Be Different or be dead

May 23, 2022

This is why 6/10 is an awesome personal score

Source: Unsplash

If you achieved a 6/10 on your performance appraisal at work would you be happy? Would others view your mark as a sign of success? Would you declare what you did during the year to be an amazing achievement?

I doubt that 60% would send you to lofty heights emotionally. Rather it would probably suggest that you are buried somewhere in the pack of averageness and that you are under performing.

That’s a shame.

Why is it that we view incredibility as a 9 or 10 and not a 6?

Many performance appraisal systems are loosey-goosey

We’ve all been victims of a soft loosy-goosey performance evaluation system that quite frankly exists in most organizations.

These systems are based on theoretical notions like:

— performance goals need to be “realistic “.
— really tough objectives will demotivate individuals and they will shut down.
— the objective of any performance management process should be to get a normal distribution of evaluations around the mean; there should be as many above-mean ratings as there are below-mean ones.

The truth is that in most performance management systems, goals are set at too low a level and performance ratings are inflated; it is relatively easy to achieve a 7/10 or higher in most organizations — this means that rather than results being evenly distributed around the mean performance rating, they are skewed to the right.

So, when someone gets a 6, they certainly don’t view themselves as over achieving, yet their performance could be above average or better if the performance system were not dysfunctional. Furthermore people who find themselves in this situation become demotivated and unsatisfied with their job.

And, if you’re a 9 in a system where everyone knows the success criteria for exceeding and excelling performers is watered down, your achievement is met with ‘ho-hum’ rather than excitement and celebration. Again, a demotivating event when it should be one of ebullience.

If the challenge is tough, a 6 should be accepted as reflecting a worthwhile achievement; it should be cherished.

I recall a situation in my company where the CEO declared that there were too many exceeding and exceptional performers as judged by the HR performance evaluation process.
“How can we have so many apparent stars when our corporate performance is below our expectations?” he asked.

His view was that there was a disconnect between how we judged people and the performance in the company that was achieved.

Group assessment is a great equalizer

He changed the system. He stated that there would be no more than 10% of managers/leaders who could be in the exceeding/excelling category and that there would be peer group assessment of the proposed ratings for every manager.

The way it worked was that every manager would present the performance ratings for each of their direct reports to a group of peers, where they would have to defend why they were giving a particular rating knowing that only 10% of the overall group of direct reports could be rated as exceeding or excelling.

So if I proposed to rate one of my direct reports exceeding job expectations at an 8 rating, I had to give evidence that supported my view.
My peers then had the opportunity to challenge my rating based on how they saw my direct report and how they viewed my report in comparison to their own.

Debates raged on and the process eventually resulted in the desired distribution of performance ratings. In fact we were instructed to continue with these group evaluations until the CEO’s objective was achieved.

Managers who were initially rated an 8 or 9 were lowered to a 6, 7 or lower and some were actually raised from the meeting job expectations level to exceeding performance.

What happened then was truly remarkable although it took time to achieve.
After a few years of going through the peer group evaluation process, people began to look at 6’s — or 5’s for that matter — differently.

They began to be (correctly) viewed as worthy measures of challenging performance. It took some doing to get a 6 was a familiar topic of conversation around performance evaluation time.

A ‘6’ became a ‘9’

A 6 became a worthy achievement because goals were set to be challenging to achieve, and overrating of performance was all but extinguished.

So if you’re in HR, encourage management to set challenging, unreasonable objectives for their people and introduce a peer ratings adjudication process to ensure that ratings better reflect performance.

If you’re stuck in an organization where the culture is such that 6’s are disparaged, it’s a sure sign that performance evaluations are overly inflated and people are over rated for the work they’re doing.

Find a culture where 6’s are cherished and you’ll know that leadership sets tough challenging goals and expects overachieving performance as the norm.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 5.23.22 at 02:16 am by Roy Osing
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May 10, 2022

What is breakaway leadership and how can you achieve it?

What is ‘Breakaway Leadership’ and how do you achieve it?

Breakaway Leadership dispels the MYTHS out there that a leader must:

❌ Have charisma.
❌ Have vision to ‘see in the future’.
❌ Command and direct people.
❌ Act with precision.
❌ Delegate, NOT micromanage.
❌ Be ‘BIG PICTURE’ minded and not get bogged down in detail.

“Leadership charisma is ‘communications on steroids’ and a classic case of style over substance.”
#Audacious

Breakaway Leaders, on the other hand, practices Audacious Unheard-of Ways focused on:

✔️ DIFFERENCES not similarities.
✔️ THE ONLY ONE—not one of many.
✔️ ’CRAZY’, not normal.

“Gem #1 that will make you a dauntless leader — STOP! doing stuff.”
#Audacious

✔️ CONTRARIAN not ‘going with the flow’.
✔️ PRACTICAL MOVES not theoretical textbook prescriptions..
✔️ EXECUTING and learning, not planning.
✔️ REACTING not predicting.
✔️ CUSTOMERS not products.
✔️ SERVING not selling.
✔️ INDIVIDUALS not crowds.

“Gem #2 that will make you a dauntless leader — STOP! following so many textbooks on leadership.”
#Audacious

✔️ “How can I HELP?” leading not “Do this!” managing.
✔️ CREATING not copying.
✔️ Helping FRONTLINERS not following the boss.
✔️ MICROMANAGING—DIY—not excessive delegation.

Food for thought and, for those leaders who want to step up their game, the necessary ingredients for an amazing and successful career.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 5.10.22 at 07:01 am by Roy Osing
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May 9, 2022

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers.

Ever asked yourself these questions?

— “Am I intelligent?”
— “Am I qualified?”
— “Am I skilled?”
— “Am I competent?”
— “Am I good enough?”
— “Am I capable?”

Probably, at some point in your working life, one of these questions has crossed your life.

But have you ever asked yourself “Am I rare”?

You may not have, and yet this is the most important question of all to ask.

RARE people are:

▪️The ONLY ones who do what they do
▪️Special
▪️Unique
▪️Memorable
▪️Unforgettable
▪️One of a Kind
▪️Distinctive
▪️Stand outs in a crowd
▪️Weird in an amazing way

All the qualities of someone who is noticed in the crowd.

Someone who will attract attention.

Who others will notice.

Who will have a chance to show what they’ve got BEFORE others more commonplace.

BE RaRE.

BE the topic of conversation and object of someones attention.

BE the ONLY one who offers unique solutions to problems.

BE contrarian.

BE creative not a copycat.

RaRE is the prerequisite to success.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 5.9.22 at 04:11 am by Roy Osing
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April 25, 2022

Why winning customers is more important than keeping them

Source: Pexels

Why winning customers is more important than keeping them.

How do you build a loyal customer base that is impervious to the sirens who try to lure them away from you with their enticing promises?

I’ve spent considerable space in this blog talking about how to build customer loyalty.

The challenge tends to be multifaceted in its set of solutions with no single silver bullet that will do the job.

Here are some specific tactics I’ve mentioned in other articles on the topic:

— recruit people who like to serve humans.
— abolish the dumb rules, policies and procedures in your organization that your customers don’t want to play by that only piss them off.
— create an empowering rule system to ‘say yes’, not one that is controlling and ‘says no’.
— listen to the frontline and do what they say you should do to improve how customers are served.
— put in place a service recovery strategy that is enacted whenever you screw a customer over.

If you fix your OOPS! and surprise me with something I don’t expect, I will forget the mistake and remember what you did to atone for your sins.

— allow frontline people to bend a rule in favor of the customer when it makes sense to do so.
— give your special marketing deals to your loyal customers first before offering them to customers if your competitors (this is a classic lie most organizations tell: they say they want to encourage and reward a customer who has been loyal to them for many years, but refuse to offer them the same special deal they offer someone who they want to attract from a competitor).
— pivot you’re call centers away from call processors with cost management as the priority to ‘loyalty centers’ where caring for people is the key— and don’t outsource them.
— forget about what your competitors are doing to take your customers; worry about what YOU are doing to KEEP them.

Although these tactics are proven to be effective in retaining customers, for long term benefits they need to be expressed within a cultural context.

They need a cultural framework that defines the people in the organization should value loyalty above anything else and that they should behave a certain way in order to earn it.

In my experience, this cultural context is best expressed this way:

In order to build long term customer loyalty, we must do whatever it takes to ‘win the customer’s business every day’.

In other words, if we want the customer’s loyalty forever, we need to have a ‘win their business everyday’ mindset that permeates the entire organization.

▪️We need to earn the right to serve them, not expect that since they are a customer of ours today, they will be a customer tomorrow.

▪️It’s an active expression connoting proactivity rather than a passive approach to ‘managing the account’.

◾️It’s a drive to take action to retain their business rather than assume the business is ours and react when we think it’s in jeopardy.

The key words in this value statement are: ‘Whatever ‘- ‘Win’ - ‘Business’ - ‘Everyday’

‘Whatever’ — there are few limits when it comes to keeping the customer on our side in every department of the organization.

Everyone’s job is to go all out to find appropriate ways to do what the customer wants.

And notwithstanding that every organization has rules and policies, there is substantial latitude given to step outside the rule system and do what’s needed to meet the customer’s needs.

‘Win’ — treat every customer engagement as if it represented a new sale. Expend the same amount of energy engaging with an existing customer as you would trying to win a customer away from their current supplier.

It’s amazing to me how much time and money most organizations invest in trying to either lure someone away from another company or win back a customer who was lost to a competitor.

The extra effort and cost made to ‘offer 3 months free service’ or ‘give away a TV’ should be reserved for loyal customers first and everyone else second but it is rarely done.

‘Business’ — get away from the notion of ‘managing the account’. Your actions with an existing customer are to expose problems and opportunities for them and new business for you.

It’s a proactive approach you take for every encounter you have with a customer who has been with you for some time.

The questions you ask all point to uncovering the issues they have that can be accommodated by your product and service solutions. The ‘How’s it going?’ call isn’t that at all; it’s prime objective is to create business value for the customer.

‘Everyday’ — winning their business isn’t an occasional act; it must be practiced every time out. You can’t take time off from this obligation. Every customer engagement must have ‘winning their business’ as the expected outcome.

Most organizations declare how important customers are to them and that they want to serve them in an exemplary way. Yet the culture of these organizations tells a different story; it values other principles.

In fact look at their performance planning system. Does it specifically measure an individual’s performance in the above categories?

If someone is not recognized and rewarded for how they contribute to and achieve the outcomes needed to build customer loyalty then nothing productive happens towards this goal.
Serious organizations ‘bake’ these behaviours into their rewards system rather than simply declaring their aspirational intent.

Only a ‘win the customer’s business everyday’ culture will produce a stream of loyal customers.

I challenge you to look at your actions and test them with the approach I advocate here to determine whether your organization is serious about procuring loyal customers or merely stating the intention but continuing to do the same-old, same-old things you’ve done in the past.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 4.25.22 at 03:34 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink