People Are The How

Measuring performance is critical for any organization. Can you describe one leadership practice you have established to effectively measure the performance of a team?

First, I think performance management at organizations and for individuals is always tough. And so we put a lot of practices in place and then we operate a little bit differently because it's hard to have that perfect practice in place because individuals are individuals and then teams are made up of individuals. What I always tried to do was have the organizational goals and then link team and individual goals to those. And I would say across my career, I was okay at that, could have been a lot better and okay. It was probably better than average.

What do you think when you say that, what do you mean? What do you think you could have done better?

I think maybe it's a part of the changing environment and the information that's available to everybody right now. But I think that experience I had with these network organizations was leading without authority. So I'm thinking more of my top down organization. And I wish always I'd have done a better job of linking the individual goals to their team goals and a better job of linking those team goals to the organization goals. I think I've learned that the how matters, the people or the how and the how are those relationships and the how is the how people work together and how do they come together as a team and really address what are the tough fish? What are the big rocks we got to move?

And you got to roll some of those big rocks up the hill together. Can't do it one person alone.

Yeah. And a lot of times I think we find that we liked ignore the big rock. We worked on all the little rocks. And then at the end of the project, we take a look at that big rock down that hill.

It's still down there.

It’s still down there. That's all people. That's not the leadership of the organization. That's the organization.