The Cranky Middle Manager Show #316 The Final Cranky Show and the Future of Work with John Blackwell
The Cranky Middle Manager Show #149 Managing Human Performance- Paul Elliott
Posted on 24. Jun, 2008 by Wayne in General
Host Wayne Turmel talks to Dr. Paul Elliott, of Exemplary Performance. If you have to manage performance, you have to know what they are supposed to do, and why aren’t they doing it. If you’re not familiar with the system of Human Performance Improvement or Human Performance Technology, here’s your introduction. Oh and a Prussian warlord just for good measure.
Show Notes
0:00 Welcome to the show. Today we dedicate the show to someone who took something messy and chaotic but critical, applied methodology and analysis to it and changed the world….and a lot of borders. Carl Philippe Gottlieb Von Clausewitz is our man, like it or not.
3:00 The quote of the week is from Publilius Syrus….. argue all you want but when a decision is made, get on with it……
4:00 Welcome Paul Elliott. My whole training career was influenced by his work in Human Performance Technology…. the Six Sigma of training, if you will. (He’d hate that description). What is it? If you take good, capable people and put them in a broken system, the system works every time. It looks at performance by trying to integrate all the pieces of their jobs by analyzing six areas:
- Access to information
- Access to the right resources and tools
- Incentives and consequences
- Are they a fit for the job?
- Knowledge and skills
- Motivation
10:23 Performance is based on a lot of things in the environment that have nothing to do with skill or training. (Note to self… open ended questions, Wayne). Study the people who do the job well….. they’ll show you the ways to get it done. He gives us a case study.
15:41 Why are we looking at top performers when we spend most of our time helping the laggers? Activity is not valuable unless you’re getting the results you want. Who’s producing and what are they doing that the rest don’t?
19:49 Hmmm someone who doesn’t think you can teach leadership…. spend your time where you can change behavior. Jobs need to be matched based on strengths and fit to what’s actually going to help them perform. High performers tend to have their own metrics that have nothing to do with what’s in the employee handbook.
24:07 You can’t just ask high performers what they’re doing because they are unconscious of what they really do. OH and this is a cool number. Performance is only a training problem 10% of the time.
Resources:
www.exemplaryperformance.com for more information and tools.
Improving Performance by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache
Performance Consulting by Dana Gaines Robinson and James Robinson
The ASTD Handbook for Workplace Learning Professionals
Don’t let the weasels get you down!
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