If we previously talked about what individuals, teams and organizations can do, expressed in skills, competences, abilities, let's now start with the more business-like question: "Where are we going?" (and how is it going)? It might sound like an episode of "On the track" but the analogy is not completely stupid, because as a management you want your organization to understand where you are going on 10 points, worst 8. If most people do not fix it until 2 points, well then the message has not reached.
If we look at it from 3 different perspectives, we believe that it is about:
Individual: What is my potential that allows me to take on new, more complex or responsible tasks?
Team: What is our performance - do we deliver on time, do we keep the cost limits and not least, do our customers think that what we deliver is worth the price they pay?
Organization: What direction have we decided, ie what strategy choices have we made and do we succeed in getting our teams and employees to understand and apply any new priorities?
Let us make an attempt to dress these concepts in words and pictures and ultimately make them integrated (integration is always the holy grail in the age of digitalisation).
1. Potential
Potential is an elusive concept that usually means different things in different organizations. Of course, the easiest way is not to describe it at all, but to let each manager assess whether their employees have potential. However, it is not usually appreciated by employees, at least not those with tough managers who do not give them the same opportunities to develop and take on new tasks as other employees.
Better then to have an idea of what potential is. Potential is built up of basic qualities, such as your personality and your cognitive ability (IQ). These are difficult to change, where we mean that it is even wrong to try to change them! We have the personalities and IQ we have, and our ability to build on that makes us both happier and more successful than an attempt at "total makeover".
But potential is also determined by our built-in parts, ie skills we have learned in jobs or courses, knowledge we have acquired through longer studies or through our work, behaviors we have trained on that we know work to do a better job. Yesbox call this “K-components” because the composition of these parts is often expressed as competence requirements at a higher level. In addition, we have gained experience in our lives - in work contexts usually represented via our CVs. Experience demonstrates, for others, what we ourselves know, namely that we have performed tasks, successfully taken responsibility for projects or customers and know what we are talking about when it comes to working in other countries, doing business in foreign languages and other experiences. The CV "proves" that we have used personality and "K-components" in situations similar to the one we are to be hired for, but it is not (yet) a demonstrated competence in the new position!
The last part one should look at to assess a person's potential is Growth Mindset. It is influenced by personality, but we believe that a person can also practice being able to receive feedback, to constantly want to learn more because the world is changing and to feel inspired by the successes of others. Growth Mindset becomes extra important if the world around us changes quickly.
2. Performance
"Have we heard that before?" you think Performance, performance management, performance appraisal, result oriented, dear child has many names. So what does this mean for you and your organization? Let's start with the obvious: No organization is doing well if it doesn't perform: It can create a bad reputation among customers, employees who don't want to do their part in deliveries, or managers who say one thing and do another. What then is cause and effect can be more difficult to sort out. Part of the problem we have with evaluating performance may be that we focus on the wrong part of the organization.
HR has for a long time focused on the individual performance assessment and for that purpose created processes and metrics to evaluate performance. In a manifestation of justice, not least before wage setting, such processes and metrics have since been used uniformly throughout the organization - in different business areas and countries, the HR-led performance process has been implemented in the same way.
But if performance instead takes place in collaboration with others, in teams or departments? Is it right to focus on the individual performance and with the same metrics across the board? We do not believe that. In the name of honesty, it feels strange that what determines an organization's future - its delivery of valuable goods and services - should be evaluated by a support function. Reasonably, those responsible for the delivery or part of the deal are best sent to evaluate the performance. And since the store looks different in business areas or countries, it seems reasonable that the way to do it, and the metrics you use, are different. Some organizations are starting to completely abandon individual assessments - the team sorts out who delivers or not - and if you are thrown out of 3 different project teams, your future is not so bright in that organization. It is Darwinian, but that more organizations should focus more on team delivery measures feels important.
It is not always easy to decide what is a good achievement. Has the salesman who sold for SEK 10 million a year and caused a lot of problems with promises to customers that could not be kept, who have consumed 25% more in sales costs and annoyed colleagues who had to pull in at inconvenient times to achieve their result been more successful than the colleague who sold for SEK 8 million with completely satisfied customers, significantly lower sales costs and colleagues who got to participate and learn and share the success? A "worthy" achievement uses less resources and time to achieve the same goal. A high jumper who manages 2,30 and rarely trains is as good as the competitor who manages the same height but trains 10 times more, but this does not normally work working life similar to decathlon.
Then the performance is affected by the organization's abilities to create value. It is usually not the responsibility of an individual team to improve these abilities, but old IT tools, outdated processes and lack of control can be real handicaps in the pursuit of a good performance. The discussion about abilities leads on to our last part, the organization's…
3. Direction
Friend of Order may wonder why the part that many organizations place the greatest emphasis on - its direction or strategy - comes last in our presentation. One reason is that many organizations attach great importance to honing their strategy only to notice that the world has changed since the work began. Others hold on to a strategy even though most signals indicate that it is not successful - "the strategy was right but the outcome did not turn out as we intended" (can it be recognized?).
So, even if one direction is important, we still argue that our prioritization of the individual's potential and team performance is reasonable. We do not go as far as some who claim that strategic work is meaningless - "vision and day-by-day follow-up are enough". Of course, it depends on what we put in the concept of direction.
We believe that the direction is determined by whether there is a clear vision in the company, a higher goal that provides a reason to work in the organization. An ambitious vision is not a disadvantage - it lasts for a long time and does not change as a result of sudden events. Another reason why a vision is firm is its anchoring in the organization's values, which have been built through anchoring and which support employees in everyday life to make the right decisions.
But even if the vision remains, reality will catch up, which means that the organization's strategy may need to be changed. A strategy is an assessment of a) what it looks like in the organization today and b) what changes need to be made to ensure that the work to achieve the vision is possible. A strategy is not right if it does not lead to the desired result, or put another way: If the strategy does not lead to the desired result, it must be changed. To be effective, the strategy needs to explain how all parts of the organization contribute. If this is done consistently, the strategy should also be possible to express for parts of the organization, and if one also succeeds in breaking down overall goals into parts of the organization, the conditions will be further improved.
The last piece of the puzzle to secure the understanding will then be communication. Changes in a strategy need to be justified and what the change means needs to be explained. That work is not completed until each team and individual has heard the explanation and transformed it into concrete activities and actions based on their role in the organization! It is not uncommon for companies to seek to "cascade" goals down the organization. You usually succeed quite well with this, right down to the last step, the breakdown to the employees. And this is not so strange, because in each stage the communication undergoes the "whispering" and the message is interpreted and explained in part differently for each managerial level. It does not have to be wrong, as different parts of the organization may need to press different parts of the strategy. What you neglect is to follow up the communication and the activities that it results in, that the "top down" exercise you have performed has actually created activities that when you do a "bottom-up" can be added together and correspond to what you want to achieve at the top level.
It is, not least for this reason, that Yesbox tools strive to give individuals and teams the best conditions to develop the individual's potential and team performance. In the long run, we believe this is just as important for the organization's success as the strategic work, and if the organization is given a driving force from the bottom up, there are also better conditions for making strategy changes that lead to the desired result.
If we look at it from 3 different perspectives, we believe that it is about:
Individual: What is my potential that allows me to take on new, more complex or responsible tasks?
Team: What is our performance - do we deliver on time, do we keep the cost limits and not least, do our customers think that what we deliver is worth the price they pay?
Organization: What direction have we decided, ie what strategy choices have we made and do we succeed in getting our teams and employees to understand and apply any new priorities?
Let us make an attempt to dress these concepts in words and pictures and ultimately make them integrated (integration is always the holy grail in the age of digitalisation).
1. Potential
Potential is an elusive concept that usually means different things in different organizations. Of course, the easiest way is not to describe it at all, but to let each manager assess whether their employees have potential. However, it is not usually appreciated by employees, at least not those with tough managers who do not give them the same opportunities to develop and take on new tasks as other employees.
Better then to have an idea of what potential is. Potential is built up of basic qualities, such as your personality and your cognitive ability (IQ). These are difficult to change, where we mean that it is even wrong to try to change them! We have the personalities and IQ we have, and our ability to build on that makes us both happier and more successful than an attempt at "total makeover".
But potential is also determined by our built-in parts, ie skills we have learned in jobs or courses, knowledge we have acquired through longer studies or through our work, behaviors we have trained on that we know work to do a better job. Yesbox call this “K-components” because the composition of these parts is often expressed as competence requirements at a higher level. In addition, we have gained experience in our lives - in work contexts usually represented via our CVs. Experience demonstrates, for others, what we ourselves know, namely that we have performed tasks, successfully taken responsibility for projects or customers and know what we are talking about when it comes to working in other countries, doing business in foreign languages and other experiences. The CV "proves" that we have used personality and "K-components" in situations similar to the one we are to be hired for, but it is not (yet) a demonstrated competence in the new position!
The last part one should look at to assess a person's potential is Growth Mindset. It is influenced by personality, but we believe that a person can also practice being able to receive feedback, to constantly want to learn more because the world is changing and to feel inspired by the successes of others. Growth Mindset becomes extra important if the world around us changes quickly.
2. Performance
"Have we heard that before?" you think Performance, performance management, performance appraisal, result oriented, dear child has many names. So what does this mean for you and your organization? Let's start with the obvious: No organization is doing well if it doesn't perform: It can create a bad reputation among customers, employees who don't want to do their part in deliveries, or managers who say one thing and do another. What then is cause and effect can be more difficult to sort out. Part of the problem we have with evaluating performance may be that we focus on the wrong part of the organization.
HR has for a long time focused on the individual performance assessment and for that purpose created processes and metrics to evaluate performance. In a manifestation of justice, not least before wage setting, such processes and metrics have since been used uniformly throughout the organization - in different business areas and countries, the HR-led performance process has been implemented in the same way.
But if performance instead takes place in collaboration with others, in teams or departments? Is it right to focus on the individual performance and with the same metrics across the board? We do not believe that. In the name of honesty, it feels strange that what determines an organization's future - its delivery of valuable goods and services - should be evaluated by a support function. Reasonably, those responsible for the delivery or part of the deal are best sent to evaluate the performance. And since the store looks different in business areas or countries, it seems reasonable that the way to do it, and the metrics you use, are different. Some organizations are starting to completely abandon individual assessments - the team sorts out who delivers or not - and if you are thrown out of 3 different project teams, your future is not so bright in that organization. It is Darwinian, but that more organizations should focus more on team delivery measures feels important.
It is not always easy to decide what is a good achievement. Has the salesman who sold for SEK 10 million a year and caused a lot of problems with promises to customers that could not be kept, who have consumed 25% more in sales costs and annoyed colleagues who had to pull in at inconvenient times to achieve their result been more successful than the colleague who sold for SEK 8 million with completely satisfied customers, significantly lower sales costs and colleagues who got to participate and learn and share the success? A "worthy" achievement uses less resources and time to achieve the same goal. A high jumper who manages 2,30 and rarely trains is as good as the competitor who manages the same height but trains 10 times more, but this does not normally work working life similar to decathlon.
Then the performance is affected by the organization's abilities to create value. It is usually not the responsibility of an individual team to improve these abilities, but old IT tools, outdated processes and lack of control can be real handicaps in the pursuit of a good performance. The discussion about abilities leads on to our last part, the organization's…
3. Direction
Friend of Order may wonder why the part that many organizations place the greatest emphasis on - its direction or strategy - comes last in our presentation. One reason is that many organizations attach great importance to honing their strategy only to notice that the world has changed since the work began. Others hold on to a strategy even though most signals indicate that it is not successful - "the strategy was right but the outcome did not turn out as we intended" (can it be recognized?).
So, even if one direction is important, we still argue that our prioritization of the individual's potential and team performance is reasonable. We do not go as far as some who claim that strategic work is meaningless - "vision and day-by-day follow-up are enough". Of course, it depends on what we put in the concept of direction.
We believe that the direction is determined by whether there is a clear vision in the company, a higher goal that provides a reason to work in the organization. An ambitious vision is not a disadvantage - it lasts for a long time and does not change as a result of sudden events. Another reason why a vision is firm is its anchoring in the organization's values, which have been built through anchoring and which support employees in everyday life to make the right decisions.
But even if the vision remains, reality will catch up, which means that the organization's strategy may need to be changed. A strategy is an assessment of a) what it looks like in the organization today and b) what changes need to be made to ensure that the work to achieve the vision is possible. A strategy is not right if it does not lead to the desired result, or put another way: If the strategy does not lead to the desired result, it must be changed. To be effective, the strategy needs to explain how all parts of the organization contribute. If this is done consistently, the strategy should also be possible to express for parts of the organization, and if one also succeeds in breaking down overall goals into parts of the organization, the conditions will be further improved.
The last piece of the puzzle to secure the understanding will then be communication. Changes in a strategy need to be justified and what the change means needs to be explained. That work is not completed until each team and individual has heard the explanation and transformed it into concrete activities and actions based on their role in the organization! It is not uncommon for companies to seek to "cascade" goals down the organization. You usually succeed quite well with this, right down to the last step, the breakdown to the employees. And this is not so strange, because in each stage the communication undergoes the "whispering" and the message is interpreted and explained in part differently for each managerial level. It does not have to be wrong, as different parts of the organization may need to press different parts of the strategy. What you neglect is to follow up the communication and the activities that it results in, that the "top down" exercise you have performed has actually created activities that when you do a "bottom-up" can be added together and correspond to what you want to achieve at the top level.
It is, not least for this reason, that Yesbox tools strive to give individuals and teams the best conditions to develop the individual's potential and team performance. In the long run, we believe this is just as important for the organization's success as the strategic work, and if the organization is given a driving force from the bottom up, there are also better conditions for making strategy changes that lead to the desired result.
