Programme aims

To produce a leadership programme for managers that will motivate and enable them to participate in the company’s performance improvement objectives. 

Objectives

At the end of the programme delegates should be able to:

• understand the company policies on Q&S and their own personal accountabilities
• set challenging targets and expectations for their operations
• embed the safety standards and quality GMP’s
• walk the factory floor with confidence and talk freely and openly with their direct reports and employees about quality and safety issues and practices
• perform consistently at a high level in the Q&S agendas
• review their performance on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis

The programme

The programme consists of three x five hour workshops which will be presented at intervals of two or more days.

Each workshop will be simple, practical, participative, enjoyable, relevant and short and engage a variety of experiences which will involve site visits, discussions, syndicate exercises and presentations.

Executive summary

People have different motives, incentives, knowledge, skills, capabilities, and ideas about what they want and where they want to go.  They also have different ways of thinking about things.  Frameworks, methodologies and measurements like the one described above will not create a performance culture by themselves.

They are tools to make things happen.  They are great at collecting performance data and displaying it effectively (so it can be seen and used); but implementing tools, approaches, scorecards and frameworks without addressing cultural issues tends to simply prop up any existing poor practices.

Communication by telepathy.

Passing measures and targets down (operating principles and standards) but failing to explain why the measures are necessary means people have to second guess what the true objective is.

We as leaders decide that a particular measure is a useful representation of what we want people to achieve but instead of communicating the objective and saying that we believe a particular measure will best measure it; we simply communicate the measure as if it is the objective.  Do our people actually know why they are being measured?  The objective is the most crucial thing.

Sometimes there are so many measures (and targets) that the people on the receiving end are unclear which are important.  What if measures conflict?  (Quality, safety, and delivery).  

When people understand why they are being measured they are able to perform better.  Even if the measures eventually appear to conflict, people’s understanding of their purpose and objectives will help them to make decisions within the framework established. 

The environment and culture in which you place performance is crucial to success.  There is no point in placing people in inadequate conditions or providing the wrong equipment and expecting them to perform well.

A culture of blame

In an environment that has tolerated lack lustre performance but also blames failure, we shouldn’t be surprised when people behave dysfunctionally or distort targets (did you know that ambulances often delay outside accident & emergency department to reduce measured waiting times inside).

A culture of penalties for failure

In consequence, adding more demands requires reports, measures and targets that appear to make little sense.   Failure to deliver is met with penalties that are to be avoided. 

Penalty cultures lead to performance avoidance – if we do nothing we can’t make a mistake – therefore no penalty.

Get local ownership

Our objective should be to enable people to report measures and targets that are useful to them and use them to improve their part of the organisation.  In a performance focused culture, measured output is used locally to improve performance (and gets reported as well).  Leaders set the objectives and let local management (with guidance) determine the measures and how they will be best achieved.  It is about making change happen and managing that change.

Are we just measuring performance or are we trying to improve performance?

A learning (rather than penalty) culture. 

A culture of learning encourages people to demonstrate that they are improving, whereas, the culture of failure and penalty often encourages dysfunctional behaviour.  Give people the opportunity to learn and only penalise them when they fail to do so………….  Engage new psychological contracts which include an agreement to higher performance in the future and acceptance of failure to learn penalty. 

Discipline is still necessary when people persistently fail to learn but that is a different problem to deal with and falls outside the scope of what we are going to achieve.