Delegation involves giving an employee the responsibility for part of your job and the authority to carry it out while you retain control and accountability. Empowerment is very similar to delegation with the added responsibility and authority to make decisions tied to the assignment while you retain control and accountability.

To ensure that things go smoothly when you delegate, you should:

• Make your expectations clear to your employees concerning the quality of the work, time frame for completion, etc.
• Invest time upfront preparing your employees to handle the task well by providing coaching or skills based training.
• Build employee confidence. Praise them for previous work and point up their knowledge and skills. Your staff need to know that you chose them to do a task because of their competence, and most importantly, because you trust them to do the job well.

If you want to truly empower your employees, you need to ensure the following:

• Invest in your employees’ knowledge, skills, and ability.
• Believe in your employees’ ability to be successful.
• Be absolutely clear about your expectations.
• Provide them a safety net.
• Identify those who can and those who can’t be empowered.
• Share information with them.

Delegating and empowering employees have positive benefits. Both build employee abilities, experience, and confidence. Therefore

• Use delegation and empowerment to train your staff members.
• Pick delegates who are confident enough to admit they are encountering problems.
• Make sure that those empowered to oversee tasks are not limited by lack of others’ support, both within and outside your unit.

The most common appraisal mistakes are:

1. Inadequately defined standards of performance
2. Overemphasis on recent performance
3. Miscomprehension of performance standards by employee
4. Insufficient or unclear performance documentation
5. Inadequate time allotment for performance appraisal discussion
6. Too much talking by manager/supervisor
7. Lack of follow-up plan

Inadequately Defined Standards of Performance

What is expected must be defined if the performance appraisal is to have any meaning for the employee, for the organization, and for the rating manager. A clear and measurable idea of effective or superior job performance is the indispensable basis for any performance appraisal. Yet, all too often, it is missing. Managers need to know what they expect of their employees otherwise evaluations cannot be made or defended at the end of the appraisal period.

Overemphasis on Recent Performance

If the manager does not gather data over the appraisal period, inevitably, whatever happened in the early part tends to be forgotten, and he or she ends up basing the appraisal on the events of the most recent month or two. Employees know the same thing and are likely to be on their best behaviour a month or two prior to their year-end appraisal. On the other hand, if the employee happens to be having some difficulty at the time the appraisal is completed, it is just as inaccurate. Either way, the manager is being overly influenced by a particular moment in time which does not present a truly balanced picture which leads to a flawed and inaccurate appraisal.

Miscomprehension of Performance Standards by Employee

Employees must be given adequate explanation of the performance standards by which they are being evaluated or the ratings at the end of the year, even if accurate, may be seen as unfair. They may not perform well in the first place because they did not have a clear target or benchmark to guide them. Employees should know not only what the standard is but also, at least in a general way, how judgments are reached.

Insufficient or Unclear Performance Documentation

Of all the performance appraisal errors, failing to document performance is the most common for two reasons: (1) managers tend to put off the work till performance appraisal is around the corner, and (2) managers seem to share a widespread ambivalence about the appraisal process as a whole. Often managers are reluctant to write down anything negative about an employee. But it is important to point out that a performance record in which accurate positive and negative factors are mentioned will give a balanced picture that is certainly a necessary basis for a plan that will go to work on the employee’s developmental needs.

Inadequate Time Allotment for Performance Appraisal Discussion

If the manager wants to use the performance appraisal as a vehicle to develop employees, help them improve in their current job, and perhaps increase their opportunity for advancement or promotion, then he or she must schedule enough time to discuss the employee’s performance in depth. It should not be merely giving the employee the evaluation but having a meaningful dialogue about the implications of the appraisal.

Too Much Talking by Manager/Supervisor

To get the most out of the discussion, a manager needs to listen as well as talk. The manager may have completed the appraisal but there are still things he or she may need to know. To make the appraisal motivating for the employee, the manager needs to know what that employee is thinking and feeling and to listen carefully to what the employee is saying. This discussion is also a chance to get at the root of performance problems. So both good interviewing as well as presentation skills is needed here.

Lack of Follow-Up Plan

Without a follow-up plan, it is less likely the manager is going to meet his or her objectives. A formalize plan is needed for improving the performance of the employee making it more likely that it is going to happen. The manager also needs to talk with employees about how they can keep, support, and advance the mission of the organization over the coming performance period.

Focus on delivering customer satisfaction to achieve your long-term business goal

 

Another of my article is featured in CATS Recruit Section, page C30, of The Straits Times today, 17 June 2009. We have it reproduced here below for your reading pleasure.

Businesses will need to manage the process of cost reduction well to ensure that they do not unwittingly compromise their product quality or service standards. Cost-cutting is a short-term strategy. It is far more important that companies take a long-term view to build and strengthen their organisation and its capabilities now, positioning themselves for the eventual economic recovery.

Over the years, businesses have worked hard to win customers to get to where they are today. To lose their customers now would be tragic indeed. Studies have shown that it costs up to six times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. In the slow economy, it would probably cost even more to win a new account.

Businesses must have an unrelenting focus on delivering the best customer experience. There must be the line of sight from the top to the bottom of the organisation. Take care of that and you will enjoy customer loyalty - and revenues and profitability will follow. Many companies find that 20 per cent of their customers provide over 80 per cent of their revenue. Thus, high levels of repeat customers will lead to high levels of profit.

To achieve that, companies must remain constantly vigilant about the changing requirements of their customers, understand their business models and the markets they operate in, know what their customers want and deliver these to help their customers succeed.

Achieving excellence

To achieve business excellence, everyone in the organisation needs to focus on delivering customer satisfaction by taking personal responsibility for improving processes and be empowered to make changes.

Departments need to become self-managed teams; cross-functional teams are needed at the company level; and the organisation needs to be flatter and more efficient for faster decision-making and response. When the company finds a problem or an opportunity for improvement outside, they need to collaborate to find the solution.

For that to happen and for that change to be successful and sustainable, a holistically integrated approach to business excellence, which engages all parts and elements of the organisation and its leadership, is required.

Leadership for change

Executives must lead the change process, the thinking about productivity and quality to learning to create a company that consistently delivers high value and customer satisfaction.
They must establish a culture of continuous improvement that seeks to remove bottlenecks, eliminate sources of wastes and customer dissatisfaction, and become more efficient and more effective.

There must be a focus on reducing cycle time, rapidly transferring knowledge and delighting the customer – these help the company to maintain its competitive edge.

Management must also be able to spot changing customer preferences, be aware of the changing competitive landscape, harness advances in technology, seize opportunities and implement new solutions rapidly.

Product and service standards have to stretch from the top to the bottom of the organisation and need to cut across all departmental lines. The organisation’s own learning and development process must be structured, systematic and focused on building on its strength. Critical systems that support hiring, training, recognition, career advancement and information access need to be in place.

Employee engagement

Organisations can reorganise, downsize and streamline their way to efficiency. These approaches are necessary but often not sufficient to catapult organisations into high performance mode because they neglect one essential component of performance – engaging employees in their work.

To mobilise the entire organisation, leaders must ask for employees’ inputs and their involvement, especially in areas that need improvement. Unfortunately, in modern day continuous improvement process this step is often missed which causes communication and ownership problems that hinder success. Employees must be trained and equipped to go from “good to great”.

Total approach needed

For companies to be successful in their business, they need to be responsive to their customers’ needs at every step of the business process involving every function, employee and leader. Anything short of a total approach is unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes.

Organisational transformation is a long-term process requiring a fundamental change in management practices and culture - a paradigm shift.

Finally, the organisational direction that advocates the strategic intent has to be clear about the objectives that needs to be achieved, the type of values and capabilities that are needed and how all this is going to be implemented for successful change to occur.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our Free Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”. If you have comments, we would love to hear. Please post them below.

P.S. To find out more about this topic, Register NOW and enjoy early bird discounted fee (by 19 June 2009) for our 2-day workshop at ST701 Professional Development Workshop to be held on 29 & 30 June 2009. Please log on to www.jobs.st701.com or email to st701@sph.com.sg. Alternatively, you may also call 6319 5979 / 6319 5923.

My article was featured in CATS Recruit Section, page C26, of The Straits Times on 11 June 2009. We have it reproduced below for your reading pleasure.

There are costs involved in manufacturing a product or providing a service. In fact, every activity in an organisation costs money. And prudence would have it that money in any business should be well spent or invested.

Cost is, undoubtedly, a key factor to competitiveness. As organisations face the current global economic challenge, the pressure now is even far greater for them to find ways to reduce their operating costs to remain profitable. But it has also become increasingly difficult to compete on price alone.

For businesses to remain profitable and viable over the longer term, companies will have to continue to satisfy the needs of their customers in more efficient ways, demonstrating value for money.

Prominent American quality consultants Armand Feigenbaum and James Harrington have pointed out that 25 to 40 per cent of operating costs result in waste. Separate studies undertaken by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) have also shown that waste can go as high as 40 per cent of sales.

Waste is any resource-consuming activity that adds no value for the customer. For most organisations, customers are the users or consumers of their products, services or both. Clearly, the focus is on external customers. But identifying waste can and must also be applied to the support activities that serve internal customers.

High Costs

In the past, there was insufficient information about production and service costs. Hence, there was limited scope for comparisons and benchmarking. Organisations, as a result, were able to pass on their high costs of production and services to their customers and continued to do so for a long time.

Nowadays, customers are more well-informed about processes and the service delivery supply chain. They are now able to analyse and compare the cost structure of their supplier organisations to determine where they might be able to derive highest value for the money they pay to acquire goods and services.

Limitations

In traditional accounting, organisations may know their total revenues and costs to the penny. But they have no idea how much they throw away every day on plain simple ineffectiveness, inefficiency and waste.

These are not visible on financial reports because traditional accounting methods do not provide a means of separating value-added activity from wasteful or low-value activity. As such, they do not show the high costs of ineffectiveness and inefficiency within the organisation.

Reducing Waste

Since traditional accounting methods have their limitations, the management of most organisations attempt to control inefficiency and ineffectiveness the best they can without proper tools and metrics - resulting in much wasteful activity.

If your accounting systems are of little help and your management practices lack the knowledge to be lean and productive, then how do you identify waste and unproductive costs?

There are two approaches. The first is a variation of cost accounting and is called activity-based costing, or ABC. It is an excellent system for identifying low-value activity, but it has drawbacks. It is a formal accounting system that parallels existing systems; it depends on considerable input from large numbers of individuals who already are working at their time capacity limits, and it requires a high level of system support.

The second approach is one with assessment and problem-solving capabilities and is called the cost of quality or COQ.

Improve Processes

The biggest opportunity organisations have to boost the bottom line comes from improving their business processes. The survival of many organisations is dependent on these improvements.

In many companies, management can make more profit by cutting unnecessary costs in half than doubling sales. This can be accomplished without hiring one new person, building a new facility, or finding one new customer.

Organisations must therefore identify unnecessary costs in the business processes and take action to improve the company’s bottom line.

Organisations must help their employees recognize wastefulness, maintain a high visibility of what these are, systematically reduce non-value-added activities and reducing costs the smart way.

An organisation that focuses on profit may have maximum profits in the near future. But an organisation that focuses on its reputation of being the highest value provider will provide the best return to its investors in the long haul.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our Free Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”. If you have comments, we would love to hear. Please post them below.

P.S. To find our more about this topic, Register NOW and enjoy early bird discounted fee (by 19 June 2009) for our 1-day workshop at ST701 Professional Development Workshop to be held on 26 June 2009. Please log on to www.jobs.st701.com or email to st701@sph.com.sg. Alternatively, you may also call 6319 5979 / 6319 5923.

We will be delighted to have you at these workshops. Please register early to enjoy discounted fees.

To Your Success,

From Us All Here At

QUARTON MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS

To help facilitate success, at least a few top managers of the group or company must be on board. We provide here a simple Checklist that allows you to do a quick assessment of your organization’s readiness to implement quality leadership culture.

Checklist For Quality Readiness:

You need to be very honest when using the checklist above. Count the number of checks in the list above after you completed it. If you have less than 6 check marks, you might want to try following the steps recommended in my previous article entitled “How To Start Right Building A Quality Service Culture” before embarking on much larger scale campaign.

In Closing

Remember that Quality usually starts with just a few people in any organization. However, the higher those people are in the organization, the more likely the process of building a quality leadership culture will succeed.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our Free Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”. If you have comments, we would love to hear. Please post them below.

To Your Success,

From All of Us Here At

QUARTON MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS

To ensure that a good beginning is in placed right from the onset, the following is recommended: 

• 1. Provide coaching for upper level managers
• 2. Have upper level managers and the board of directors go through a seminar on service quality
• 3. Do an upside-down review. Have subordinates rate the managers on quality readiness
• 4. Have upper level managers go through an executive retreat to assess this cultural readiness and work through a plan to change the culture. This is done by defining the desired culture and then doing a gap analysis by surveying employees to see how close the current culture is to the desired outcome. Outside facilitators can be most helpful. 

Leadership training comes in many forms. There are four basic types; feedback, personal growth, skills building, and conceptual. Each has its drawbacks and advantages. The latest trend, however, is to use a value-based approach. 

Value-based leadership maintains that if we share certain values, the bond between us will be stronger than if we follow the same commands. It requires leaders to articulate the company vision and then create an environment where employees can figure out the answers. 

The Japanese went through 20 years of changing a very authoritarian management philosophy into one that involves considerable direction from the top and input and decision making at the bottom. 

Total quality service is both top-down and bottom-up management. For it to succeed, leadership has to be responsive. Work on the leadership first if this is not the case. Unresponsive leadership will only make employees and customers resentful as heightened expectations are dashed against the arrogance and resistance. Most organizations have a bit of this in place, but ultimately leadership has to walk the talk.  

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our Free Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”. If you have comments, we would love to hear. Please post them below.

If you know you have the skills to work with others effectively, your attitude toward them is going to reflect that - you know you’re ready to address whatever may warrant your attention. You are less likely to have your back up against the wall or be defensive. You are also less likely to be overly cautious, holding back. Instead, you’re confident and willing to engage.

Choosing a mind-set to make a good impression of yourself will influence your behaviour - in all sorts of ways. The tone of your voice will be positive and engaging. Your listening skills will be sharpened and at the ready. And although in a telephone conversation your body language would not be visible to the other person, it will nonetheless manifest itself in the way you come across. If you are in a face-to-face setting, your body language will certainly reflect the positive words you use in the conversation.

When you consistently express this mind-set, you will influence the behaviour of people around you. They will respond in a different way than they otherwise might thus create a positive environment for all.

Much of what we are describing comes back to the importance of choice. With a mind-set to make a good impression of yourself, you make the choice to respect the other person and treat him or her as you would have him or her treat you; your attitude and behaviour would naturally reflect that commitment. This applies to personal relationships as well.

The bottom line is with a mind-set to always make a good impression of yourself, it helps you establish a genuinely respectful relationship between you and others. Even if you have to tell the customer that his product was back-ordered or that his appliance sent in for repair isn’t ready for collection - or must say no in any fashion - the customer can still feel that you have handled the situation in such a calm, confident, professional way that he or she would still choose to have another contact with you in the future. 

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Our expectations are at an all-time high. We are more demanding than ever with growing affluence. We are spoilt for choice. Ask yourself as a customer, do you bother to take time to tell people exactly what you want? The answer is most probably “No”. You would expect the quality or service you want for whatever it is you’re buying and you expect the other party to know.

I was with a close buddy recently who wanted steak for dinner. We went to this restaurant in mid town and ordered a rib-eye and sirloin steak complete with soup, salad, red wine, and dessert and coffee to end off. He preferred his steak done medium-well while I like mine well-done as usual.

When our soup was served, it wasn’t hot. In fact, it tasted like it was mass produced and left on the kitchen stove for some time. The garlic bread that accompanied it was no better. It wasn’t freshly toasted and soaked of melted butter.  Twenty minutes later, our steaks arrived. Mine was almost burned (I could tell even with the brown mushroom sauce over it) while his was clearly rare when he cut it. Meanwhile, the waiters were busily serving other diners. I suggested we have his steak sent back to the kitchen but he said to forget about it.

Thirty minutes later, we asked for the bill. The restaurant manager presented us the check and enquired if everything was to our satisfaction. My buddy simply replied, “Fine, thanks” and the manager happily moved on.

“Fine! Why didn’t you tell him your steak was served practically raw fit for the lions? They messed up your steak and you said fine?” I protested. “Oh, I can’t be bothered. I’ll just make sure I don’t come back,” he replied with certainty.

Here is the scary situation. The manager thinks everybody is happy while the customers are thinking, “We are not ever going to come back here again!” My friend did not even register his dissatisfaction on the customary customer satisfaction form located at each table.

So how do you know what your customers are thinking about you? Just because they are silent does not necessarily mean they are happy.

What can you do?

1. Openly and habitually seek feedback from your customers - good or bad.
2. Even if your customer should reply that everything is fine, still ask “If there is one thing we can do better, what would it be?”
3. In the feedback card, use words like “Please give us your honest comment. We love feedback as it will help us serve you better.”
4. Then go to work on improvements based on the feedback received or your customers will know sooner or later that you are insincere about improving.

And finally, if you do get customers who complain, remember to thank them. They are probably speaking on behalf of many dozen other customers who thought similarly but didn’t tell you. Learn from it and make sure you win them over and keep them coming back.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog and get our Free Report on “10 Secrets to Successful Employee Engagement”. If you have comments, we would love to hear. Please post them below.