A note from me

We are still relaxing with family in France at the moment. The area is beautiful and also deeply historic. There are many impressive chateaux and gorgeous bastide towns with connections to the hundred years’ war in the Middle Ages over rival English and French claims to Aquitaine. Up until the ill-conceived Brexit vote, the English were surreptitiously reclaiming the land here through vacation properties, but now that has also gone into retreat! Looking further back in time, there are also deeply moving pre-historic cave paintings nearby.  

I’ve been trying to improve my physical condition by swimming every day but I can’t claim it is helping me get in shape yet. I’m still the overweight, white-bearded man that somehow appeared during the Covid lockdown period. I know “long-Covid” is a serious medical condition – indeed one of my adult daughters is suffering from it – but there are also more subtle physical and mental carry-overs from that difficult period.  

On the positive side, I still managed to emerge victorious from the family boules competition. This was more due to luck than skill as we play on a very uneven surface but, hey, let’s not discount our minor triumphs!

We also read through once more the first theatrical drama I’ve written in decades.  We’ve read through this several times previously to refine it, but this was an opportunity for serious grilling. And I received a real grilling! With this very frank feedback, I hope to be able to enhance the play and its impact considerably.  

That’s the impact of good feedback when taken seriously – it can lead to learning and improvement, even from a reasonably good starting point to begin with. That’s why, in a previous Newsletter, I included “credible performance feedback” as one of the characteristics of high-performance teams. We’ll consider this in more detail in this Newsletter.

I’m also preparing for an experiment with the Dodo Club webinar which will be hosted for the first time this week on LinkedIn. It’s an opportunity for you to pose questions or comment on recent, or any, Newsletter content or issues related to leadership, strategy, scenarios or energy transitions. Please join the webinar though the link below on Friday 16th at 12:00 UK (13:00 CET) to make this a really interactive event.

I hope you enjoy it!

My Bi-Weekly Guide

Credible Performance Feedback for High-Performance Teams (and Art)

Being in France at the moment, my mind has tended to turn towards French artists when thinking about the Newsletter and which images to share. In the last Newsletter I connected some thoughts about Strategic Narrative with Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”. For this edition, focused on credible performance feedback, for some reason I’ve been prompted to share “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix.

This was painted in 1830, commemorating the July Revolution of that year, which was witnessed by Delacroix and which toppled King Charles X. Like Géricault’s painting, the style is “Romantic” – full of movement, emotion and symbolism.  Climbing over the bodies of fallen comrades, the personification of Liberty leads forward brave Parisians of different backgrounds. Liberty herself is topless as a reference to representations of the immortals in antiquity, but also earthy and disheveled as a reference to current fortitude and the strength of the people.

The link to credible performance feedback is that the uprising made clear the failings of the governing regime in France at the time. Since the revolution of 1789 and the overthrow of the “ancien regime”, various constitutional constructs had been instituted, with a form of constitutional monarchy reinstated after the defeat of Emperor Napoleon. However, the unpopularity of the king’s ultra-conservative ordinances, and even the notion of hereditary monarchy itself, prompted the uprising, his replacement as king, and additional constraints on the power of the monarch.

That was pretty strong feedback on the performance of the governing elite!

In thinking about present-day high-performance teams, I use the term “credible” in two directions. First of all, of course, the feedback needs to come from credible sources or measurements. Secondly, however, the feedback can also be used by the team to enhance its own credibility with stakeholders.  

This can be particularly important for teams whose performance can’t be summarised by a single, simple metric like positions in a race, positions in a league or financial returns. This is the case for most teams, and is why the concept of a “balanced scorecard” developed. In such a framework, several considerations are highlighted as significant for judging performance and giving guidance on strengths and weaknesses.   

The purpose of the last team I was privileged to lead as a corporate executive was to “surface important insights and bring these to life in the minds and actions of the most senior decision-makers in the organisation and beyond”. This naturally sounds pretty abstract and difficult for performance assessment, but we instituted a 5-pillar framework to help us judge the effectiveness of what we were doing and guide efforts for improvement. With appropriate customisation, this structure should be valuable for all teams seeking high performance.

Here are the 5 performance assessment boxes:

1. Quality of Tangible Deliverables:
   Some things can be measured directly, like bottom-line financial returns, so are very tangible. But there are other tangibles that are delivered by teams like reports, presentations, workshops, designs etc. It is possible to make judgments about the quality of these, preferably from the stakeholders they have been delivered to, but also through internal deliberation.
   

2. Specific Recommendations:
   A team that is advising others should be making specific recommendations as well. These may or may not be implemented, but the rigour of thinking through the implications of your work for others inevitably improves the team’s focus and relevance. Simply tracking the number of specific recommendations made can improve performance quality.
   

3. Fingerprints on Major Decisions:
   Whenever a major decision is made by an organisation, multiple people and teams will have been involved along the way. There will be many “fingerprints” on the decision. But organisations generally only make a handful of major decisions every year, and every team should be asking itself “are our fingerprints on those decisions and, if not, why not?”
   

4. Evidence of mindset shifts:
   A high-performance team influences others. That may be an explicit aspect of the purpose of the team as with my former activity, or it may be simply through its reputation for high performance. There will be evidence for how the team has changed the way of thinking of other people. We used to pay careful attention to the speeches made by the most senior people inside and outside our company and look out for use of language that we had introduced. Use of language is a good way of judging how people are thinking. 
   

5. Disappointments and opportunities for improvement:
   This could be approached as a sub-category for all the pillars above, but I’ve found that it’s helpful to collect all disappointments together to see the whole picture. One of the main purposes of the assessment framework is to take lessons from experience that propel improvements, and identifying disappointments is powerful for this. In any case, the tendency is to recognise mainly the successes in the previous 4 pillars, so making the disappointments explicit in the 5^th is a necessary balance. 

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

In the teams you are involved with, could this 5-pillar framework be helpful and how would you customise it for your specific use?

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