Benchmarking Success Factors

Story from my 6-year-old:

She: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

Me: "I don't know."

She: "To get a Mars Bar. Ta-Dahh!"

Me: "...I don't get it."

She: "Neither did the chicken..."

As we all know, that chicken has been risking its life for years, crossing many of the major highways around the world, and usually for no greater reward than the gratification of getting to the other side.

Does your organisation have any greater reward than that in mind when it recruits new employees? Or is it just the gratification of completing the process and opening another personnel folder?

I would guess you would be pretty disappointed and surprised if you had to admit that the process of recruitment is less well executed now than it was ten years ago. Almost certainly it is done better now - smoother processes, better systems and so on. Here's the more critical question:

  •  is your recruitment process delivering more star performers to your organisation now than it was ten years ago?

In other words, has all those years of selecting staff made your organisation more intelligent about picking the ones you really want; has your organisation learnt from the huge volume of experience?

To my mind one of the most valuable exercises is to analyse subsequent performance against characteristics measured during recruitment. For a particular role (for example salesperson or call-centre operative or driver), what characteristics show up in those who are subsequently stars but are absent in the average or underperformers? Find just one statistically significant factor and you are on to something.

Or does the chicken just keep crossing the road?

One Size Fits... Some

Great article by Robert Simons in the July/August HBR - "Designing High-Performance Jobs". Simons looks at 4 "Spans"* - Control, Accountability, Influence and Support - and how these can be tweaked in designing roles. Very thought provoking.

Caveat on this (and 101 other recent HBR articles) is that it fundamentally assumes we are all the same and can be motivated in the same manner. So for example, Simons explains how to create an "Entrepreneurial Gap", by giving someone a shorter Span of Control and a longer Span of Accountability: in other words, making them responsible for results which will demand access to resources they don't have. Simons appears to assume that any executive worth her or his salt will be turned into a rampant entrepreneur by this tension. If a particular individual doesn't perform in this situation, then presumably they have identified themselves as being "not 'A' material".

Research data suggests something a little different, starting with the insight that only around half the population are motivated in some degree by a challenge, while the other half are motivated by situations in which they are confident they can succeed. Simplifying things a little, you could vastly improve the success rate of Simons' insight by creating Entrepreneurial gaps for those who need a challenge, and excluding them for those who do not. And if you are tempted to say "but we only want the people who eat up challenge!" you need to know that performance of a challenge-averse person who has access to the resources and support that they need can far outstrip that of someone who is happy in the Entrepreneurial Gap.

*if you are familiar with Jacques' work on Span of Control - Simons is using the term in a significantly different way.

Leverage Conflict

Not too many of us enjoy conflict. "[I'll do] anything for a peaceful life," is a common throwaway line, both at work and at home.

Fact is, any situation totally free of conflict is inherently dangerous.

Conflict of itself is generally not all that productive, and probably usually counter-productive; I am certainly not voting for war here. But the existence of, or potential for, conflict says something extremely positive:

    Here are people with different perspectives on reality.

No conflicting perspectives means no conflict and no real hope of coping with a complex world of paradox and competing demands.

So the challenge is not to defuse conflict but rather to tease out the differing visions of reality that drive it - and harness that difference to your mission. As true for making a home and raising kids as it is for leading a FTSE 100 company or a major public sector organisation.

Flying to America

Launching any strategy is like hiring a small plane in which to fly from the UK to America. Of course you check the engine log and kick the tyres and speak to the met officer, but surely there is one more question you just have to ask:

    How far does she go on a tank of fuel?

The best maintained aircraft in perfect flying conditions and with a full tank of Avgas, but which has an operational range of less than 3000 nautical miles is going to get you wet if you try flying direct. So you adjust your route to take in fuelling stops at Iceland and Greenland or whatever. It's obvious.

So why do so many of us launch strategies without first checking organisational capacity?

That gives you: launch, fly, fuel warning light, crash and die.

Jim Collins' research-based work "Good to Great" came to the surprising conclusion that what he called "Level Five Leaders" (leaders like those in his study who had taken enterprises from average to exceptional performance and sustained that over the long term) were those who would first make sure they had the right people on the bus, and in the right seats, and only then decide where to drive the bus.

This grates with the popular view (the one which Collins and co expected to find in their results) of a visionary leader announcing the strategic direction and inspiring everybody to get on board with it.

I have a slight variant on this approach, which may be somewhat easier to execute under pressure, namely that leaders are right to try to understand where things should be headed, but they then have to run a reality check based on organisational capacity:

    "What is possible for us as we are today?"

Once that is established and we have won ourselves some respite by tackling tough but achievable goals as we are, then we can focus on capacity building that will fit us for the final envisaged strategy; and we can launch sections of that as the appropriate capacity comes on stream.

It's obvious when you see it. "What is the capacity of my organisation?" "What could we be?" "How do I build that capacity?" Surely these are fundamental questions for any Chief Exec.

Fail to ask those questions and you are more like the pilot in a true travellers tale reported in the Lonely Planet Newsletter about 15 years ago. A western traveller was travelling on an internal flight in southern China and the flight was starting to get a bit bumpy when the air hostess came on the intercom and said in English:

"There is a very severe and dangerous storm between here and Chengdu, but we are flying on because our Captain is a very brave man."