The challenges of today’s tough marketplace and the instant availably of fine-grain performance data puts a spotlight on business performance more than ever before. Leaders need to be able to find ways of ensuring that their organisation is performing to its potential, and that no ‘performance gap’ exists. Performance improvements need to be measurable, with visible impact on key performance indicators, and any intervention must be precise and powerful, such that people's engagement in creating the solution is maximised.

In our experience, performance improvement initiatives fail to achieve their potential, or deliver as rapidly as required, because of the following, classic blind-spots:

• The connection between the initiative its intended impact on key performance indicators is not sufficiently clear

• The most powerful 'levers for change' are neither identified nor 'pulled'. This is because insufficient insight is brought to diagnosing the causes of current 'underperformance' - either out of impatience, or because the diagnostic process becomes so laborious it misses what's important.

• The 'solution' is seen to lie in developing skills or understandings - rather than appreciating that the underlying issue may be complex, possibly involving the relationship between key leaders, or the way the leadership team is framing and prioritising the business agenda and thus encouraging alignment and engagement.

Our expertise in getting alongside the ‘real work’ being done, while stimulating people to see and find contextual solutions, makes us ideally suited to performance improvement work, in a way that that traditional HR Consultancies or Leadership Development Consultancies are not.

Typical support may involve:

• targeted ‘diagnostic’ work to both identify current challenges and ways of working, and begin to establish productive relationships with those critical to success
  
  
• coaching for leaders to help them to face into the truth of ‘current reality’, and to articulate a desired future in a compelling way which enhances alignment
  
  
• identifying a minimal set of key ‘levers for change’, and contracting intelligently with those most able to ‘pull’ such levers
  
  
• getting alongside existing work, through attending meetings, convening workshops or coaching, and then bringing appropriate levels of edge, challenge and support in order to shift patterns of behaviour
  
  
• monitoring progress against an agreed set of metrics or key performance indicators – and using this process as a key intervention to stimulate further, sustainable improvements.

For more information on our approach to performance improvement, read our case-study Whole-system Performance Improvement at a FTSE 100 company.  Also see our article Delivering Employee Engagement - A Response to the MacLeod Report.