Improving Performance: Moving the Needle
Why this course?
Work gets done primarily through conversation. The quality of work conversations determines business results. This program improves the quality of conversations about performance, thus improving individual results as well as business outcomes.
What makes us different?
In this training, customized to your company’s needs, participants learn not only what to do, but also how to do it. Our approach is based on surveying the 15,000 direct reports of 2,000 managers who had participated in the training. That research documented that these managers improved significantly on all communication behaviors, and that improvement was sustained over time.
How will your organization benefit?
Managers with improved skills help achieve important business goals. Our clients’ own metrics have documented improvement in critical areas such as:
- customer satisfaction scores
- efficiency scores
- coaching scores on the company’s internal coaching survey
- people management skills as measured on the company’s engagement survey
What will participants learn?
The program’s intense practice is focused on key conversations that move the needle in a positive direction. Participants will learn:
- the skills, confidence, and commitment to handle key conversations that produce a measurable positive outcome for associates, for customers, and for the company
- specific, practical skills and strategies for what to say and how to say it in order to have maximum positive impact
- not only what to do, but how to do it
- how to ensure that employees understand performance expectations
- how to ensure that employees are committed to producing desired outcomes
- how to get performance back on track when it misses the mark
- how to translate abstract corporate values such as inclusion, agility, and collaboration into specific daily actions
- how to ensure that employees own responsibility for solving performance problems
- how to ensure that employees meet performance targets
- how to spend less time correcting the same performance problem repeatedly
How does this course work?
- Typically this program involves 12 to 20 participants (16 is ideal). It covers 16 intense hours, including three video labs, and also involves some pre-work.
- Direct reports of participants respond to questions about their managers’ coaching/leading/managing communication behaviors. This online survey is administered before leaders attend the training, and again 9-12 months later. The first survey creates a baseline of specific participant behaviors that need to be improved through the training. The second provides documentation that the skills are being used consistently and sustained.
- Participants create their own practice scenarios based on real-life situations, not off-the-shelf business cases, so that they can begin to use their training immediately.
- Improving Performance: Moving the Needle works because it is designed in partnership with you to integrate seamlessly into your organizational culture and its existing practices, programs, models, and systems. We’ll work with you to integrate the skills and processes into your existing management processes.
- More than 2/3 of course time is spent in small groups in video labs: practice, coaching, feedback. Participants use scenarios drawn from their own experiences – typically a “teachable moment” conversation, a preventative-maintenance conversation, and a career coaching conversation, although these scenarios can be customized to fit your organization’s needs.
- Each lab group has four participants and one coach/facilitator.
How will the skills be sustained?
Sustaining the skills entails collaboration on the part of the participants, their managers, and the organization. We can offer strategies to support all three and can work with you to select and implement strategies to ensure sustainable success.
