It is rather pleasing to talk to partners and customers today….about performance management and the buzz is electrifying….the topic that prays on so many C level executives minds every working hour….now seems to be gaining hearts and minds of people at all levels of the organisation.
Consistently delivering to the expectations of the various stakeholders, whether internal or external can be a rather lonely role for a leadership team. However, things can really exciting when the leadership team “grabs the nettle” with both hands and really starts to walk the talk about people engagement as this is the key to delivery of long term sustainable performance.
At Avisen, we can speak from personal experience of working, observing and engaging with small, medium. large and very large organisations over the last 10 years who either “get it” or “don’t get it”, and the interesting thing is a key element of those who get it are the leaders who really can connect with their people and are not ashamed to say they dont have all the answers but they know that there is someone in the team who can help them get there.
However, we have also observed that an organisation who may be strong on the people engagement dimension….appear to fall down on either process or technology awareness to deliver the holistic end to end steps you really need to support long term performance. It’s as though they have a “blind” spot on either process or technology or both that seems to steer them away from attacking these areas when actually they can help to make life easier…..
One organisation (who shall remain nameless) is a large multi national retailer who has grown from humble beginnings in UK to be an international powerhouse…..I had the lucky opportunity to work with this organisation over many years and was intrigued to discover that for all the great things it did on process i.e. driving efficiency and cost out of the operation…..and all the admirable stuff it did to keep it’s people engaged it was absolutely in the dark ages in relation to Technology enablement……
In a business sector where margins are tight….I still to this day believe they could move to double digit net performance year on year by investing in driving even more efficiences through technology…..the challenge this organisation has today…and will have for many years to come is lack of investment in this area for decades, which as we all know you cannot turnaround in weeks and months….
Fascinating but absolutely true….. AJT
