Most efforts to strengthen organizational culture work from the top down. Leaders agree on the values, model the practices, and in one way or another lead the culture.

I’ve been involved with sales performance and sales enablement for nearly 50 years. Three of my four companies have focused almost exclusively on sales performance, spanning multiple industry segments across the globe.  Frankly, not much has changed over the years, other than the high-tech tools, and the continued flow of new sales experts, books, and training programs. Two things I’ve noticed have definitely not changed, and I’d like to bring them to your attention.

The well-known Balanced Scorecard experts, Norton and Kaplan, have written a lot about the fact that most strategic plans are not fully executed.  Like many strategic planning experts, they focus on what it takes to execute effectively, and recommend establishing a formal process for execution, engaging leadership in the process, and even having a group or "office" devoted to execution of strategic plans. These are all key recommendations, and they align with principles one could also derive from change management, culture change, systematic performance improvement, and other disciplines devoted to moving whole organizations forward toward goals.

At our Summer Institute several years ago, we tried an experiment that went very well! We devoted a session to relationships as valuable accomplishments, and applied Performance Thinking.  We have always listed relationships as a type of valuable accomplishment, teaching both managers/coaches and performance consultants to identify them as important work outputs, when they deliver value in exceptional ways. We then apply the performance improvement logic to defining and improving them. We organized a mini workshop at the Summer Institute, and had a lot of fun with it, while at the same time exploring what otherwise might be thought of as a very "soft" sort of performance

As organizational performance consultants, we often help companies accelerate business results and gain a competitive advantage by strengthening their leadership and management capabilities. For example, when working with organizations offering applied behavior analysis services (ABA) to individuals with autism spectrum disorder, we often focus on improving the effectiveness of clinical supervision delivered by behavior analysts and assistant behavior analysts. 

I just got off participating in a great panel discussion, recorded as a podcast, joining several of our most senior learning and performance colleagues from Europe and the U.S.  We were talking about the challenge of pivoting from training and development in an organization to performance improvement. How do we make training more performance-based, more connected to the work people have to do, and more directly effective? That goes along with the question, how can we optimize the return on our investments (ROI) in training and performance, and in talent development altogether?

As an instructional designer for the past 20 years or so, I’ve seen a lot of changes, both large-scale and incremental. I recently had the opportunity to learn Performance Thinking, and I wanted to share a few insights that I think you may find helpful.

A recent blog post that was highlighted in the monthly digest from the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) caught my attention, not so much because of what it said, but because of the question it asked.

In the several decades that I've been involved with building sales training and performance interventions for business-to-business sales, I've learned about the important advantages of defining sales performance by identifying the milestones and progress indicators or accomplishments that exemplary sales people work day-to-day to achieve in their territories and accounts.

Another great Harvard Business Review article, The Agile C-Suite, got my attention this month.  It talks about the balance that leaders need to find between efficiency and innovation, particularly in uncertain times.