What's needed today to achieve breakthrough performance?

According to the Corporate Leadership Council's (CLC) study on High Performance, the conventional approaches to managing/leading performance have delivered gains of about 1% per annum since 2002.  Yet on average, Executives and Managers estimate they will need to lift employee performance by a whopping 20% to meet their organisation's goals over the next few years!

By analysing what the best performing organisations are achieving, they say this is possible. And the key to unlocking this 'Breakthrough' performance?  Increase the 'Network Performance' of employees.

Network Performance is defined as...
"employees effectiveness at improving others performance and using others contributions to improve his or her own performance".

At this point you might note that this is quite a different approach to traditional organisational development programmes which have typically focused on 'Individual Task Performance' i.e. an employee's effectiveness at achieving his/her own tasks and assignments.

Network Performance is essentially about the ability of everyone to freely and willingly transfer knowledge to the benefit of everyone. It includes things like:

• Effectively transferring great ideas from other parts of the organisation into their own work
• Improving procedures and processes based on ideas from others
• Effectively transferring skills and knowledge to co-workers
• Providing useful new ideas for products, services and process improvements to others
• Improving working methods, techniques or tools for others

The ability to achieve any of these comes down to whether your organisations culture actively facilitates them, vs working against them. For example, cultures which ignore or tolerate silos would struggle to get any type of true network performance. And business silos remain all too common today - possibly the one thing that almost all our clients say is an issue for them.

On a related note, this insightful article by Soren Gorhamer 5 New Paradigms for a Socially Engaged Company explores how "companies are realising that it is not enough to get people to show up to work; the real challenge is creating cultures that enhance creativity and innovation" and that's all about getting them working together better.

The article reinforces a number of really important points about why the concept of ‘Network performance’ is so important.

• build a culture that reflects the experience you want your customers to have so that experience comes naturally. For example, it is likely that staff will struggle to deliver great service to customers if they aren't getting it from their own colleagues! Think of the great quote by Sam Walton the founder of Walmart..."It only takes 1-2 weeks for employees to start treating customers the same way the employer is treating the employee"
• look to the wider organisation for the answers and ideas you need. Leaders don't have all the answers but the wider organisation and its customers almost certainly do, so provide the channels that allow that wisdom to be exposed and shared. Internal online community platforms like OBP’s ON2net are designed to be just that for those wanting to share what they know and learn from others
• ensure everyone in the business understands and is engaged around the 'purpose' of the business. It may sound cheesy but unless people really believe in what their organisation is there for, and understand the value it adds to its customers, they won't understand their particular role in achieving it, and you won't get the best out of them. This point was reinforced to us in a video taken at one of our engagement events where a staff member has just realised that he was 'not just an IT person' but had a much more important and significant role in helping to look after the financial welfare of their six million customers. I'm sure this guy feels much more connected to the business now and will look for more ways to deliver the best service to customers
  

Soren finishes his article with this powerful statement...

"The old paradigm was individualistic and focused on thriving to be personally brilliant; the new one is much more social, and it involves creating cultures that enhance innovation in all those present".

Brilliantly said. It's clearly time for everyone in an organisation to be brilliant together.

If your company culture doesn't support an integrated network approach to work, the team at ON-Brand Partners would love to talk about how we can help you build a culture that does.