People vs. Process: The Real Performance Issue

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common, common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

If the performance in your team or organization isn't at the level or standard it needs to be at, it might not necessarily be that you've got a people problem. You may have a systems problem. You see, the processes and systems that work in a team or business of five people are rarely the ones that will work in a team or business or 50. So if performance is slipping, you'd be well advised to ask yourself, is this a people problem or a systems problem? Is it the environment and culture within which people are operating that is causing them to under perform? Now, when performance drops, it can be very easy for us leaders and managers to assume that that the problem is due to a lack of skills, motivation or effort. But in my experience that's rarely the case. More often than not, performance slips due to frustrations within the environment or culture. It's because the systems or processes that once worked are no longer working. And I found this is particularly true in scale ups. Whether that's a new business that's gone through the startup phase and is now trying to scale, or even whether that's a business unit within a much larger organisation that's scaling. And when the development of systems and processes fail to keep up with organizational growth, that creates inefficiencies and huge levels of frustration. So here's the challenge for us leaders and managers. When performance drops or standards slip even, it can be very easy for us to point the finger of blame at the people we can see. And sometimes that can even get a little personal. Why does that happen? Well, it's easy to point the finger of blame or find fault in the people we can see. We sit in meetings with people, not processes. And because we can see the people and we can't see the processes, it becomes all too easy to point the finger of blame there. So the challenge, our challenge as leaders and managers is is to pause, to look deeper, to think harder, and ask ourselves what's really causing the underperformance here? Is it a people issue? Or is it a systems, process and cultural issue? And if you really want to know about your leadership capability as you are scaling your organization or or a business unit or product stream within a much larger business, you can follow the link with this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag and you'll be able to complete a free scorecard that will benchmark your leadership capability against nine key areas. That's it for this shorter than usual episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. As always, hope it's been useful. Look after yourself, look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.