Staying people AND performance focussed
It doesn’t matter what type of organisation it is, finding the balance between being people focussed and performance focussed is a challenge. And obviously the two are completely linked.
If people are not valued and engaged then the performance of the organisation is going to suffer. And yet, if we become so people focussed that we stop challenging, setting goals, and raising standards, then the performance will also drop.
Of course, if the entire focus is on endlessly improving the performance, then we are going to end up losing people and leaving them behind. Then we are left without the very people who are essential to the performance of the organisation.
So the question we need to grapple with is: how do we keep a healthy balance between focussing on people and focussing on performance?
To propose an answer, here is a paragraph from an article in the Harvard Business Review on this subject. After studying lots of different CEO’s handing the balance between people and performance, the ones who did it best did so my combining four strategies:
Tags: Organisations, People, Performance“First, they earned the trust of their organizations through their openness to the unvarnished truth. Second, they were deeply engaged with their people, and their exchanges were direct and personal; employees in the companies we studied had a particularly close connection with the CEO and were seldom surprised to meet him or her. Third, having earned legitimacy and trust, these CEOs were able to mobilize their people around a focused agenda. Finally, while they were all strong individuals, these senior leaders realized that they could succeed only as part of a committed leadership team, and they devoted considerable efforts to building their firm’s collective leadership capabilities.” (Emphasis mine)