Author Archives: Teddy Nee

Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

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Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

If you’re in charge of a team, you’ll appreciate that they’re rather tricky animals. At times, all appears well, but you’re achieving little. At other times, you’re reaching your targets, but there’s unhappiness and resentment. If your team has become disaffected, then it’s time to rely on performance management to set people straight again. Following a four-step program should ensure success.

Investigate

It’s vital to establish why a team is disaffected. Usually, it’s related to performance – of the entire team or of an individual. The cause may be that the wrong objectives have been set. Perhaps your team members feel their objectives are not achievable or not realistic? Performance management will help you to review these targets.

Implement Performance Management

Performance management works best when there is an atmosphere of honesty and openness. Try to encourage this in your people. Clear objectives also need to be set. Ensure they are SMARTER (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated and re-evaluated). This useful mnemonic was developed from George T. Doran’s comments in Management Review and has been in use ever since.

Set Goals

Ensure that any targets are clearly aligned to your company’s objectives. The work that your teams carry out should be considered within the work of the company as a whole. Make this as explicit as possible. Your employees need to know that their work matters and has relevancy within the company.

Praise

As soon as objectives are met, ensure you praise, reward and promote. Your team members must see that you, too, have an eye on their targets. The promise of promotion is a real motivator.

Appreciation and motivation are one of the keys to increase performance, and to align any targets to company’s objectives. If you have any opinion about this topic, feel free to leave us a comment or send us a message.

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What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

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What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

Obviously we need a new system. And what can we say about the new system that would serve us better? Well, the specifics of the system will depend on the company, but we do know that it must have the following six characteristics, each of which follows logically from the one preceding.

First, it must be a real-time system that helps managers give “in the moment” coaching and course-correcting. The world we live in is unnervingly dynamic, where we are on one team one week and another the next, where goals that were fresh and exciting at the beginning of Q1 are irrelevant by the third week of Q1, and where the necessary skills, relationships, and even strategies have to be constantly recalibrated. In this real-time world, batched performance reviews delivered once or twice a year are obsolete before we’ve even sat down to write them.

We need much more frequent check-ins—weekly or, at most, monthly. Luckily, we now live in a world where most of us are armed with a device that knows exactly who we are, and into which we can record pretty much anything we want. This device—your mobile phone—will enable you, the employee, to input what you are doing this week and what help you need; and, because it knows you, it will be able to serve up to your manager coaching tips, insights, and prompts customized to your particular set of strengths and skills.

Second, it must be a system with a super light touch. Third, it must feel to the individual employee that it is a system “about me, designed for me. Fourth, and crucially, it must be a strengths-based system. Fifth, it must be a system focused on the future. Finally, it must be a local system.

If you have any question about performance management, or would like to have a discussion about performance management, leave us comment or send us a message.

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Indonesia to Ease Curbs on Foreign Investment as Growth Slows

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Indonesia to Ease Curbs on Foreign Investment as Growth Slows

Indonesia said it will allow foreign investment in airports and ports as the government seeks to revitalize an economy growing at the weakest pace since the global recession.

The country may also ease limits on overseas holdings in its telecommunications and pharmaceutical industries, the Investment Coordinating Board said today, hours after a report showed economic expansion slowed for a fifth quarter. Gross domestic product increased 5.62 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30 from a year earlier, as a declining rupiah restrained investment in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Indonesian policy makers are grappling with a depreciated exchange rate, elevated inflation and diminished foreign capital inflows undermining President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s legacy of economic stability before he steps down next year. His failure to fix infrastructure gaps in his two terms has added to price pressures, threatening his party’s chances at elections in 2014.

“The dust has yet to settle on the slowdown definitely,” said Wellian Wiranto, a Singapore-based investment strategist at the wealth-management unit of Barclays Plc. “Hopefully it will be replaced by construction dust coming from new infrastructure investment if they stick to these opening up measures.”

The rupiah fell 0.5 percent to 11,415 per dollar as of 3:45 p.m. in Jakarta today, according to prices from local banks compiled by Bloomberg. It has dropped more than 15 percent this year, the worst performer among Asia’s 11 most-active currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

Indonesia still remains as a major investment destination. If you want to learn more about investment, feel free to send us a messageor write a comment.

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Financial literacy education has real-life impact

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Financial literacy education has real-life impact

While the Great Recession put many Americans through a financial wringer, it has left at least one positive legacy, hopefully with long-term consequences: a renewed focus on financial literacy education that has united teachers, school districts and businesses in a commitment to curriculum, training and resources.

Financial literacy education advocates interviewed by USA TODAY all mentioned the financial crisis as the pocket-emptying influence behind the country’s increased attention on personal finance lessons in school.

“The American public felt they were a little bit in the dark and really didn’t understand the decisions they were making or not making,” says Nan Morrison, president of the Council for Economic Education, whose biennial Survey of the States measures financial literacy education implementation across the country. “The recession really put a fine point on that.”

Educators decided to try to do something to prepare the next generation of America’s earners.

“We look at things like this and translate them into education practice,” says Lynne Gilli, program manager for career and technology education instruction and head of financial literacy education for the Maryland State Department of Education. “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past.”

What do you think about “Financial Literacy”? Let us know your opinion in the comment or send us a message.

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Zara’s Secret To Success: The New Science Of Retailing

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English: Zara in Oxford

English: Zara in Oxford (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Zara’s Secret To Success: The New Science Of Retailing

In the book there are many good examples of successful strategies. Companies like Abercrombie & Fitch, Best Buy, Joseph A. Banks, Borders, National Bicycle, Walmart, World and many others, are highlighted.    I particularly liked the discussion of Zara, the fast expanding, fashion-right, company headquartered in the remote northwest corner of Spain in La Coruna.  The founder – Amancio Ortega founded Zara in 1975 in order to better understand world markets for his fashion merchandise. A decade later he formed Inditex as a parent company for Zara, as well as several other retail concepts and suppliers that he had built.

While Zara’s original stores were in Spain, today it has stores throughout Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. The company opened their first store in Russia on August 28, 2013. In fiscal 2012 Inditex reported total sales of € 15.9 Billion ($20.7 Billion); Zara represented 66% of total sales or €10.5 Billion ($13.6 Billion) with 120 stores world-wide. Other, smaller, divisions include Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterque.

Zara has focused teams of designers and product managers. They oversee the design, sourcing and production of a specific classification such as dresses or women’s sportswear.  They are responsible for both the initial collection and in-season response. Importantly to its success, Zara produces where it sells. This achieves short lead times for new fashion ideas.

Zara has certainly revolutionized the fashion industry in terms of the supply chain management. If you want to learn more about supply chain management, feel free to drop us a message.

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Why should leaders care about performance management?

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Why should leaders care about performance management?

A consistent track record of sound results is the best indicator of leadership potential and capacity. Top-rated leaders are those with a history of repeated high impact results across a variety of contexts and complexities.

Consequently, performance management should be a central issue in every organisation. Sadly, in our experience, this is not so – in a significant number of cases we see leaders covering their incompetence and poor results with blame shifting.

Performance review meetings are seldom welcomed. They are widely regarded as the event about which most employees get no sleep the night before, and most leaders get no sleep the night after. We have observed many organisations in which performance management has been reduced, if not entirely relegated, to a once-a-year paper exercise for a mandatory input for annual salary reviews. We have also seen organisations where the performance appraisal is a one-sided affair in which the manager does all the talking, wanting to get one more unnecessary administrative formality out of the way as quickly as possible. Does this sound familiar?

Helping people achieve the very best results possible is a primary challenge for every leader and lies at the heart of effective performance contracting, reviews, correction and reward.

Here are five tips to improve your management of performance:

1. Reframe the purpose

2. Reframe the label

3. Reframe the timing

4. Reframe the model

5. Reframe your role

Performance is a crucial aspect in management. If you are interested in how to leverage your performance management, feel free to contact us.

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Coca-Cola refreshes sustainable sourcing goals

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Coca-Cola refreshes sustainable sourcing goals

Coca-Cola has increased efforts to make its supply chain more sustainable by announcing a series of new targets in the areas of sourcing, water use and carbon dioxide emissions.

The drinks producer, which is working with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) on its sustainability programme, announced a target of improving water efficiency by 25 per cent among a series of sustainability goals for 2020. It also pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions of its drinks by a quarter and to work with the WWF to ensure that materials for its PlantBottle, which is manufactured entirely from plant materials, are sourced sustainably.

Other additions to its 2020 sustainability strategy include working to ensure key ingredients, such as sugar cane, mango and pulp and paper are sourced sustainably and replenishing 100 per cent of the water expended through its operations. It also aims to reach a 75 per cent recovery rate on the bottles and cans it sells in developed markets.

Coca-cola’s strategy is one of many good examples about how supply chain management is utilized into operations. If you are interested in how to improve your supply chain management, feel free to contact us.

 

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The Beer Game

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The Beer Game

A rite of passage for new Sloan MBA students provides lessons in systems thinking.

Thursday, August 29, 1:00 p.m.
It is a miserably muggy afternoon in Cambridge as the incoming class of the MIT Sloan School of Management—roughly 400 students from 41 countries—files into a second-floor ballroom at the Kendall Square Marriott. They are here to play the Beer Game, a Sloan orientation tradition. Unfortunately given the weather, the Beer Game does not involve drinking cool beverages.

“There is no actual beer in the Beer Game,” says John Sterman, the Sloan professor who is overseeing the proceedings for the 25th consecutive year.

Rather, the Beer Game is a table game, developed in the late 1950s by digital computing pioneer and Sloan professor Jay Forrester, SM ’45. Played with pen, paper, printed plastic tablecloths, and poker chips, it simulates the supply chain of the beer industry. In so doing, it illuminates aspects of system dynamics, a signature mode of MIT thought: it illustrates the nonlinear complexities of supply chains and the way individuals are circumscribed by the systems in which they act.

All that will be explained in a class-wide debriefing Sterman will conduct after the game. For now, it’s game on, and as a writer for MIT News, I’ve been invited by Sterman to play this year. I go to one of the 47 tables where students are randomly seating themselves in teams of eight, introduce myself to my seven teammates (MBA candidates from India, Peru, and the United States), and listen to Sterman explain the rules.

Beer game simulates the reality of supply chain management. If you are interested in knowing more about supply chain management, feel free to contactus.

 

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Five economic lessons from Sweden, the rock star of the recovery

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Five economic lessons from Sweden, the rock star of the recovery

Almost every developed nation in the world was walloped by the financial crisis, their economies paralyzed, their prospects for the future muddied.

And then there’s Sweden, the rock star of the recovery.

This Scandinavian nation of 9 million people has accomplished what the United States, Britain and Japan can only dream of: Growing rapidly, creating jobs and gaining a competitive edge. The banks are lending, the housing market booming. The budget is balanced.

Sweden was far from immune to the global downturn of 2008-09. But unlike other countries, it is bouncing back. Its 5.5 percent growth rate last year trounces the 2.8 percent expansion in the United States and was stronger than any other developed nation in Europe. And compared with the United States, unemployment peaked lower (around 9 percent, compared with 10 percent) and has come down faster (it now stands near 7 percent, compared with 9 percent in the U.S.).

Sweden has proven to the world that they survived from the crisis in a short time. If you are interested in learning more about financial management, feel free to contactus.

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Dashboards Help CIOs Manage Business Services

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CIO.com has recently released an article introducing the following 6 business dashboards by putting data from a variety of enterprise applications and services at a CIO’s fingertips so he or she can better manage employees, website activity, development projects and company resources.

Kapta Dashboard

Kapta shows a summary of employee goals in an easily identifiable red, yellow and green—map to the overall company goals with a heat map. The map shows a breakdown of the percentage completion rate by groups within IT.

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