Leveraging Clarity, Capability, Culture and Purpose to enable Fulfilling Performance.
The first of four posts about how to strengthen the fundamental factors that contribute to Fulfilling Performance, starting with Clarity.
Image credit: Pete Linforth
Hello fellow Enablers,
When you open Google Earth, it starts by showing you the whole planet. You can then zoom in on specific places.
The Fulfilling Performance framework is designed to provide a similarly high-level viewpoint to begin with.
We assess a situation from above through its lens and categorise what we see into one or more of the four fundamentals of Clarity, Capability, Culture and Purpose.
We can then zoom into areas that catch our attention and address those which may represent the biggest handbrakes right now.
It encourages us to start at a macro level before getting into micro details.
Strengthening the fundamentals
The stronger we make each of the fundamentals, the more we enable Fulfilling Performance.
I use the word enable because Fulfilling Performance is an outcome. It’s a result that we get when we create the right circumstances. We create the circumstances by paying attention to all four of the fundamentals.
My paradigm is that the capacity to experience Fulfilling Performance exists already within all of us. It simply requires us to create the right circumstances to enable it.
When developing each of the fundamentals, we may find ourselves considering high level factors or minute details. Sometimes we will need to zoom out and sometimes we will need to zoom in.
The framework can be as helpful to senior leaders as it is to the most junior team members. The questions that each needs to be able to answer to perform at a high level are the same. The way they go about answering them will differ according to their level of responsibility.
Our mission statement is:
By creating Clarity, developing Capability, aligning Culture and engaging Purpose, we enable Fulfilling Performance.
In this and the next three posts we will take each of the fundamentals in turn, starting with Clarity, and consider how to enhance them.
I’ll suggest some of the macro and micro level components within each that contribute towards enabling Fulfilling Performance and include examples from the perspective of both a senior and a junior person.
I’ll use examples from an office environment, but the principles apply equally anywhere people are working together towards a common goal.
Create Clarity
From a vision to a task
We have four diagnostic questions to define the four fundamentals.
The Clarity question is:
How clear are you about what you are supposed to be doing and how you are performing against those expectations?
Many components contribute to creating clarity within an organisation.
Some may be formal, structured and well communicated, like the vision, mission, strategy, balanced scorecard, published values, departmental objectives, or individual objectives.
Others may be informal, unstructured and less well communicated, like behavioural expectations, objectives and outcomes of meetings, and performance feedback.
At a macro level we might be referring to the vision for the organisation.
At a micro level I might be delegating a simple task.
As the CEO I may be responsible for making sure that there is a clear vision in place for the organisation and that it is known and understood by all.
As an intern I might be responsible for making sure that visitors can find their way to a meeting room.
Both of those initiatives contribute in their own way to creating clarity.
Communication
To create clarity, I need to communicate.
Effective communication is a two-way street.
The quality of my communication is determined not by how well it is delivered but by how well it is received.
To make sure people are clear on what they are supposed to be doing I need to communicate in ways they understand.
For people to know how they are performing against expectations they need to receive feedback.
This applies at the macro level of communicating a vision or the micro level of explaining a task whether I’m the CEO or an intern.
Once someone knows what is expected and how they are performing, the direction of their performance, whether it is maintained, improves or declines, is determined by a host of factors all of which sit within one or more of the four fundamentals.
Measurement
Creating and maintaining clarity requires measurement.
Businesses often measure their performance against their competitors in terms of market share, product specification, company valuation, customer satisfaction, operating efficiency, and many other key performance indicators.
This approach to measurement can be cascaded down to a department level, for example when salespeople are ranked in a league table, or departments are compared based on efficiency ratios.
Within many teams or even families our interpretation of performance is relative to an expectation that we have set for ourselves or others. We perceive performance as high or low depending on how it compares to what we were expecting.
To enable Fulfilling Performance we need to be explicit about our expectations and provide a means of measuring progress against those expectations.
Reporting
Having agreed our expectations and means of measurement, we need to have adequate methods of providing timely feedback.
This could be a display in a call centre providing real time statistics on customer service levels.
It could be a daily morning meeting of car salespeople reviewing their progress against the month’s targets.
Or it could be a child’s star chart recording incidents of good behaviour on the refrigerator door.
Again it applies at the macro level of an organisation’s annual report or the micro level of deciding whether a child has eaten enough breakfast cereal to earn another star.
Coming up in Release the handbrake!
In my next post I’ll invite you to consider with me how we can develop the fundamental “Capability”.
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Thank you,
Andy