StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 18 – An Interview with Roxanne Emmerich, author of Thank God It’s Monday!
StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.
Special Edition 18 – An Interview with Roxanne Emmerich, author of Thank God It’s Monday! explores how to create a workplace environment that engages the hearts and minds of employees and customers; resulting in increased growth and higher profits. During our discussion, Roxanne Emmerich, President and CEO of the Emmerich Group and author of Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love
- tangible bottom line results companies with engaging workplaces achieve over their competitors
- steps leaders can take to make their organization more engaging and motivating and sustain the cultural change
- how junior managers can drive this organizational transformation
Additional Information
In addition to the outstanding insights Roxanne shares in Thank God It’s Monday!
Final Request…
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About the Author
Roxanne Emmerich, author of Thank God It’s Monday!
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Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 6 – Three Whys Deep
Executives, managers, and individual contributors familiar with the day-to-day workings of their organizations undoubtedly know or have contrived the reason for ‘why things are the way they are.’ Beyond this understanding, sometimes at an unconscious level, these individuals will perceive one or more drivers to these organization shaping whys. What remains unseen and unthought-of are the tertiary and lower level drivers to why the business performs as it does. It is here that truly useful insight can be gained; insight enabling the foundational changes needed to alter the organization’s direction and propel it to the next level.[wcm_restrict plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]
To be of real value, business performance assessments must get to tertiary and lower drivers; otherwise they are nothing more than simple collections of already known data. Assessors should therefore strive to ask three whys deep before drawing their final conclusions on organizational performance.
How to Get to the Third Why
Getting to the third why and its valuable insight can be challenging, after all, these drivers are largely outside of the organization’s collective conscious. Therefore, the following method is offered as a means of third level driver identification.
Step 1: Identify and Document the Strength or Problem
Variability increases the further away from the source of organizational strength or challenge assessors probe. Therefore, it is critically important to precisely and concisely identify the strength or problem statement first. This statement should be documented and discussed by the assessment team to ensure unity of understanding.
Step 2: Brainstorm Possible Level 1 Causes of the Performance Strength or Problem
Performance drivers not considered by the assessment team, particularly at Level 1, may prevent the team from identifying the one insight that leads to breakthrough growth. Therefore, it is important at this stage to consider all possible performance drivers.
The most effective means of ensuring all potential performance drivers are considered is to consolidate the assessment team’s collective experience in a performance driver identification brainstorming session. The outcome, the list of potential performance drivers, should be documented and communicated with the entire assessment team to ensure a common understanding.
Step 3: Validate the Level 1 Performance Drivers
Once a list of potential Level 1 performance drivers has been created, it will be important to identify which drivers play an active role in organizational performance. Only those impactful performance drivers will be considered in Step 4.
It is important to remember that not all identified potential Level 1 performance drivers will actually exist within the organization. Additionally, some drivers may exist but have little or no influence on organization behavior and so can be disregarded. Finally, validation of the relevance of the potential performance drivers will typically require some combination of document reviews, personnel interviews, and in-field observations along with the subsequent data analysis and calculation.
Step 4: Brainstorm Possible Level 2 Causes of the Performance Strength or Problem
Like Step 2, it is important to leverage the collective experience of the assessment team in identifying potential causes of Level 1 drivers. As before, these potential drivers should be documented and socialized with the entire assessment team to ensure a common understanding.
Step 5: Validate the Level 2 Performance Drivers
Assessors should follow the approach described for Step3. Note that at this point, the reasons for organizational behavior are becoming more vague to both leaders and staff members. At this point, the diverse experience of outsiders, internal and external, become invaluable in ‘seeing’ past organizational predispositions and to the existence of performance drivers; particularly undesired drivers and those conflicting with the organization’s values or self image.
Step 6: Brainstorm Possible Level 3 Causes of Performance Strength or Problem
and
Step 7: Validate the Level 3 Performance Drivers
These steps are a repeat of Steps 4 and 5 respectively. Insights of organization outsiders become increasingly important now as conclusions drawn should be well outside of the organization’s conscious. Whenever possible, driver validation should be supported by quantitative or a significant amount of collaborating qualitative evidence. If not already being done, assessors should routinely brief stakeholders to ensure ongoing buy-in for their conclusions.
Step 8: Conclusion Documentation and Communication
As with all self assessments, the conclusions reached should be well documented and communicated to key stakeholders. Documentation should include enough detail that later readers of the assessment will not only understand the conclusion reached but will be able to logically follow the evidentiary reasoning for it. Communication should motivate those who can preserve good or improve on poor performance to do so.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]
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Additional Resources
Several other StrategyDriven best practices work in concert with Three Whys Deep to ensure assessment teams reach insightful, value adding, and robustly supported conclusions including:
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers (Continued)
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 4 – Use of Independent Assessors
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 6 – Multidiscipline Teams
- Decision-Making Best Practice 4 – Identify the Target
StrategyDriven Leadership Conversation Episode 1 – An Introduction to Leadership Effectiveness
StrategyDriven Leadership Conversations focus on the values and behaviors characteristic of highly effective leaders. Complimenting the StrategyDriven Management & Leadership articles, these conversations examine the real world challenges managers face every day that are not easily solved with a new or redesigned process and instead demand the application of soft leadership skills to achieve a positive outcome.
Episode 1 – An Introduction to Leadership Effectiveness introduces the concept of leadership effectiveness by exploring what leadership effectiveness is, the characteristics and behaviors exhibited by effective leaders, and the impacts of organizational culture and situational conditions on leadership effectiveness.
Final Request…
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Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Leadership Conversation!
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Recommended Resources – An Interview with Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
Additional Insights: An Interview with Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
StrategyDriven contributors recently interviewed Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 5 – Seek Local Participation for Context
Properly performed self assessments provide business leaders with deep insights as to what is working well and opportunities for improvement within a business function, area, or process. These insights become even more beneficial when the practices and results of top performers are used as a reference or benchmark for the evaluation. Best practices, however, are not always relevant to every situation or circumstance. Therefore, it is important to consider local context when evaluating performance against accepted best practices.[wcm_restrict plans=”47750, 25542, 25653″]
No one better understands the local performance context than those who work within it every day. These individuals know from experience what drivers, written and unwritten, cause the organization to function as it does. For this reason, business performance assessment teams benefit most when receiving the local perspective from an objective, top performing member of the organization being assessed.
Important to the success of the business performance assessment team, including the local content provider, is the clear definition of this individual’s role. The context provider should not be assigned to the assessment team to defend his or her organization or to ‘soften’ the assessment team’s findings and recommendations. A context provider’s role is to provide:
- perspective of the organization’s performance over time
- insight to the cultural and behavioral norms accepted within the organization, both written and unwritten
- historical events driving implementation of policies, practices, and procedures
- organizational circumstances and situations incompatible with the specific best practices being considered
- guidance as to whom the team should interview and/or observe to gain additional insight; including making introductions to these individuals
- direction as to how needed documents and information can be obtained
- facility tours and access guidance/coordination
If the business performance assessment is formally presented, the local context provider should attend so to be available to offer the stakeholders receiving the report any additional perspective they may desire.
Final Thoughts…
Participation on a business performance assessment team is a broadening experience; offering team members an opportunity to learn about the organization as well as interact with senior leaders. Therefore, the position of local context provider should be given to those rising stars who will use the opportunity to further their professional growth. Additionally, because the local context provider gains firsthand experience with the business performance assessment process, these individuals are excellent candidates to serve on the assessment teams evaluating other parts of the organization; yet another development opportunity for the rising star.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”47750, 25542, 25653″]
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