planning.

But, being prepared is only part of being lucky. Just because we might know what to do, does not mean we have the capability to do it. Do we have the mental fitness to see, analyze, adjust and execute. More importantly, have we practiced seeing, analyzing, adjusting and executing. What would happen if your volume suddenly doubled (being lucky)? Do you have the mental fitness to pick up the pace, reorganize your sequence, focus on strategic constraints?

Tell me about a time when you were lucky?

Time Management

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“Jerome, by that look on your face, you seem a bit overwhelmed,” I observed.

“Is it that obvious?” he said, then looked around. “I guess you can see by the stacks of stuff on my desk that I am a bit unorganized.”

“That, and the scared look on your face,” I replied.

“I just, I just don’t seem to have enough time to get everything done,” he stammered apologetically. “I guess I need a course in time management.”

“Jerome, time cannot be managed. We can only manage ourselves in relation to time. So, you don’t need a course in time management, you need a course in self management. Look around your desk, at all the stacks, where is your focus, where is your attention?”

“I guess it’s all over the place,” Jerome surmised.

“Don’t guess, be deliberate. You see, you don’t have enough time, because you are all over the place. If you could determine your focus, the best place to focus your attention, you would have all the time to plan, to organize and determine next steps. If you are focused on the right thing, the right purpose, you will know in a nanosecond what needs to be done and what needs to be discarded. If you don’t have a focus, if everything has your attention, then you will probably have to carry around an organizer.”

Controlling the Future

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“We have the forecast,” Samuel said. “All on a spreadsheet. We know what we need to sell by the end of this quarter.”

I looked up, smiled. “Do you mean, you know what you hope for? Do you mean, based on your explanation for the shortfall last quarter? Or is this just a guess?”

“Well, none of those. It’s just what we believe the CEO would be happy with,” Samuel explained.

“It’s nice to have an agreed upon target,” I surmised, “but do you think it will just happen from the number on the sheet or are you going to make it happen? Do you think you have the power to intervene on what will happen?”

“We are going to try,” Samuel looked determined.

“What will happen, will happen,” I replied. “Are you prepared to intervene in what will happen?”

“I told you, we will put in our best effort.”

“And, what if your current best effort isn’t good enough? Are you prepared? Look, your forecast is a target, not a predictor. We don’t know what is going to happen, nor do we control it. We don’t control what customers do. We don’t control what our competitors do. We don’t control how our supply chain performs. The only thing we can do is to prepare for whatever may happen. So, when it does, and it will, we are prepared. What does that preparation look like?”

You Are Part of the Problem

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“You make it sound like the project failed, because it was our fault,” Roland pressed back. “The customer was being unreasonable.”

I held up my hand. “Stop,” I said. “Your customer came to you with a project. Projects are full of problems. They came to you for solutions. The first rule in being part of the solution is not to be part of the problem. Your explanation sounds eloquent, even reasonable, but your customer did not come to you for an explanation. Your explanation tells me more about you than it does about the project.”

Roland’s face turned glum. “So, we learned about the difficulty of the project, the time pressure of the deadlines, the negative demeanor of the customer. You said we missed something in our post-mortem.”

“What you missed,” I continued, “was your own contribution to the problem. You knew the complexity in the project, but mis-estimated your team’s capability to deal with the complexity. You knew the time pressure, but did not know your team would mis-fire in the face of that pressure. You knew the customer was prone to anger, but did not prepare to manage expectations. These are the lessons your mistakes were trying to teach you. Until you face those lessons, your next project will see a similar outcome.”

Long Term Consequence

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“Clarity, competence, habits, conscientiousness. There’s more?” Mariana asked.

“I told you that making performance necessary was not a simple sleight of hand, or even a hat trick of three,” I said.  “The most powerful element of necessity is consequences. And, I am not talking about pizza for the team for a job well done. Necessity becomes a part of a person’s life.  Long term consequences. Over a decade, the difference in a person’s life has to do with clarity of aim, competence to perform, positive habits that build momentum and conscientiousness to persist toward the goal, in spite of obstacles. That difference is the consequence that matters in our quality of life.

“For you, as a leader, you must surround yourself, build your team with people who see performance as necessary. Not only for your goals, but for their own personal aspirations.”

Necessity Requires?

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“If I want to make high performance necessary, I have to be clear,” Mariana repeated. “And, I have to make that clarity understood. Not what I understand, but what my team understands.”

I smiled. “And there is more.”

“More?”

“More. You can make the performance standard clear, but the team may not have the competence to make it happen. Necessity requires competence. A team without competence, in spite of necessity, will never perform at standard. Necessity requires both clarity and competence.”

Mariana nodded. “And, if they are not competent?”

“You are the manager,” I replied. “If the team members are not competent, why did you pick them?”

“At the time, I didn’t know if they were competent. They looked competent, sounded competent. I thought they had potential, that’s why I picked them.”

“Competence starts with potential. You assembled the team. Then, what did you do?”

“Well, we started with training,” she explained.

“You described, you demonstrated, they tried, you coached, they tried again, they practiced, you tested, they practiced more. You put them through drills, pace and quality. Pace and quality, until you, as the manager were satisfied at their level of competence. Necessity requires both clarity and competence.”

Mariana sighed acceptance.

“And, there’s more.”

More Powerful Than Yelling

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“We missed our target,” Mariana complained. “Again, we missed our target.”

“How so?” I asked.

“There are just so many hours in the day, so many minutes in the hour. I just can’t get the results we hoped for,” she explained.

“You are not getting the performance you want because you have not made it necessary,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Mariana wanted to know.

“Raise your hand,” I continued. “Raise your hand as high as you can.”

Mariana was puzzled but complied.

“Now, raise it higher,” I smiled.

Her head dropped, but she raised her hand higher.

“So, why didn’t you raise your hand as high as you could, when I first asked?”

“I don’t know,” Mariana replied, still puzzled.

“You didn’t do it, because it was not necessary. I did not make it necessary for you to perform at that higher level.”

“So, to make performance necessary, high performance necessary, as a manager, what do I do? Yell at the team?”

“Yelling only works in the short term and is only practiced by parents who have no children. Parents who have children know that yelling does not work. Yelling does not create necessity. Necessity is much more powerful than yelling.” I nodded.

“So, how?” Mariana was curious. “If necessity is so powerful, how do we create necessity?”

“There are many ways,” I continued to nod. “Let me ask again. When I first asked you to raise your hand as high as possible, you thought you did, but you didn’t. Why not?”

“Well,” Mariana thought harder, “I thought you just wanted me to raise my hand high. I didn’t know you wanted me to stretch.”

“Part of necessity is clarity. Not clarity in my mind, but clarity in your mind. Clarity in the mind of the team. We cannot make something necessary unless the standards of performance are clearly perceived by the team.”