PerformanceXpress

Special Edition, October 2008

 

Applying Performance Improvement to Yourself: Sustaining or Recovering Leadership

by Roger Kaufman, CPT, PhD

One lament often heard from human performance technology (HPT) professionals is that they never get the opportunity to talk with or influence a chief executive officer. But they do. Themselves. Each person, including you, is his or her own CEO and, given that, you can make decisions about being your own leader by applying some of the basic concepts and tools of performance improvement.

Leaders then, including you, are like other mortals. You can be your own leader, your own CEO. Sometimes leaders make good decisions, stay relevant, and make significant contributions. Others, often by making poor choices, run out of their ability to lead—themselves or others. Falls from leadership grace are not uncommon—whether one was the CEO of Apple, a spouse, head of a major utility enterprise, an instructional design group leader, head of a major charity, or a parent.

Realities change. And as they do, leaders have the choice of being resilient; reinventing themselves; changing how they think, what they do, how they act; and reaping positive consequences. Others make poor choices resulting in organizational or personal losses, or both. Change, choices, and consequences are vital considerations that are appropriate when leading or when attempting to return to leadership.

A Key Performance Improvement Principle

One element seems to be at the core of successful leaders and successful human beings: they all work to add measurable value to associates, family, external clients, and our shared society. And this is a vital element in successful human performance improvement. The leadership thinking and behavior that works for corporate CEOs will also work for you as your own CEO.

We can learn much from failed leadership. Look at the corpses of once successful organizations and people. One simply has to review the statements (often called “visions” or “missions”) and stated purposes of failures such as Enron, Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac and note that the words implied adding value to all stakeholders (especially stockholders) while their actions were about selfishness, skimming, hiding, and diverting. Organizational collapses are about self-seeking people at the helm who did not use their leadership and their organizations to add measurable value to all stakeholders. Were those pumping out inflated mortgages thinking about those signing up or those who were sold ultimately bad paper, or about their own financials? How about those you know in personal relations? Know any tragedy built upon poor or selfish decisions?

Successful leaders, and those who would recover leadership status, all add societal value. And they do it formally, rigorously, and measurably.

Leadership is about creating the future, and management is about making today operate. Success depends on making useful decisions. Just as a leader can be effective with organizations or groups, one may become one’s own leader and create a better tomorrow for oneself as well as others.

When a leader finds reason (even before a fall and to prevent one) to rethink his or her own pattern of behavior to change the payoffs, there are some very pragmatic guides. These guides are at the base of human performance improvement, including strategic thinking and planning (Kaufman, 2006a, 2006b). These basic value-adding guides can be applied in organizational behavior or in personal and family relations.

Strategic Guides

Strategy is about defining the most useful societal purpose before deciding how to get from where you are to that destination. Tactics deal with the choices for getting you from here to there. With a precise definition of a useful destination, one may then make practical choices on how to get from what is to what should be. To sustain or recover leadership, define and create your own better future.

There are Three Cs1 in Our Lives

We can count on change happening. We can be the victims of change—wait for things to happen and then react—or we can be the master of change by paying attention to the three Cs and proactively create our future. And make it a better future for all stakeholders.

Change. One wag noted that “Change is inevitable except from a vending machine.” Whether maintaining leadership or reinventing it, isn’t it riskier to continue with the predictable-yet-painful (or perhaps unrewarding) than it is to decide to make things better?

Choices. We do make choices. Not making a choice is a choice. Delaying a decision is a choice. Continuing ineffective actions is a choice. No matter what our choices, the consequences are ours to own.

Consequences. What happens to us in our lives is largely up to us. If bad things happen, we can be resilient or give up and drift from day to day.

Decisions and Leadership

We must make sure that we are making good decisions—decisions that will add value for all. As decision and psychotherapy expert the late Harold Greenwald (1973) has shown us, we often make decisions without really identifying the payoffs we want and deserve. One can decide to be successful and to make good leadership choices. Here are the steps:

Basic decision-making steps (based on Harold Greenwald’s Direct Decision Therapy):

Based on these Greenwald steps for making successful decisions, there are some more guides for sustaining or recovering leadership, and for being successful in both life and business.

Two Basic Templates or Guides, for Leadership


  1. Do not assume that what worked in the past will work now. Get out of your comfort zone and be open to change.
  2. Differentiate between ends (what) and means (how) and prepare all objectives to rigorously measure accomplishment.
  3. Use a societal view—an ideal vision (Mega). Define in measurable performance terms the kind of world we want for all of us (including tomorrow’s child) and use this as the underlying basis for planning, decision making, and continual improvement.
  4. Use and align all three levels of planning and results (Mega/societal, Macro/organizational, Micro/Individual) for decision making.
  5. Define “need” as a gap in results (not as insufficient levels of resources, means, or methods).

Leadership Template 1. The Five Key Success Factors for Useful Decisions

The next template is about your commitment to making useful decisions, first for yourself and then for those with whom you live or work.

  1. I commit to add measurable value to our shared world and community, my close relations, my immediate associates, and to myself.
  2. I commit to select and use efficient tools, methods, and means to accomplish the above (1, 2, and 3).
  3. I commit to select resources—including physical, financial, and human—to get the results identified above (1, 2, and 3).
  4. I commit to evaluate the results I get and use those data to continually improve what I use, do, produce, and deliver, including the impact and consequences of the results.

Leadership Template 2. A Decision Success Model (DSM)

Explaining Each Leadership Template

Some brief foundations for each component of the two leadership templates are outlined below.

Leadership Template 1: The Five Key Success Factors for Useful Decisions
  1. Don’t assume that what worked in the past will work now. Get out of your comfort zone and be open to change. A consultant I know reported that he met with the CEO of a huge financial organization who told him “we have a proud tradition of over 150 years untrammeled by a single new idea.” Ever been in a work or home relationship where you or others kept doing the same things over and over again? If you are not changing and adding measurable value to all, you are failing.

  2. Differentiate between ends (what) and means (how) and prepare all your goals and objectives to measure accomplishment. To be a leader, clearly define where you want to head and why? Be very clear, precise, and rigorous in defining the results you want. Come to agreement with all of your partners. Most statements of vision and missions are loose, self-serving, fuzzy, and do not provide the basis for planning and decision making; they are full of form and lack substance.

    Interestingly, most people first select means—the solution, such as getting training, buying a new car, going out to dinner, hiring a new staff member, starting or ending a relationship, buying resources, or making an investment—and assume that useful ends will follow.

  3. Use a societal view—an ideal vision (Mega —of what kind of world, in measurable performance terms, we want to help create for all of us, including tomorrow’s child. Mega thinking and planning are vital to create a useful future for you and others. Mega is the level of thinking and planning where the primary client of everything we use, do, produce, and deliver is society—society now and in the future.

    Mega is defined by an ideal vision—a “practical dream”—that is a measurable statement of the kind of world we want, together with others, to create for tomorrow’s child. Interestingly, Mega (and the ideal vision that defines it) is the same for all organizations in all societies.2 Each person or organization is the vehicle for adding measurable value to Mega.

    As system performance expert Dale Brethower advises, “If you are not adding value to the world you are subtracting value from the world.” McKinsey & Co.’s International practice director Ian Davis notes that doing so is our “biggest contract.”

    Want to relinquish leadership? Have tunnel vision and see the world with oneself as the center and look only at one’s own immediate payoffs and own environment, and do not realize we are a small part of our world, of our shared big blue marble. Want to maintain or regain leadership? Place external value-added before your own immediate rewards. Rotary International is on the mark when they declare “service above self.”

  4. Use all three levels of planning and results (Mega/societal, Macro/organizational, and Micro/individuals) for decision making. There is a link between (a) what we use (inputs), (b) what we do (processes), (c) what we produce (Micro results), (d) what we deliver (Macro results) outside of ourselves, and (e) the societal impact (societal value added). Every level links and aligns and has impact on all of the other levels.

    Add measurable value to yourself, those close to you, your organization, and our shared world—to Mega. Ignoring this value chain is hazardous. Individual and organizational greed is out.

  5. Define need as a gap in results (not as insufficient levels of resources, means, or methods). Means (how) should not be confused with ends, but that is exactly what we do when we use need as a verb. When making this usual error, we skip right over closing gaps in ends—needs—to picking the means, activities, and resources. Needs are gaps between current results and required results; and needs assessments—the way to make sure we are headed in the right direction—place the needs into priority order on the basis of the costs to meet the needs compared to the costs to ignore the needs. So every0 time someone says “We need more money,” or “We need more time,” or “I need to go to the mall, ” ask that person “If more money (or time or shopping) is the solution, what’s the problem?”(Kaufman, 2006a & 2006b). Don’t jump into solutions before knowing the basic problem.
Leadership Template 2: A Decision Success Model (DSM)

Using this model is about commitment. The DSM asks you to affirm that everything you use, do, produce, and deliver will add measurable value to both significant people in our immediate lives and to our shared society. By committing to the propositions in Leadership Template 2 you can see that linkage and alignment to making our world better is crucial for your world and ours. It is “practical dreaming” to provide the leadership—for yourself and others—to improve our world.

All of us live in a shared world that is a huge system where all the parts work independently and together. What a coal plant in Australia discharges into the air has global effects. What happens to a rain forest in Brazil has implications for our climate. When we decide to burn fuels that could be eaten, we make life more expensive to others and soon to ourselves; and when we treat each other at home or work with malice, everything suffers.

A pragmatic over-arching decision guide is quite basic: Will what I decide and do bring me and others closer or further away from Mega?

Applying HPT Mega Thinking and Planning to Your Personal Life as Well as to Organizations

Adding value to our shared society is practical, realistic, and vital. Increasingly, even conventional businesses are realizing that making money and doing societal good must not be mutually exclusive. It is not yet the norm, but it is evolving. Adding value to others is not just for an organization, it is also for each and all of us.

In daily life, act to add value to those around you as well as to yourself. It will not only provide the role model for others based on your behavior, it will also bring rewards, both personal and external, back to you. If you are not adding value to others, you are likely subtracting value from them. A primary focus on Mega is both practical and ethical.3 We all depend on others focusing on Mega when they deal with us; do we owe others any less?

You decide. A leadership commitment would be:

I commit to add value to myself, my family, and my organization as well as to our shared world.

Whether you are now a leader and want to contribute or you have fallen and want to recover, this is practical and effective. It will require you to apply HPT to yourself and become your own leader.

So?

With inspiration from Peter Drucker’s The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (2008), here are some questions for you to ask and answer if you are to sustain or recover leadership:

  1. Is your mission based on adding measurable value to our shared society as well as to all others within and outside your organization (or personal life)?
  2. Is your defined client aligned with payoffs for our shared world, your organization, and yourself?
  3. What do all stakeholders value and what should they value?
  4. What are your results and how do you prove that they add value?
  5. What is your plan to get from where you are to where you want to be, and how will you evaluate your progress?

You are what you do and deliver. Leadership depends on you being in control of your three Cs:

Leadership and personal success are yours for the choosing. Or not.

References

Drucker, P. F., Collins, J., Kotler, P., Kouzes, J., Rodin, J., Rangan, V. K., & Hesselbein, F. (2008). The five most important questions you will ever ask about your organization. San Francisco, CA: Leader to Leader Institute and Jossey-Bass.

Greenwald, H. (1973). Direct decision therapy. New York: Peter Wyden, Inc.

Kaufman, R. (2006a). 30 seconds that can change your life: A decision-making guide for those who refuse to be mediocre. Amherst, MA: HRD Press Inc.

Kaufman, R. (2006b). Change, choices, and consequences: A guide to mega thinking and planning. Amherst, MA: HRD Press Inc.

Related Readings

Davis, I. (2005, May 26). The biggest contract. The Economist, 375 (8428), 87.

Kaufman, R., & Guerra-Lopez, I. (2008). The assessment book: Applied strategic thinking and performance technology through self-assessments. Amherst, MA: HRD Press Inc.

Roger Kaufman is professor emeritus, Florida State University, as well as distinguished research professor at the Sonora Institute of Technology (Mexico), which uses this model for its planning and operations. He is also the director of Roger Kaufman & Associates. His PhD is in communications from New York University. He consults with public and private organizations in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and Europe. He is a Certified Performance Technologist, a diplomat in School Psychology, a fellow in Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He has been awarded ISPI’s top two honors: Member for Life and the Thomas F. Gilbert Award. He is a past ISPI president, a founding member and is the recipient of ASTD’s Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance recognition. Kaufman has published 39 books and over 250 articles on strategic planning, performance technology, quality management and continual improvement, needs assessment, management, and evaluation. He may be contacted at rkaufman@nettally.com.

1 Robert Carleton, former senior VP of t-Systems, notes that change is very easy if you can find the right incentives. Individual change is also very possible: two of the outstanding psychotherapists of the last 50 years independently said that actual psychotherapy—personal change—only takes 30 seconds! The rest of the time is spent getting ready to decide and commit to change. So the essence of leadership maintenance or recovery is making the decision to change based on creating a better tomorrow. 30 Seconds—the title of the book upon which this article is based—is pretty good for busy executives. Good results depend on a few guides to good decision making.

2 We have taken the initiative to ask people from almost around the globe to define the kind of world they want for tomorrow’s child. Except for the extremists (who have means and solutions in central focus and pretend that is the end), almost all agree on this definition. It is stable and universal. This definition of an ideal vision is not imposed, but rather derived and defined by our neighbors far and wide; it is based on consensus, not on arbitrary power.

3 I and others have used this approach in individual consulting and executive coaching. It is also at the core of the successful therapy models and approaches developed by the late and outstanding psychotherapists Theodore H. Blau and Harold Greenwald whose work helped inspire my book 30 Seconds That Can Change Your Life: A Decision-Marking Guide for Those Who Refuse to Be Mediocre.

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