Do you know what ‘good looks like’?
In this post, we’re discussing how to uncover the potential in your management teams to grow. However before you can think about unlocking greater potential you have to be confident you know ‘what good looks like’ in terms of existing performance levels. This means having robust performance benchmarks in place measured against industry standards. With benchmarking in place you’ll have a level the playing field across your entire management team enabling fair assessment of individual performance and easy identification of any issues that need to resolved.
If you don’t have a performance benchmarks in place in your operation below are some key indicators of poor management performance to looks out for:
- 121/performance reviews are missed or not timely
- Training plans are moved backwards
- Teams only working to task with only a short term view in place
- Compliance actions become overdue
- Outstanding work load volumes increase – customers are waiting longer to be served uncontrolled backlogs increase in outstanding levels of primary and secondary controls activity
Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations.
Unlocking potential
Time and again management capability and potential is restricted because a business hasn’t defined what it expects of its managers. For managers to grow, realise their full potential and consistently deliver exceptional and efficient service they need to have a clear operating specification. Management frameworks provide this specification but simply don’t exist in many operations.
With clear working methodologies explaining how their role delivers the key business outcomes managers understand what is expected of them. These frameworks help to form and support routine practices and principles that define the expected behaviour and approaches ensuring the right things are, done at the right time to the right standard consistently.
When managers know the level of quality and performance they need to deliver they strive to achieve it. With the right skills, behaviours and approaches they gain more confidence, control and greater ability to interact with staff earning more respect, creating a better working environment enabling them to improve their personal and team performance.
Management capability can be further enhanced when supported with workforce management and optimisation software. We’ve talked extensively about the benefits of software which you can read about here. In short software provides transparency across the entire operation. It gives managers consistent metrics enabling them to make decisions based on facts not assumptions and it supports them to consistently deliver and achieve against internal and external expectations.
The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.
To truly get the best performance from your managers and release their full growth potential you need:
Management frameworks – Clearly defined operational specification with practice and principles to create active performance management routines carried out daily, weekly and monthly to provide a structure and consistent approach to achieve better decision making.
Skills and behaviours – Understand, where your manager’s skill levels are as not all of them, will be at the same level. Ensuring there is a consistent level of skill across your managers greatly contributes towards operational improvement.
Workforce management and optimisation software – Managers need effective, easy to use tools to help them manage teams, drive efficiency and improve performance. Workforce management and optimisation software is key to freeing up time, providing data needed to drive improvement through fact-based decisions, ensure consistent quality and service delivery as well as forecasting and planning to ensure teams can cope with existing and new business volumes.
