The Six Keys to Performance Excellence

How does Motorola—an immensely successful high-tech company—continue year after year to out-distance its competitors, replacing the previous year’s products with a new and innovative product line?

Performance is key. Like other progressive companies, Motorola realizes that it must utilize two fundamental elements to keep its performance at peak efficiency—technology and people. Consider the company’s innovative strategy of simultaneously building 72 satellites for its new communications system. This is truly a "state of the art" approach. But technology can’t take all the credit—it was Motorola’s employees who came up with the idea!

In today’s competitive business environment, attaining and maintaining peak performance levels is a constant challenge…and performance excellence can only be achieved when every "cylinder" in the corporate "engine" is firing in sync. The engine must be fine-tuned to desired specifications to achieve peak performance.

In my years of experience as a consultant, I’ve found that most companies have more technology than they can use. Poor performance is rarely caused by a lack of technology. More often than not, performance problems originate with a company’s employees.

Small- to medium-sized businesses can learn a lot from successful large companies that employ the following tried-and-true principles of performance enhancement:

1. Review the employee selection process

How do you hire new employees? Are you asking the RIGHT questions? Do you use some sort of behavioral screening process to evaluate an employee’s "assets and liabilities"? Do you know whether your new employee has the personality traits that will allow him or her to perform the job without unnecessary stress? The bottom line is that the less an employee’s personality fits his or her job description, the less chance there is of performance success…and the higher chance there is of inefficiency and turnover.

2. Train employees for traditional job skills

How much theory and/or experience does a person need to know and/or have to get a job at your company? Is there a transfer of job/task knowledge from previous employees to new ones? How is knowledge managed and communicated between new and old employees? Without continual development and diversification of knowledge and skills, a company’s employee base will always "start from scratch" each time someone new is hired.

3. Train employees in interpersonal job skills

Do employees understand their own behavioral assets/liabilities and how they affect their job performance? Do your employees know how to adapt to the behavioral differences required for the job functions of other employees? Can your employees communicate and work together despite those differences? If not, productivity and performance will suffer unnecessarily.

4. Make sure a career development process is in place and functioning

Is there a career path for every position? Is there a performance management process so your employees know where they are going if they excell? Do they understand how they will be rewarded? Regardless of what a particular job description may specify, each employee wants and needs to know how he or she "fits", what future opportunities within the company might be available, and what it takes to be retained. Even though there are no "guaranteed" jobs these days, everyone needs a sense of direction to perform well.

5. Build teams based on diversity

Does the sales department feel like the "outsider" in your company? Is there a constant breakdown in communication between technology and training? Almost without exception, companies find that the better a person fits a job description, the more unique that person will be…and consequently the greater potential there will be for communication problems between departments. In order for there to be a natural blending of individuals into teams, companies need to develop an appreciation for the fact that individual skills and knowledge are determined largely by a person’s behavioral style of learning.

6. Maintain a balanced lifestyle

Even though a job today requires up to an hour more to perform than the same job did 20 years ago, there needs to be time set aside for rejuvenation. The hidden expense of "burnout" costs American corporations millions in profits every year. Do you get a constant flow of new, creative, and innovative ideas from the people who know your products and services best? If not, you would do well to help your employees focus on their careers, rather than the job at hand.