Win-win agreements for scaling the organization

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I used a new title to describe this post that continues my case study of the organization I am coaching on implementing the win-win agreement process that embraces the Three Brain Synergy methodology of types of people.

The title reflects the goal of the owner of the company who sees this process and the leadership training that proceeded it as essential to scaling the organization. What he means by this is that in order for the organization to continue to grow and be less dependant on him driving everything, his managers and their teams need to develop greater autonomy in decision-making and be more pro-active in taking initiative to identify and act on key opportunities.

He realizes that this will only happen through shifting his own leadership approach and by coaching his direct reports so they make better decisions and themselves delegate and develop their team members.

The win-win process we are implementing is geared to assure that each manager is committed to their own leadership transformation and that they are well supported by the president. Thus each win-win agreement is a two-way written document that covers the performance commitments of the manager and is supported by a written support committment by his/her boss.

Over the last few weeks I have interviewed each manager and their manager and drafted both the performance commitments and the support commitments. Now I am meeting with the two parties, the manager and his boss to review the final drafted document. Once this is agreed upon by both parties, the next step will be to conduct a practice review coaching session. In the coaching session they are to practice the skills of coaching and active listening they learned in the training workshops.

The goal each month is to have them meet to discuss and evaluate the performance of the manager for each leadership behaviour that is crucial for the realization of their most critical operational responsibilities as described in the document. The same is done for the support commitments by the boss. Both parties must agree on the evaluation score and this happens through discussing their perceptions while practicing active listening. They must come to consensus on the final evaluation score.

I will sit in on a few sessions following the practice session to monitor their performance and assure the sessions take place.

The next phase will be to introduce the empowerment initiative process, which really drives continuous improvement for both the managers and the operations.

I will soon report on the progress of the evaluation coaching sessions. For more information visit the Three Brain Synergy website.

Stephen Goldberg

The win-win agreement with the president

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As mentioned in my last post on this case study the next step was to meet with the president to conduct a performance review of his commitments to improve and as well review my support commitments to him.

We met last week to conduct the review. Although there was no real improvement in his performance, I was happy to see his continued commitment to the process. He realized how difficult it is to change habits in order to get the results he wanted and had put in writing.

We took the opportunity to clarify his key goal relative to the personal tendency of his type that he wants to work on. He realized now that he tends to be to dominating with his managers and thus he does not empower them to make their own decisions. This was a change because originally he had chosen the tendency of procrastinating on decisions.

He also realized that this tendency of being too dominant had a strong impact on his ability to meet his leadership performance commitments, which evolve around subjects like using active listening, sharing thoughts and ideas, coaching his direct reports, delegating more etc.

It thus became evident that learning the leadership skills for participative management is not sufficient to make changes in behavior but one must work on the call tendency first that acts as a restrainer to change and better performance as a leader and manager.

The next meeting will be to follow-up on his progress of tracking his performance and to plan the set up of win-win agreements with his direct reports.

Stephen Goldberg,

Be free to work less, earn more and enjoy life!

Find out how at http://threebrainsynergy.com

Leadership and team development performance management process; case study

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This post continues my case study of a client with whom I am coaching on implementing a win-win agreement process with the goal of building a high performance management team. The idea is to provide the support to implement what was learned during the Leadership Styles and Team Development workshops that took place recently. Please refer to my previous posts in this category to see the progression of activities that took place up to now.

I met again with the president last week to finalize our win-win agreement together. This included completing his performance commitment form that I had modified after our last meeting. He needed help writing the personal development goal relative to the tendency of his type that was most important to overcome. In his case the tendency was being to dominant and he realized that it is easy for him to take charge and direct people to do things according to his perspective. He realized that this closed the door for his managers to participate more in the decision making process and to become more autonomous.

We also completed our discussion and agreed on the support performance commitments that he required from me to be successful in his commitments to the process. We also identified how we were to measure progress towards his expectations.

In this system we developed a way to measure each commitment based on a rating scale of 1 to 10. This is prepared by each party before a review session and then there is an exchange to discuss each person’s rating and perspective. This is also where both parties need to practice skills such as active listening and coaching, as well as keeping the others person’s motivation and needs relative to their type in mind.

This week I will conduct a performance review using the aforementioned approach and form and then discuss how to set up the win-win  agreements with his direct reports.

Stephen Goldberg

How to Scale Your Organization for Growth!

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This is another article to continue my case study on leadership and team development in a small business of about 50 employees.

After the initial workshops on leadership and team development, I met with the business owner to continue the process towards creating an organization that is scalable to meet the business opportunities in the marketplace.

This next phase of the mandate is about implementing a win-win agreement process that commits each manager to achieving certain organizational outcomes by applying good leadership behaviors of participative management that they learned in the leadership workshops.The first meeting I held with the business owner was to establish a win-win agreement between him and I for the mandate itself. This is to assure that we stay on track towards agreed upon objectives and to hold each other accountable through a clearly written document and evaluation process.

It also was to help the business owner fully understand the win-win agreement process so he would know how what is required from him and his managers in terms of time and resources.

The first meeting was so that I could interview him about his concerns and to have him articulate what he wanted out of the mandate and win-win agreement process.

After the interview I drafted an agreement using our template form for this purpose. Since it is a two-way agreement I also drafted the support commitment form for us to discuss and complete at the second meeting. The support commitments from me are what he feels he requires as support for him to achieve his objectives.

Each form includes the key goal that each person is working on related to the negative tendency of his type. This tendency is really what holds us back from fully using our qualities in what we do and in interacting with others.

We always keep the key goal of one’s type as part of the agreement because we never fully overcome our tendencies and they can always surface to make us ineffective. It also forces us to keep working on ourselves and develop the habit of continuous personal improvement of our behavior related to leadership and teamwork.

We had a second meeting where we reviewed the first document of his objectives for the mandate and the performance commitments required by him to achieve what he envisioned. Though some discussion we came to agreement on the leadership behaviors required by him to meet his objectives.

We then discussed the support commitments he would need from me to reach his objectives. These were comprised mainly of holding him accountable through confronting him when he was off track or neglecting certain commitments etc.

I was quite pleased with the commitment of this business owner to this process and to wanting to put forth the effort to modify his own behavior to achieve his objectives. He is confident and willing to be transparent with his team, to commit the time to coach them and to be held accountable.

As part of the agreement we worked out how to track our progress towards the objectives and even discussed rewards and penalties.

The next meeting will be to finalize the support commitment document and discuss how to begin implementing the same agreements with his direct reports. This will enable us to figure out the time required by me to coach him and his managers and thus formulate a budget that makes sense to him.

I will post an update after the next meeting.

Stephen Goldberg