Results or Efforts Matter More?

Which are you focused on for performance measurement? Results or efforts?

In profit-driven companies, results matter more as part of your performance. Your performance centres round your KPIs, Key Results Areas (KRAs) and goals. Salespeople have to sell as much as they can. Marketers have to deliver on brand communication and brand development. Leaders have to lead the company to higher returns-on-investment (ROI) for their stockholders.

In cost-centres, efforts matter more. How you manage funds and budgets become your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The time your staff spends on keeping the house in order validates their performance and, thus, employability. Values like accountability, integrity, transparency, and due diligence are the expectations of a highly-critical public which is trigger-happy on criticism, blame, and hullabaloo.

In triathlons, the journey is as demanding as reaching the destination. How you achieve your athletic goals is contingent to your efforts during training. Certainly, the more scientific the process the more likely you may attain your results. However, you still have to do then time if you are to be faster, stronger and higher. Your results are very much dependent on your fitness, lowered risk of injury, and how well you feed your body on race-day.

Leadership Lessons: Which matters more to you: results or efforts of your staff? Why? What are you doing to bring either up to speed?

Calibrating Your Performance

I finally got my timing for the Newton 30K Run held on 10/10/10. This time, the results were sorted according to actual timing. I made the top-6 percent cut in the 30K Men’s Challenge category at 79^th position within a field of 1376 finishers. If I include the highly commendable performance of the women (which numbered another 304), I would have been promoted higher. I had a reasonable timing of 2:35:17 while recovering from a marathon.

Comparing how I felt, I believe that it would take less than a month to fully recover from a marathon. I am of the opinion that we can benefit from the secondary gain of a post-marathon peak. You can still register PBs for shorter distances which was what I was attempting during my month-long, evaluation process.

We evaluate and calibrate our performance with others and ourselves. In performance appraisals, both Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Key Results Areas (KRA) are used to measure our performance. In industries, we call this benchmarking. You can compare your performance with previous results, or contrast it with others. You either measure for similarity or differences. Consider how you integrate your abilities, capabilities, skills, relationships, attitude and mindset into your total value and performance.

As an athlete, you can also calibrate your performance progress through your training. Each training session gives us a sense of how we feel at a certain intensity of effort. Certainly, there are low days as there are highs. It is difficult to stay at the top of the totem pole for a long time.

How are you calibrating your performance?

Can You Be Indispensable?

There is a prevailing belief, propagated and promulgated in large part by the management machinery. Nobody is indispensable! How true is that? Can you become indispensable?

Of course you can! The questions you need to consider are: how, and for how long?

Be a valued staff, and make yourself valuable. What can you offer beyond the achievements of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Results Areas (KRAs)? What do you do to add value? How do you multiply your value throughout your organization? How do you share value? Seriously give much thought into these value propositions.

Have you been asked to postpone your annual leave? Have you been told how the workplace was busier without you? If you returned after a hiatus, back to your job, then you are still valuable.

1. Have unique skills (be rare)

2. Be competent (so that you can compete)

3. Update your Job Description/Job Scope (scare the next person coming in!)

4. Do tasks that are not popular (writing minutes of meetings; editing; conversations with staff/management)

5. Lead, and be in leadership positions (include temporary ones)

6. Assume ‘acting’ roles (standing for a manager in their relative absence)

7. Reinvent yourself, and reduce your predictability

8. Shift that sense of dependability on you from a few days to a few weeks in a year (go from there)!