Back in the land of the living!
Back from a conference week…. blimey it sure takes time to get back to the grindstone when you’ve been out of the office for a while.
Anyway - interesting reading from McKinsey…..Sustained Organisation Improvements
If you want to get sustained improved performance you have to perform well on a wide range of management initiatives. And that they can be initiated concurrently; the major gains come from complementarities between practices.
- The carrots and sticks of incentives appear to be the least
effective of the four options commonly used to motivate and encourage
employees to perform well and stay with a company. - Applied
in isolation, KPIs and similar control mechanisms (such as performance
contracts) are among the least satisfactory options for improving
accountability. - Relying on a detailed strategy and plan is far from the most fruitful way to set a company’s direction.
- Command-and-control
leadership—the still-popular art of telling people what to do and then
checking up on them to see that they did it—is among the least
effective ways to direct the efforts of an organization’s people.
Baseline, here’s what Mckinsey suggests
"Accountability, clear direction setting, and a strong culture as the
main foundations of a high-performing company. These outcomes underpin
high levels of organizational performance."
And here’s how the senior team can do it
"Senior executives must provide for clear roles within a structure
matched to the needs of the business (accountability), articulate a
compelling vision of the future (direction), and develop an environment
that encourages openness, trust, and challenge (culture). Each of these
practices, the data tells us, works best in relation to a specific
outcome, but applied in combination they produce much more dramatic
results, for they have a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Increasing the
amount of effort behind any one practice increases the likelihood of
achieving not only its target outcome but also the other target
outcomes, thus making organizations more effective overall."
There is also a useful summary of management and organisational practices at the end of the article.
Easy really!