Traits of A High-Performance Organisation

Seven important traits of High Performance Culture

A compelling vision
The vision statement of what the company wishes to be in non-financial terms reflects in the employee behaviour of the organisation.

A true-believer psyche
Employees are not concerned with their individual success alone but they believe in their company's vision and its success. Each employee strongly believes that he is part of the organisation and owns it too.

Basic values
At least two to four basic values are observed in high-performing organisations. These simple and down-to-earth values are either implicit or stated.

Dissatisfaction with current performance
Although employees are proud of their organisation, they are not complacent about their current ways functioning. There is a certain degree of restlessness and they try to improve their performance by learning from mistakes.

Respect for peers

Respect of peers through their performance and the desire to be the best is the biggest motivator amongst executives in high-performing organisations.

Committed employees
The idea of a long-term association with the organisation and their colleagues causes employees to behave well with them. They do not exhibit any other behaviour with a short-term association in mind.

Fun

High performing organisations believe in working and playing hard. Success is celebrated almost everyday.

The Employees

High-performing companies invariably attract outstanding performers, they do not settle for anything less. Employees' exhibit a "Can-do" attitude and are Highly Competitive

The system aims at developing employees and maintaining transparency in business transactions, and having clear expectation/evaluation/frequent feedback.

Reference: The Manage Mentor

Managing Global Talent With Integrity

The enormous cultural diversity in today's global economy makes evaluating, assessing, recruiting and managing talent a challenge - perhaps the challenge - for transnational companies. There are several key steps companies and their talent leaders can take to meet that challenge and build a global workforce that delivers high performance with high integrity.

First, contemporary corporations must explicitly establish high performance with high integrity as the foundational goal of the enterprise, recognizing that it should indeed be the goal of global capitalism.

High performance means strong, sustained economic growth based on superior products and services that provides durable benefits to shareholders and other stakeholders.

High integrity means:

a) Tenaciously adhering to the spirit and the letter of formal rules, both financial and legal.

b) Adopting voluntary global standards that bind a company and its employees to act in its enlightened self-interest.

Living the core values of honesty, candor fairness, reliability and trustworthiness, which infuse the creation and delivery of products and services, and guide internal and external relationships.
Combining high performance with high integrity must counter strong pressures to cut corners to make the numbers. It isn't just about avoiding evils and the potentially catastrophic impact of an integrity miss. It is also about creating strong, affirmative benefits for the company, the marketplace and the broader society. Such trust is needed to sustain corporations' enormous power and freedom - even under current regulation - to allocate capital, to hire and fire people, to drive productivity, to invest in new geographies and communities, and to innovate with new products or services.

This is not a frill or a nice-to-have. It is not the initiative of the month. The fusion of high performance with high integrity should be the foundation of an organization. This is especially so for companies seeking beachheads in difficult markets.

During my time at General Electric, whenever I was asked what I lost sleep over, my answer was always the same: emerging mistakes. For understandable reasons, multinationals have embraced the potential of significant new growth in the developing world, touting it at analysts' meetings and in public speeches. At the same time, they are quietly aware of the significant integrity minefields that threaten to impair performance and destroy margins: limited rule of law, endemic corruption, rampant conflicts of interest, erratic enforcement, money laundering, unscrupulous local competitors and hard-to-assess economic and political risk. To meet their dramatic growth projections, transnational companies must navigate treacherous shoals.

Second, corporations must adopt a uniform, high performance with high integrity global culture. Culture is the shared principles and practices that influence how people think and behave. The right culture is not punitive but affirmative. Such a culture only can exist when it flows from top leadership - when aspirations are matched by actions. Integrity principles and practices should be driven deep into business operations, without compromises for tough markets.

An important dimension of such a culture is the adoption of global ethical standards. "Globalization through localization" is one of the mantras of transnational companies. Localization, of course, includes adherence to the financial or legal rules of the specific national jurisdiction. GE's code of conduct, for example, begins: "Obey the applicable laws and regulations governing our business conduct worldwide."

But that's not always enough. In some cases, the answer to questions such as, "Is it according to GAPP?" or "Is it legal?" may not be adequate because formal rules don't address the broad problems facing a company. A corporation may find the best answer is to go beyond required duties and voluntarily impose a higher global ethical standard on itself and its employees.
An organized, systematic process is needed to decide whether to adopt such global standards. Once adopted, these standards should have uniform application and implementation across business units, product markets and geographies as formal financial and legal rules. Examples include ethical sourcing and building Greenfield plants in emerging markets to world, not local, standards.

Another important dimension is hiring "A" players in key leadership positions throughout the company and recognizing that driving performance with integrity into business operations requires resources. In most corporations, there is a constant struggle to find the right people and allocate adequate resources. Unless both happen, the merger of integrity and business processes isn't possible.

Hiring experts inside the corporation is vital and cost-effective for risk assessment and abatement. Inside experts know the company far better than any outsider, and they can act quickly. For example, Jack Welch encouraged me to hire outstanding experts in taxes and environmental programs, who had developed world-class expertise both in government service and private practice. Beyond minimizing and mitigating integrity risks, they also proved extremely valuable to the CEO in transactions and financial planning and in offensive and defensive public policy.

Questions about paying for the integrity infrastructure need to be faced candidly and systematically. There's no way around it: Funds must be found and spent to establish the fundamentals. Unless the CEO makes this a clear performance metric for business leaders, these costs inevitably get shoved to the bottom of the list.

This is a forward commitment, as well: When the company engages in the next round of "10 percent across-the-board cost-cuts," the CEO and other business leaders must fight the temptation to wield the ax in this sensitive area, and instead scrutinize the actual impact of reductions.

Third, performance with integrity education and training must come alive. It must be given the same commitment as training in business skills such as finance, marketing, sales and IT, and employees must be given a voice to raise integrity concerns.

The largest challenge: finding the people, message, method and evaluations that collectively constitute a culturally sensitive, yet globally effective set of communications in each market. Face-to-face sessions with employees unschooled in the company's global culture are essential; Web or paper training are second-best.

For example, GE Healthcare developed a short training case about the now famous but fictitious Mr. Vu, who faced multiple tough scenarios, such as hiring third-party consultants, approving travel and living expenses, dealing with customers' demands for bribes and the use of the GE mark.

Such learning by example isn't easy. Talent leaders will need knowledgeable trainers to develop trust and get the most out of illuminating discussions. GE often found it hard, given the exponential growth in Asian employees, to deliver live, in-context training. Too often, we had to settle for an interactive Web-based approach. This challenge is mirrored in the difficulty of finding multilingual, multicultural leaders who can help the corporation act with local sensitivity and global discipline in emerging markets, while also anticipating contingencies, diversifying operations and finding top talent.

One of the most powerful principles in creating a high performance with high integrity culture, and for ensuring accountability up and down the corporation, is to give every employee a voice. This means encouraging, and indeed requiring, the reporting of concerns about possible violations of financial, legal and ethical standards.

One channel for such voice is a company "ombuds" system that encourages employees to express their concerns, addresses those concerns promptly with professionalism and respect, makes failure to report itself an integrity violation and, of course, sanctions those who engage in retaliation. A vibrant, fair, trusted ombuds system not only detects issues early, before they can metastasize into huge problems, it also deters improper acts inside the company right from the start.

Another channel for employee voice is through the finance, HR and legal functions. These key staff members must reconcile dual, conflicting roles. They must be partners to business leaders and help accomplish performance goals. But they also are corporation guardians and must report legal, financial, ethical and reputation concerns to corporate staff leaders if they have problems raising and addressing them in their business units.

Finally, corporations must develop compensation regimes that do not just pay for performance, but pay for performance with integrity. We can measure integrity by looking at whether leaders have adopted the core performance with integrity principles, are implementing the key practices to achieve them, have created the affirmative culture - through employee surveys and 360 degree assessments - compare favorably to peer companies and have achieved annual performance with integrity goals and objectives. Similarly, the management development process should be aimed, in part, at training future leaders in the principles and practices of high performance with high integrity, especially in international markets.

[About the Author: Ben W. Heineman Jr. is senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School and senior counsel to the law firm of WilmerHale. This article is adapted from his book, High Performance with High Integrity.]

Include Employees in Leadership Transition Conversations

"Uncertainty" is a common word these days, used to describe everything from the economy to the future for America's businesses and workers. Having a succession plan for key management positions is one of the most valuable HR initiatives a company can leverage. During uncertain times, it's imperative for businesses to make sure employees have as much job certainty as possible, but succession planning often is neglected for more immediate concerns.

Just as the country had two and a half months to transition into Barack Obama's administration after eight years of Bush leadership, companies benefit greatly from a planned transition between incoming and outgoing top-level management.

But it's not always that easy. Generally, there are three kinds of transition:

1. An internal candidate's successful transition. This is only possible when a company knows the executive is leaving and has identified a likely successor. It eliminates surprise and enables a smooth, transition with the least amount of distraction and lost productivity.

2. An executive leaves unexpectedly. This is a good opportunity for companies to promote from within, but the news can lead to power jockeying and interpersonal struggles.

3. A company brings in an external candidate. When companies go outside for a new leader, they are implicitly saying to current employees: "You're not good enough to lead," or "Whatever you have been doing in the past, it is not what we need you to do in the future."

Planning is the lynchpin to ensure organizational stability during a change of power. For example, Hilton Hotel Corp. identified succession planning as a top company priority and emphasized this by creating a separate, dedicated succession planning department within the company's corporate structure. Hilton is able to identify different competencies for the most critical management positions company-wide, while highlighting employees with the appropriate competencies who are on track to succeed in different divisions. The company can identify successors for every executive position and ensure minimal confusion and uncertainty in the midst of change.

People likely do not fear change as much as they fear uncertainty. Uncertainty over leadership creates anxiety which leads to decreased productivity and increased turnover. Further, the more uncertain people are about the potential actions of a new leader, the more they may view that person as a threat.

Further, when there is change at top, employees naturally wonder what's next. Defining roles in advance of succession can set employees' expectations and allow them see where they fit into the organizational picture. Transparency and communication before, during and after transition reduce uncertainty and keep performance high.

The fewer surprises a company has, the better it is for employees and the organization as a whole. Creating a robust and active succession plan not only safeguards against surprise, it can contribute to higher productivity and employee satisfaction. Successful succession plans are the byproduct of a smart performance and talent management program that gives companies a clear window into its workforce's skills, strengths, competencies and goals.

Strategic succession plans engage employees at all levels in a dialogue about their company and the future of its workforce. They also empower executives to build the company's bench strength, improve individual employees' career development plans and save time and money.

Nothing communicates the employee's value in a company more than programs that actively seek to develop and advance careers within the organization. The key to succession planning is not to go into the process blind. Using the right tools, including a performance and talent management system, companies can plan for most contingencies in C-level exits. All they need is a little planning.

[About the Author: Steven T. Hunt, Ph.D., SPHR, is the chief scientist at Kronos Inc., a company that empowers organizations to effectively manage their workforce.]

Moving ahead during tough times

It is a seesaw-like situation for executives in the corporate world as each executive tries to justify his personal and professional goals. Pressure times compel top class executives to reveal their true personality. Their determination and composure in such tiring situations reveal their leadership qualities. However each employee can be a leader in his own stride by inculcating perseverance to survive in today's tough world.

Fear factor

Often pressure builds a sense of urgency and forces an individual to arrive at logical solutions for practical problems. When an employee is apprehensive of the outcome of a business strategy he generally tends to evade it thereby complicating the situation. Evading must be the last thing on an employee's mind if survival is his goal.

Away from...

To mobilise organisations, immediacy must be created. Employees though slip into a fear psychosis when faced with immediacy. Fear moves them into immediate action but not necessarily in the same direction. Therefore, all that fear does is to misalign the efforts of individual leaders to motivate employees towards common goals. Fear only brings to naught leaders' efforts to motivate employees. This is further compounded by the stress it produces.
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Corporate health

Stress is the causative factor for many an ailment in the corporate health, leave alone employee personal health. Stressful employees lack creativity and become inefficient. Their perspectives are narrowed down and their problem-solving abilities slacken and learning ceases. Even employee morale diminishes leading to disengagement. Disengagement cannot contribute to peak performance!

The motivating duo

The duo that influences the success of businesses is fear and quite surprisingly leadership. Truly, fear scatters the efforts of employees in random directions. Leadership balances the negative effects of fear in employees by aligning their goals in the desired direction.

Sharing is winning

Pre- defined goals help employees visualise the path they would be treading. Sharing the organisation's vision, mission and values is key to its success.

Good, bad and the best

Identification of ultimate goals unlocks creativity, enhances problem-solving skills and helps utilise resources towards a purposeful mental state. Working towards challenging goals, creates eustress, a positive stress syndrome, which channelises energy. However, directionless movement creates bad stress. The balance between the good and bad stress needs to be delicately managed. Coordination is crucial here. Lack of coordination could paralyse an employee's ability to take on challenges. Therefore, good stress and coordination must complement each other.

The pull effect

Pulling the workforce back into powerful, productive mental state requires effective leadership. Leaders must be positive and shun negative attitudes at the workplace to radiate stress effectively. Spreading positive feelings throughout the team creates intrinsic motivation.

Towards leadership

Extraordinary leaders thrive despite the restrictions imposed by tough and challenging times. That every employee is a leader in himself implies that there must be a storehouse of some intangible inherent characteristics.

Bigger is better. The leader must view the problem in its entirety not in parts. Vision differentiates a leader from a follower. It helps him disentangle the nitty-gritties of a problem that prevent him from resolving it.

Fire from within. Unwarranted faultfinding leads to ineffective teamwork. Leaders must act rationally and objectively, without being carried away by internal conflicts.

First and foremost. Sacrifice is an important characteristic of a good leader. A leader who sacrifices first for his team will earn the loyalty of his subordinates and colleagues.

Calm and composed. A relaxed mind enables employees to make better decisions.
Move them forward. Leaders emphasise on being optimistic motivators during rough times, thereby moving the employees forward towards their goals.

Small leads to the big. Goals must be split into smaller achievable targets. Employees must be rewarded when those goals are achieved. A consistent win in small goals keeps the track of success steady for the employees while motivating them.

Have more of humour. A decent sense of humour even during tough times helps maintain the tempo of work/life balance.

Tripod balance

A motivated team relies on the tripod stand fundamental. So building a motivated team during hardships requires the top management to hire, train and communicate constantly.
Hiring the best is essential because, they make the job of motivating easier. A bad hire for the right job is difficult to motivate.

All employees cannot be perfect but are undoubtedly trainable. A right mix of technical skills, people skills and self-management skills is essential for appropriate training. Training must not only be appropriate, but also adequate. Once trained, employees must be encouraged to take a holistic perspective of their company and replenish their capacity for creativity.

Training promotes competence and therefore, confidence, the latter being an internal motivator. Competence also reduces stress and increases productivity besides improving attitude.

If employees' contributions are not acknowledged, they get demotivated and withdraw. Employees work enthusiastically if their ideas are valued. Talking about uncertain situations help defuse anxiety, which may lead to stress. Truth is an antidote for uncertainty. Therefore, constant communication is an imperative.

Reconnecting people

Once stress is reduced, the onus lies on the leaders to provide a direction to the employees and motivate them adequately and appropriately. Over-motivating the employees could have negative impact too, so leaders must be cautious.

Productivity is about moving forward in a uniform direction once it has been determined with the team consensus. Anxiety and fear are imaginary monsters and employees must avoid fighting them to perform well.

Performance Appraisal Blues

A performance appraisal can be good or bad, depending on the employee. The appraisal, in theory, is designed to provide an orderly way for an employee’s superior to interact with him, usually on an annual basis, to tell him what the company thinks about his job performance and how to improve it by pointing out key positives and negatives about his on-the-job performance over the past year.

Its primary mission is to give feedback to help employees strengthen their capabilities so that they can be more productive members of the organisation, and in the process receive additional compensation or responsibility.

The review is used to convey both satisfaction with an employee’s job performance (leading, hopefully, to a raise) and dissatisfaction (which could be the precursor to a demotion or even a termination).

To grow with an organisation when an employee has received a less-than-sterling review, he has to learn to separate the "learning" areas from the "hurting" parts of the message (i.e. the personal or work related negatives). For the employee, the bottom line of a performance appraisal is often of a fairly short range.

Most employees come out of an appraisal that is critical of their performance understandably upset or angry. One important thing to remember is that the employee is still at the company (not applying for a job) so there's a lot they can do before resigning themselves to being terminated or being forced to leave.

Five keys to help employees to cope with and overcome a bad appraisal

1. Employees should go in with a list of accomplishments that they have accumulated over the past year. They will be surprised at how much they have accomplished.
2. They should go into the review assuming there will be some negatives, and think of the meeting as a way to learn what specific issues they have to work on to get to that next step. It's the boss' job to let the employees know about areas where they can improve, so the employee should try not to be offended. The employees’ goal is to convince the supervisor, in a positive manner, that they are willing to make that commitment.
3. Before going into a review, employees should separate a page into two columns. The first should be headed "Specific Areas of Strength"; the second, "Specific Areas of Improvement." It's very important that they hear both the good and the bad comments, because they will never improve, to their boss' satisfaction, if they deny, in their anger, that there are any areas needing improvement.
4. Employees should ask for clarification and specific examples if they hear generalisations or don't understand what the problem is. But they should try hard not to be too argumentative.
5. Employees should find out how their boss might solve these issues, and ask for another review in 30 days to address these specific issues, to see if headway is being made.
   

Employees should remember that if they spend their time being hurt by or defensive about what is said, and not learning about what they can do to change their boss' perception, they are doing themselves a disservice.

What they should try to accomplish is to leave the meeting with a good idea of what they can do to improve their boss' perception of them, before the next appraisal. The employees should also create an image of a thoughtful employee who is willing to change and able to modify behaviour.

Good jobs are hard to come by, and if employees like their job, this approach will help to give them a fighting chance to assess and correct areas that their supervisor feels may have been overlooked, without allowing personal feelings to dominate.

Reference: TheManageMentor

Staying employable!

Grappling to stay employed? Don't fret, say industry experts, you can make yourself indispensable.

Just 6 months back, who'd have thought employability would become a point of contention. And now, people across the Indian corporate world are having sleepless nights, fretting over how to hold on to their jobs. The key to this, as experts and HR managers say, lies in having the right mindset and certain attributes which will keep you sailing through. Here are some sure-shot ways of staying employable even in a bad economy.

Crisis management skills: This entails the skill of responding intelligently to a certain difficult situation by coming up with effective solutions and viable alternatives. "This is the time to confront and not avoid uncomfortable truths about yourself and the organisation," explains Ajay Soni, business leader - talent & organisation consulting, Hewitt. "It's also important to discuss these brutal facts and act to overcome them," he adds.

Multitasking: In a downturn, a generalist scores over a specialist as s/he can multitask, thereby, creating value. "One should focus on having cross functional skills and be open to different job roles," opines Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst, Gartner. "Many might have latent talent, this is the time to tap that," he asserts. Surely, this also gives many of us the chance to do something we might be good at and have not been able to do.

"Employees must look at smarter ways of doing things, cutting where necessary, and keeping a steadfast eye on growth," - Ajay Soni, business leader - talent & organisation consulting, Hewitt

Customer Focus: This is the time to be closest to your customers, even if there's no business coming in immediately. That's the only way to understanding their needs and be able to reequip yourself and the organisation to meet the new customer demands. "Individuals who have outstanding customer relationship with their clients are the most vital resources for the company as they create sustainable business," notes Sanjay Jha, executive director, Dale Carnegie Training India. "It's important to go beyond the silos within the organisation and be closer to the customer," adds Soni.

Financial Intelligence: It is important to be familiar with the basic of the organisation's top line and bottom line, so that you can estimate the likely impact of your performance and the repercussions of non-performance. "In a downturn, you need people who have their eye on the costs," explains Judhajit Das, chief – HR, ICICI Prudential Life.

Flexibility and Adaptability: Challenging economic environment requires pragmatic response based on a holistic view. "This demands a high adaptability," says Jha. "It calls for energy and enthusiasm to learn new things, explore new roles and responsibilities," elaborates Srini K, head - strategy, HR, Satyam.

Citing the Indian IT case, Chakraborti explains, "Being geographically mobile is critical as big IT firms like Infosys have centres all across." He further adds, "If the business in one centre goes down, employee should be open to relocation to another centre where there's more project work etc." He feels many in the Indian IT sector have a narrow outlook. "Take the recent case of Wipro which faced opposition from employees for shifting them from IT business to BPO business in its Kolkatta centre," he adds. "Employees should deeply reflect on roles in the context of current business environment and modify accordingly," Das suggests.

High Performance Focus: Every sector and business needs high performers, so no matter where you are, you should be seen as a performer. "Employees must look at smarter ways of doing things, cutting where necessary, and keeping a steadfast eye on growth," Soni points out. "You must have the drive to succeed and excel even in the worst of market scenarios," asserts Srini K.

Surely, this is no mammoth task and any one of us can hone these skills by being more self-aware and making an effort. "Individuals can acquire these skills through training, experience, reading and job exposure," says Jha. Chakraborti believes that HR managers have a huge role in fostering these skills in employees. "HR managers should identify employee skills other than what are being used and channel that accordingly," he stresses.

To out it in a nutshell, if you follow these simple tips and adhere to what experts suggest, you will definitely come out a survivor!