A Performance Tip for Leaders
 

Looking for donut holes...

A big part of my work is finding opportunities to improve my clients' business performance.  Most managers have the same goal.  You are paid to achieve better results - more sales, faster service, fewer errors, happier customers, lower expenses.   

It's like looking for donut holes.  You're looking for what's "wrong" with the donut!  I had this experience recently with a client.  I spent the entire day gathering data, looking for opportunities to streamline his operation to lower costs and raise customer service performance.  At one point, I asked him to rate his customers for upside potential.  I pulled out his customer list - four hundred and fifty names of businesses and consumers.  To my amazement, he was able to intelligently evaluate each and every customer on that list! 

As the day went on, I watched him in action.  Customer after customer, he spoke to as if they were good friends.  "How was your trip to Florida, Gord?"  To another he joked, "Are you STILL working on that project?"  Throughout all this, I kept focused on my work and never made a comment.

As I drove home that night, I realized that I had spent my day looking for holes and I had failed to notice the donut!  I thought to myself, "This guy isn't just good - he's great!"  I felt a bit bad that I had not even make a single comment about it because I was so self-absorbed in my own work. 

I decided to write him an email, describing how impressed I was with what I'd seen him do, and giving him several specific examples of his remarkable customer relationships.   A couple of days later, he told me that it was the highlight of his week.  His wife even spoke to me later and thanked me.

As a leader of people, it's so easy to get caught up looking for donut holes, without noticing and appreciating how impressive the donut itself is!  When you work closely with someone and you share what you see in an honest, appreciative way, you give a gift that motivates, rewards and feels good.

Sincerely,

Great News!

Performance Shift 2.0 (PS 2.0) creates an "unfair advantage."

PS 2.0 is proving itself as a tool that gives client users two powerful benefits - it raises customer satisfaction AND it increases employee satisfaction.  By reducing operating errors and improving executional excellence, PS 2.0 almost seems unfair - results go up and stress goes down!  Here's how:

When PS 2.0 is installed across a whole department or company, it coughs up a Data Warehouse of performance data which point out attractive "Areas of Opportunity."  Suddenly, clients are able to "see" the big picture - the core workflow steps, the overlaps and duplications, where everyone's time goes, how much it costs to produce "services" such as invoices, customer inquiries, shipments - whatever your organization produces as outputs.  This provides the basis of process improvement which when linked to customer needs, drives quality up by shifting staff time towards higher value customer-driven work.  And don't forget, PS 2.0 still acts as an outstanding performance management tool for hiring, training and managing people for excellence.

If your organization is facing next level growth challenges, go to http://www.performanceshift.com  or contact us at
info@performanceshift.com   1-877-Out of Box (688-6326) to help your company grow with ease.

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Performance Leader Shift is a free service of Performance Shift Leadership Systems  Copyright 2006, All rights reserved.  1-877-688-6326 (1-877 Out of Box)  or 905-381-0341  http://www.performanceshift.com  Burlington, ON Canada