Building a High-Performance Culture through Identifying your Future Leaders
Creating a culture of high performance and alignment at your organization requires the implementation of a performance/talent management system that rewards those who deserve it and identifies those who fall short.
A high-performance organization depends on managers and employees who, in addition to high performance, exhibit behaviors aligned with the company’s values.
But performance and alignment with company values must be considered separately because there is no direct correlation between them. Successful leaders must be able to navigate these two independent areas of leadership.
Leaders must take these steps in order to improve the performance of their managers, employees, and organization through proper talent management.
- Establish clear and measurable organizational values that translate into observable behaviors.
- Develop a talent management system that measures employee performance against your core values.
- Follow up on the results of your custom performance/values assessment by rewarding, coaching, or terminating your employees.
We must use organizational values to measure performance. It is impossible to achieve executive performance without such values.
Identifying and Measuring the Core Values your Company
Organizational values give performance meaning, so we need to define and measure them. Despite all the information available many organizations fail to translate their values into practical application through the definition of their values.
You should ensure that your organization’s values meet a few essential criteria to avoid this mistake.
- You should provide clear behavioral guidelines in your definition. It should provide your employees with accurate information about how they should behave.
- These guidelines will help you translate your organizational values into observable behaviors.
- Establish a rating system to make these behaviors measurable. A minimum of three rating levels should be used, such as “below expectations,” “meets expectations,” and “above expectations.”
Performance Measurement Based on Company Values
The Values-Based Model
Advocates of the values-based management model suggest that executives, managers, and employees can improve their performance automatically if they implement organizational values through their behaviors.
However, the latest research shows that value-aligned behaviors do not directly correlate with performance.
The Performance/ Values Matrix
Taking this measurement problem beyond the values-based management model, I conclude that we should consider three variables.
- Capability
- Alignment
- Commitment
As stated earlier, we need to evaluate performance and adherence to core values separately because they are separate leadership focus areas.
Using the Performance/Values Matrix, we can compare the impact of both variables independently. As a result, we the can provide the employee valuable information regarding potential areas for improvement by providing insight into how an executive performs and also tells them how they aligns with company values.
In this evaluation, a comparison is made between the quality of the leader’s decisions and how these decisions are aligned with the values of the organization. It allows us and them to gain a very accurate and relevant picture of an executive’s capabilities, commitments, and alignments.
High performance combined with high alignment is the ideal outcome of a Performance/Values Matrix evaluation!
If you would like more information about building leaders and cultures send me an email at Coach@MyTCG.com
