When leading performance, for the most part, your work and the work of your team fits into two large buckets. Both of these buckets are essential to progress and in turn, the performance and success of your business.
The first of these buckets relates to structured work.
Structured work should fall directly in alignment with the strategy of your organisation. This work is easy to identify. It’s planned and organised and has clear key performance indicators and targets, that gauge success. Leaders should provide regular support to their teams in the achievement of structured work outcomes. This should include high-quality coaching interventions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Good communication structure and meeting structure is essential in overseeing planned work. The aim of this is to ensure people are across expectations and understand the performance needs and behaviours required to drive strategy. Structured work also includes any processes and systems you wish to challenge and improve over the course of delivering planned work, underneath your strategy.
The second component, is our reactive work.
Typically, this work is seen as a distraction. However, this is where the breakthroughs come. Relationships are tested and the true performance of your products and/or services are recognised. These learnings allow you to tweak where and when necessary, making you more competitive in the market. Reactive work comes from the performance cues that arrive in our business – some subtle, and some not so.
This second bucket includes our response to complaints and the resolution of mistakes identified as a result of the recognition of shortcomings in either skill levels, mindset or attitudes. Our reactive work also lends itself to resolving misunderstandings and personality clashes. Leaders often find themselves needing to work through staff issues and/or challenges on an ad hoc basis, to facilitate an environment that supports people being at their best and able to work together.
Despite your best efforts to plan for everything, you will undoubtedly, be forced to react to the unknown. This might include market and competition forces, environmental events and pandemics, like COVID-19. Unfortunately COVID-19 has pulled the oxygen away from other reactive performance cues we would normally be working through in maintaining high levels of business performance as leaders.
An analogy I’m using with some of the leaders I’m working with at the moment, is that whilst the COVID-19 tidal wave has come through, all of our energy and focus has gone into survival through this period. Whilst the water is still high, it’s no longer rushing through, causing us significant problems. It is however, time to begin our assessment of the damage caused. Unfortunately, as the water recedes, we’ll start to realise we’ve missed many of the performance cues we would normally focus on, enabling our business to solve problems, both through people and processes, designed to maintain our competitiveness in the market.
Leaders who recognise that they have been blind to what’s below the water, because they’ve focused their energy on survival at the high watermark as a result of COVID-19, will quickly turn their focus back to the performance cues they may have overlooked.
As the water begins to recede, leaders have the opportunity to build momentum back into the business, through these three simple steps:
- Start to look below the water line – don’t do denial: Accept that some things may have been dropped and overlooked (and for good reason). Consider also, what you’ve learned. COVID-19 has seen many of us adopt new ways of working. Review these measures, burn off what no longer serves you and adapt those that do.
- Take a no blame or shame mindset to having dropped the ball: Many leaders and leadership teams, through absolute necessity to keep their business alive, have had to think about and operate, completely differently. Maybe it’s time to move to that next phase now – what’s below the water line?
- Develop a plan to pick up the things you may have missed and adopt learnings: What is the best approach for picking these things back up and what outcomes do you expect? Allocate accountabilities across your team for immediate action.
