Do you have a clear vision of where you want your company to go? Do all of your employees know what that direction is and what your company will have to do to make your vision a reality? With experience in large and small companies, and industries ranging from chemical, electronics and machine manufacturing to accounting firms and property and casualty insurance, Performance Leadership Systems will help your company build the capabilities it needs to give you a competitive edge. Most of our clients fall into one of three groups:
CONSULTING SERVICES & CLIENT BENEFITS
Our Clients
Mid-Tier Companies
These are companies with annual revenues of $50-500M, and up to 1,000 employees. You’ve experienced consistent growth, but now you’re facing some new challenges. How do you sustain that growth as your organization gets larger and more complex, making it more difficult to adapt to changes occurring in your markets? New and more nimble competitors, the introduction of new technology that may impact your customers’ needs, new products being introduced that could threaten your market position … or changes that could represent opportunities for you to expand into new markets. As a senior executive, you need to anticipate these changes, because you can’t afford to stand still. Do you have a strategic plan that explains how you’re going to compete in the future and identifies the changes you’ll need to make? How are you going to get all of the different parts of your organization aligned with what may be a new direction? Do you have the talent to execute that strategy … employees with the right competencies, skills and knowledge required to implement your plan? Are your managers ready? How can you get the best possible performance from your people … beyond just compliance with management’s instructions?
Smaller, Family-Owned Companies
Family-owned companies are different. With more than one family member involved in their operation, this adds another level of complexity not found in other companies … the family dynamics don’t stop at the front door of your business. As the owner, you have the responsibility for navigating your company through what can be very turbulent waters, balancing what’s best for your company against what may be best for your family. Issues involving employee performance, competency, consistent management, succession … they all take on a new dimension.
Large Corporations
We can help large corporations in two areas:
- Change Leadership
- Performance Reviews
In Change Leadership, we can help top management design and execute a comprehensive change strategy. This will help you build and sustain the critical mass of organizational energy needed to overcome your company’s natural resistance to major change. We also help leaders learn how to use their energy to “pull” their company toward the vision they initiate.
Intended to improve employee performance, Performance Reviews have been around for a long time, but often they do more harm than good. What companies don’t realize is that the traditional process, focusing on an evaluation of past performance, is fundamentally flawed. We have a new and very different process that actually works.
We Provide Consulting Services in 3 Major Areas:
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Business Planning & Change Leadership
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Talent Management & Engagement
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A New Approach to Performance Reviews
The above services for large, mid-sized and family-owned companies are designed to help you build and sustain a competitive advantage so your business can continue to grow. And ultimately any competitive advantage comes from you and your people.
Often this competitive advantage will emerge from the company’s Business Plan where you determine how you are going to compete. If you don’t have a plan, we will help you build one and assist you in its execution. What do you want your company to be known for? What do you have to be really good at to be successful? The answers to these kinds of questions will begin to tell you what critical capabilities your company needs. Creating a new capability always requires people to change how they are doing their jobs, and that, in turn, requires a change in how they are being managed. The broader and more significant the change, the more such leadership is required.
Talent Management and Engagement consulting projects are designed to ensure that your business is able to meet its current and future talent needs. But that alone is not enough. If your people aren’t fully engaged then you are only getting a fraction of the value of their skills and knowledge, not to mention their energy. To be successful, senior leaders and business owners will need to demonstrate their ownership of Talent Management and Engagement initiatives, including their alignment with your company’s business plan.
And finally, Performance Reviews are held in such low regard that few senior leaders bother to conduct them with their own staff. Yet, they still require that the rest of management conduct them. That will change with our new process, not because of some mandate, but because all employees and their managers will recognize and appreciate the value of our new approach. Not only will it actually improve employee performance, but it’s also much simpler and less time and energy consuming.
Family-owned Businesses, where multiple family members are also employees, are unique. Here we help you learn how to balance the needs of your family with those of the company. Often we focus on business planning and establishing a foundation for the effective management of your employees, including succession planning. We also help you identify and resolve issues where family dynamics may be having a negative impact on the operation of your business.
Business Planning, Change Leadership & Organizational Development (OD) Everything starts with your company’s business plan. Without a clear vision of your company’s future destination, it’s impossible to get all of the different parts of your company properly aligned and coordinated for operational effectiveness. And when your plan requires major organizational change, the research is clear: most large scale change efforts fail. While smaller businesses tend to be more flexible and agile, they encounter the same problems as their larger brethren. Organizational change is all about your company’s energy. Unfortunately unless it’s their idea, most people really don’t like change. It disrupts our lives, makes new demands of us, and takes us out of our comfort zone. From a systems perspective, change can threaten an organization’s internal balance, and when that happens, the system pushes back. Better the devil the system knows.
Talent Management & Engagement
- Lower costs from fewer selection errors
- Reduced employee turnover costs
- Lower recruiting costs with higher rates of placements from within
- A stronger bench for future talent needs
- Higher employee motivation and commitment
- Better employee performance and productivity
- Overall lower workforce costs
We can help realize these benefits with our services in the area of Talent Management & Engagement. Talent Management focuses on how well your organization is meeting its current talent needs, and how well you are prepared to meet your future talent requirements. What is your company’s Core Profession? How is that profession changing? If you’re growing, do you have the right people to effectively manage that growth?
But even the best talent won’t matter if your people aren’t engaged. What’s their level of commitment? How much are they willing to give? What would increased productivity mean to you? Below are just some of the questions we’ll help you answer and then determine what you need to do to address any issues that surface:
- The Selection Process: Are you asking the right questions the right way to increase the accuracy of your predictions?
- Employee Retention & Turnover: Not all turnover is created equally … Are you keeping your key people?
- Employee Development: What’s the best approach? Training … Coaching …Mentoring … Developmental Work Experiences. Are you investing in your talent where it will have the greatest return to your company?
- Career Development: Are your employees’ career planning needs effectively balanced against your company’s future talent requirements?
- Succession Planning: What and where are you needs? … Do you have the right people? … With the right skills? … Will they be ready? … How will you develop them if there are gaps?
- Employee Engagement: Where is engagement high? … What do you need to do to keep it there? … Where could it be increased? … What has to change to make that happen?
Training Programs and Workshops
Using a spaced repetition approach that dramatically increases retention, we offer a wide range of training programs and workshops that include:
- Coaching
- Team Building
- Time Management
- New Managers & Supervisors
- Goal Setting
- Leadership Skills
- Management Skills
- Leading Change
- Situational Leadership
- Changing Group Norms
- Increasing Employee Engagement
- Negotiation Skills
- Exercising Influence
- Giving & Receiving Feedback
- The Performance Review Process
- Strategic HR Planning
- Customer Loyalty
- Entrepreneurial Leadership & Strategic Planning
- Executive Leadership
- Executive Strategic Planning
- Sales
- Team Leadership
- Cultural/Values Workshop
Contact us for more information about any of the above programs and how they can be customized for your company.
A New Performance Review Process
Performance Reviews or what is sometimes know as Performance Appraisals or Performance Management, has been around for a very long time. The idea is simple: give employees feedback about how well they are doing their job so they can perform better in the future.
Unfortunately over the years we’ve tried to make Performance Reviews do too many things. This has led to a process that is fundamentally flawed and simply doesn’t work.
Most companies know their process doesn’t work, but instead of taking a hard look at the basic process, they “tinker” with it every couple of years … redesigning the appraisal form, changing the wording for the overall employee ratings to make them more “objective,” moving from a 5-point scale to a 7-point scale, introducing new performance factors to be evaluated, or going to a forced distribution to eliminate the upward bias in evaluations that characterizes most programs.
None of these changes work. We know that because we have designed and implemented these programs for more than 30 years for a wide range of companies. We’ve also done our fair share of “tinkering” and we’ve seen the negative results.
That’s why we have developed a totally new process … one that is dramatically different than the traditional process that focuses on an evaluation of past employee performance which is the source of so much negativity. Instead our process focuses on future performance rather than the past, and creates a partnership between employees and their managers where they make a mutual commitment to ensure the best possible performance from everyone.
With our process, employees will still set goals but no longer will those goals be “low-balled” so they can be easily met to ensure a higher salary increase or bonus. Instead, employees will willingly set more difficult goals … ones they actually find challenging and motivating. And together, employees and their managers will identify work results and behaviors that may need to change on the part of both parties to ensure positive performance. Our new process also eliminates the costs, time and energy, and resentment associated with the traditional process.
Sound too good to be true?
Contact us and we will help you design and implement a pilot so you can see the results for yourself.
