Beyond Performance by Scott Keller & Colin Price

Author:Scott Keller & Colin Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118097465
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Most leaders we encounter feel they already have a good idea of who the influence leaders are in their organizations. However, the results of the SNA take many of them by surprise: the real informal organization often looks very different from what they were expecting. Our experience with clients from many industries shows that identifying influence leaders is harder than it looks. When leaders are asked to do it, they get it right less than 40 percent of the time. This is true at all management levels, from CEOs to business-unit leaders, heads of manufacturing plants, store managers, and so on.

As well as establishing who the influence leaders are, the SNA can estimate how much authority they have (how many people do they reach? how great an influence do they exert?) and their willingness to transform and lead (can they become role models?). Once identified, the influence leaders can be set to work to role model the desired shifts in mindsets and behaviors.

Some organizations have been able to achieve significant shifts through the help of influence leaders. When the private wealth management business of investment bank Goldman Sachs was trying to increase its contribution to the firm's earnings, it identified “positive deviants”—influence leaders who exemplified a different and better way of doing things—and mobilized them to help roll out the new practices to all investment teams, showing not just how to adopt them but why. The tactics buzzed throughout the business and were adopted so fast that average productivity per team doubled.41

Although the impact of influence leaders shouldn't be underestimated, it shouldn't be overestimated either. As Malcolm Gladwell argues in his book The Tipping Point, influence leaders should be seen as one intervention among many, not an all-purpose catalyst for making change happen. After all, not everything that influence leaders say, wear, or do catches on in the way that TOMS footwear did. Influence leaders are not a panacea. They are one tool in a transformation, not the whole toolkit.

Using Performance Initiatives to Influence Mindsets and Behaviors

Each of the four levers in our influence model affects mindsets in a particular way. An individual transformation program may rely on some levers more than others, but using all four together sets in motion a powerful system that maximizes a company's chances of getting new patterns of thought and behavior to stick. Executives often ask us which lever is the most important. We reply that the key is to take a few high-impact actions on each lever simultaneously.

Some of the interventions pursued to shape mindsets will be freestanding, separate from the slate of initiatives in the broader transformation program. The cascading of the change story is one example; others include adjustments to performance management processes and broad-based leadership development programs.

However, a great deal of mindset-influencing activity can be woven into performance initiatives. In fact, every performance initiative that touches employees—be it a customer service enhancement, a sales force effectiveness drive, an IT upgrade, or a cost-cutting effort—creates an opportunity to influence mindsets. By

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