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Performance Management Systems
working with The Performance Learning Company
Training
Enhancing your ability to learn through our supported and extended
Performance Learning Framework©.
Unless we make a deliberate and conscious effort to practice or reinforce our learning, we tend to forget much of what we learn within a matter of days or even hours. This ‘forgetting curve’ is why the majority of learning courses provide little benefit; it's not that the teaching or course is ineffective, but that the scaffolding before and after the course is inadequate and, alas, mostly non-existent. Our Performance Learning Framework© provides an end-to-end pathway from business need to business benefit, and our Performance Learning Toolkit© enables anyone to define a clear action plan to apply their learning in their day-to-day work. Additional elements of our Performance Learning Framework© provide peer and tutor support to boost your practice and facilitated reflection to deepen, share and leverage your learning.
We use the Performance Learning Framework© to offer courses and workshops in various facets of leadership, including:
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Leading yourself and others (Fundamentals of Leadership; Accountability)
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Leading projects
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Leading customers (Sales)
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Leading suppliers (Purchasing)
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Leading the market (Culture and Brand).
You can read more about each of these topics below, or contact us to find out how we can help you learn to lead and lead to win.
Fundamentals of Leadership
Leadership is the most crucial element of an organisation or team. Ambition, performance and results all start with leadership. Leaders determine the direction the organisation is heading in: they lead the culture, lead the energy, and set the example for the rest of the organisation to follow.
However, we believe that leadership is something that anyone in your organisation can learn and develop. Leadership is not a title; it is not exclusive to those at C-level. Leadership is the application of a mindset, skillset and toolset, through deliberate practice and continuous learning, that can occur in and benefit any level of business. It is also not exclusively something that applies within your own business; a company’s success is boosted significantly by learning to lead those outside your own business, such as customers, suppliers and your community.
Leaders harness the brilliance of others to achieve great things that those others would not see, or have the courage, commitment or capability to choose and succeed in, by themselves. Although there are many elements to great leadership, the most fundamental role of a leader comprises four critical elements:
• Determining the Purpose of the business or team
• Shaping and living the Values by which you choose to behave
• Setting the Promise you commit to delivering to your customers
• Inspiring committed action to a Vision that creates a sustainable future.
Whether you are leading a project, a team, an organisation, a customer, supplier or market, you will need to persuade your followers to believe in you, believe in your vision, and believe in themselves to achieve the vision.
We will enable you to create the mindset, develop the skillset and build your toolset to practise and learn your way towards leadership excellence.
Accountability
Accountability is a fundamental of execution that gets people into the habit of doing what they say they will do. It is the requirement to be responsible for, and to be able to justify, your actions and decisions. Guided by the company’s mission, vision and values, accountability starts with organisational leaders showing the way; it then spreads throughout an organisation by inspiring all employees to hold themselves and others accountable for their decisions, actions and outcomes.
We have identified six key factors – the 6Cs of Accountability© – which actively enable anyone to be accountable. Using the 6Cs of Accountability© as a checking tool, every task or project can be run through our Performance Project Cycle© to plan, track and reflect upon the task; this ensures tasks are completed on time and to the required standard, and that key learning actions can be identified and taken forward to benefit future projects.
Ensuring everyone in your organisation is inspired and able to be accountable, and is purposefully applying the toolset to ensure they live accountability, will significantly help your business successfully deliver on what it says it will do.
Understanding the challenges of building personal momentum to master self-accountability, we can also help accelerate your accountability practice through the support of an Accountability Partner. This guided service helps you build momentum to deliver on your personal, organisational or customer promises with greater speed and greater success.
Leading Projects
We all demonstrate leadership skills in our daily lives; as well as leading others, we must regularly lead ourselves. You can think of most challenges, opportunities and tasks as being a project. All projects flow through a number of stages and each stage requires specific capabilities to achieve successful completion. This can be true of things we do in our personal lives, such as buying a car or booking a holiday, as much as it is in business, and such personal experiences can be drawn upon to help us face similar challenges in the business world.
Working through the Performance Project Cycle© can help us understand the steps required to lead a successful project. It begins with clarifying and understanding your goal, i.e. what you are aiming to achieve. It’s invariably beneficial to explore relevant advice and guidance on what might enhance your success; this could involve talking with others, reviewing exemplary practitioners or conducting internet research, for example. The benefit of such a broad sweep of insights is the opportunity to make more connections and innovate more ideas to advance the project, using techniques such as brainstorming with a carefully selected team of colleagues. When assessed against a relevant set of criteria, your ideas will hopefully yield a clear solution, against which you can now identify the people you need to help you achieve your goal and persuade them to join the project.
With your project team in place, it’s time to plan how you will execute the solution, then follow your plan to deliver the project which achieves the goal. Throughout delivery, a monitoring process checks that progress is on time, on budget and on specification, ultimately tracking the project to a successful conclusion. As a final analysis, following a reflective process enables you to understand what happened, what can be learned and what can be improved next time.
Different people will naturally have a tendency to dive into the cycle at different points; for example, some may jump straight to the delivery stage. Following the Performance Project Cycle© can strengthen a project by reminding you of steps you might otherwise miss, and can enable a leader to build a strong team consisting of members who specialise in different elements of the Performance Project Cycle©.
Sales, Purchasing and Marketing
The essence of all businesses is that we buy, we brand and we sell.
All businesses seek to sell products or services to generate revenue that they hope will be greater than their costs.
Why is a supermarket's own brand of cola so much cheaper than the market leader? Some businesses recognise that the biggest impact on revenue is price, so they employ the power of marketing to understand how to create the most value for customers (physical and emotional) in pursuit of maximising that price.
Whether it is raw materials that we transform into a very different end product, or simply trading somebody else’s products, we all have to buy something.
We buy, we brand, we sell – and we have to be good at all three to thrive as a company.
Sales
Expertly using your sales process to lead your customer is one of the core areas of business leadership. In recent times, there has been an increase in the proportion of B2B buyers following the consumer trend to make a purchase based on the experience of buying, rather than simply the product or price. In our Sales Leadership Programmes, we explore how you can put the customer at the centre of your business and make the buying experience feel personal to them; an experience they initially choose to have, then choose again and then recommend to others.
Our Performance Selling Framework© enables you to build a successful, customer-focused sales operation, which:
Focuses your customer and product Portfolio;
Tunes your Value Proposition;
Drives the efficiency of your Process;
Increases the effectiveness of your People;
Develops a customer-specific sales Plan; and
Delivers a winning Performance.
This will help you successfully lead your customers through the Revenue Generation Flywheel©, from the creation of awareness and interest through new and repeat sales, ultimately building a winning position where your customers create referrals to generate your next customers for you.
Purchasing
If you are in business – you are in purchasing; its not discretionary. It is often said that selling makes the business but buying makes the profit. The only question is, therefore, ‘How well do you buy?’
Purchasing isn’t just about the cost of the product you hope to pay for; it impacts a huge hidden priceberg that includes:
The cash impact of things like minimum order quantities, supply lead-times and payment terms
The on-costs of expedited deliveries, special processes, quality re-work, re-packaging, etc.
The revenue impact of stock-outs, etc.
The brand impact of late deliveries, product failure, returns and customer claims.
This list is by no means exhaustive.
Alas, despite such a stark reality, buying things 'right' is not often seen to be a critical goal and so purchasing remains one of the most neglected functions in most smaller businesses.
Our Performance Purchasing Framework© helps you uncover your hidden priceberg, categorise your suppliers to know which of four strategic buying approaches to take with each supplier, and highlights ways of reducing price, costs, and stock to help improve your sales, your brand and your profit.
Marketing
As much as we might believe we have a brand, it ultimately exists in the mind of our customers and most of us do not truly understand what that is. Marketing, therefore, is as much about shaping internal insights as to what customers want as it is about shaping customers’ insights to influence what they buy.
In today’s world of marketing, the classic 4P framework (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) has expanded to double figures and yet many of us still perceive Marketing as Promotion. Yet without the right product being easily accessible at the right price, we face diminished revenue; either because we don’t attract or serve the right customer, or because we default to random discounting to ‘win’ sales.
Ultimately, Marketing exists to guide the business to simultaneously create the best value for the customer and the best value for the business. Therefore, it is based on both market and business acumen.
Since not all customers value the same things, Marketing has first to determine the customers that best align to the value you create, then to explore what tweaks to your value will best attract, retain and build your custom.
The Performance Marketing Framework© helps you clarify these issues and guides actions that ultimately help to increase the value your business creates.