At the heart of organizational performance and a performance driven culture is performance at the individual level – and more specifically, individual leader behaviour skills. To help you reframe and refocus your thinking on behaviour competency to drive performance, consider the following key behaviour skills essential to creating and sustaining the highly effective relationships necessary in a performance driven culture.
1. Build and Maintain a Core Foundation Linked to Behaviour Based Expectations.
If you lack the clarity of knowing your values and what you believe, you will lack consistency in behaviour that drives optimum performance. A clear statement of corporate values allows for clearly articulated behaviour-based expectations that can be reflected in individual performance appraisals.
2. Accept Responsibility and Take Initiative for Performance.
Technical competence is the ability to get things done and deliver results — doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. Do not make excuses, do not blame shift, and do not allow yourself to become a victim to avoid accepting personal responsibility.
3. Hold Yourself Accountable.
Accountability is more than just adherence to rules. Accountability is a moral skill aligning values to behaviour. Accountability is the most difficult task for any leader at any level of the organization. Great leaders and their highly functional teams are able to hold themselves and others accountable in a culture of mutual respect to drive performance.
4. Pursue Effective Communication.
We have all been taught that the key to communication is listening. This is true but you first must care (moral skill) before you can listen (behavioural skill) to understand effectively (technical skill). Effective communication, as a highly influential trust behaviour, requires caring first, and seeking to understand before demanding to be understood.
5. The Fifth Competency – The Artful Apology
At the heart of sustaining highly effective relationships is the skill of expressing an artful apology.
Connecting leader behaviour to a performance driven culture requires a corporative attitude that begins with the skill of Positive Presence. Positive Presence is a new and deliberate way of thinking and behaving that makes the connection between human energy and behaviour and is easily practiced and developed right on the job. For many, it is just a lot of common sense, but for others it is a slow and gentle process that requires the help of both team mates and leaders.
Catherine is the President and CEO of CORPORATE HARMONY, providing virtual solutions for leadership development and organizational culture change. Her leadership and coaching experience as a Project Manager in an ever-changing, fast moving technological organization with unrelenting demands drove her to the realization that a positive mindset and strength-building behaviors are essential for today’s complex and chaotic organizational systems. CORPORATE HARMONY’s virtual platform of programs, coaching and performance measurement, is an innovative online technology of tested proprietary content. The world-class content of CORPORATE HARMONY’s Positive Presence Program develops the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and the necessary ‘Positive Presence Behaviour Competencies’ for maintaining a positive and energized mindset and increased performance in today’s complex work environment, and leading to a culture of collaboration and connection. Catherine’s vision for Corporate Harmony is to bring the skill of “Positive Presence” to the corporate world as it becomes more complex, ambiguous and chaotic. Catherine is uniquely positioned to impact organizations’ productivity and long term success, with her powerful vision of eliminating bad stress from every workplace around the globe, bringing purpose into the people equation to promote healthy, productive and meaningful work cultures and turn the tide on the neglect of mental health on a global scale. Catherine is author of the book: “CORPORATE HARMONY – The Performance Link for Today’s Modern Organization” Catherine can be reached at: Catherine.Osborne@corporateharmony.ca or go to ‘contact us’ on our website www.corporateharmony.ca. Catherine is available for consultation, and can be reached by 519-695-3407.