How to Use Visibility to Drive Performance

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I believe visibility of what matters DRIVES the changes that matter.

In this episode, I will show you how you can create results that matter—those that impact profitability through visibility systems.

If you’re the kind of leader who has every employee already aware of exactly what high performance looks like and you have complete visibility on how every employee is doing on the important things that matter, stay tuned because I’ll share with you another, higher level of performance enhancement.

If instead, you don’t really know how every employee is performing every week AND if the ones who look busiest aren’t really the ones that drive profit, you’ll enjoy knowing that you can take a lot of risks out of your organization. Low performers cause high performers to leave EVEN if you can’t see who is struggling to perform.

And if you already have one or two visibility systems in place, you’ll find out how having interconnected systems are the magic that can sustainably transform your performance.

There are a few challenges to putting accountability visibility into an organization:

• Unlike most traditional systems that measure the wrong things, you need to understand the right leading and lagging indicators. Let’s face it, since approximately 87% of your customers have a negative impact on profit, who cares how many new customers you have this month? It’s the wrong metric.
• In contrast to most attempts to bring visibility metrics to a bank where they overcomplicate and don’t really drive performance, you need to understand that information is NOT communication. You don’t need metrics—you ultimately need performance breakthroughs driven by the right metrics.
• Also, when you bring visibility to low performance, you could lose many team members who, if given the right education and tools, could instead be rock stars. So, getting visibility ahead of the right education AND progress on results can be a corporate culture disaster.

If you have one or all of these three challenges, consider yourself normal.

I’m ready to help, armed with three things you can do to create an accountability system that optimizes results and drives sustainable performance improvement as opposed to mass exodus, guilt and shame.

Step 1: UNLIKE so many performance dashboards, you have to realize there is a pace and progression of ever-increasing improvement tied to what really matters that must be followed. Cultures are vulnerable.

Almost every bank has a few employees who came from a big bank. And when those folks hear that accountability will be coming to your bank, they stir the pot for the others. Panic sets in because they don’t know that what you’re doing is completely different—empowering instead of deflating. But until they know that, people start looking for the door.

Step 2: Roll out an interwoven system of visibility in the appropriate progression. Ever advancing daily huddles, weekly radio reports, quarterly celebrations and other optimized systems need to be blended together in the right order. Each of those serves a different purpose and must have an advancing level of what is reported on as people learn more. Then progress is made with their effectiveness of execution.

Step 3: Understand that traditional “stack rating” has actually proven to lower performance in all industries. Guilt, shame and fear are not the right emotions to build up performance. That said, being able to celebrate breakthroughs and top-performing individuals and teams—positive reinforcement—is imperative to performance breakthroughs.

Here’s how to start:

1) Do NOT start with a performance dashboard or you could blow this into a mess of epic proportions.
2) Instead, create a grouping of interconnected accountability systems that makes results visible AND makes sure that you sequence the advancement of expectations.
3) Then create a mechanism that celebrates top individuals and teams and breakthroughs from others, AND still has accountability for those “under the performance line” without humiliating and embarrassing them.

Join me for the next episode where I will show you how to create a “raise the bar” performance improvement system. It’s the same one that systematically skyrocketed performance at hundreds of banks.