Need to accelerate the performance of your business? Here’s what can help
If you want to accelerate your business and scale up your team’s performance, simply setting higher goals, making plans, and motivating people will not help.
Do you ever feel that the actual potential of your business is much higher than what its performance depicts? Would you want to accelerate this performance and of your team’s? If a thunderous ‘Yes’ is your answer to both questions, you need to read on.
To simplify things, ask yourself: “How does one accelerate their business performance?”
Typically speaking, it involves setting specific goals for the company and the team, and creating plans to motivate, inspire, and push each individual towards achieving those goals, correct?
While it might surprise you to hear this, you’re wrong! If you want to improve and scale up your team’s performance, simply setting higher goals, creating plans, and motivating people will not work. This is an exercise in futility as the means, methods, and goals are not aligned at all. In fact, it’s like planting guava seeds in the ground, watering, and caring for them, only to expect a mango tree to grow! That is simply impossible and defies laws of nature and reality.
The irony is that, he secret to enhancing your team’s and business’ performance is not so much of a secret - it is common sense. If the performance of your team is what you’re looking to improve, you need to be able to address the root causes affecting and influencing it.
This is where P.A.C.E comes in. P.A.C.E or “Performance Acceleration as a result of Clarity, Competence, and Culture Enhancement” has 12 main steps that will help improve clarity, competence, and culture to accelerate one’s business performance. This system is designed to enable business owners and corporate managers to identify the roots of performance and streamline them for increased efficiency. According to this method, there are only three primary components which business owners and corporate managers need to focus on - clarity, competence, and culture. Nurturing these have an inevitable impact on performance and can help in acceleration.
Consider this: can any business ever flourish without clarity? Teams cannot deliver expected results without clarity of goals, strategies, systems, and roles. In fact, clarity actually forms the basis of performance, as evidenced in Gilbert’s Behaviour Engineering model, which states that 70 percent of all performance issues in business are caused by a lack of clarity within the organisation and the business. Clarity about what needs to be done and how it needs to be done makes the job effortless, which helps in taking action. This is why enhancing clarity is the most crucial aspect of accelerating performance.
Competence is yet another key ingredient, which affects a person’s performance. Leaders in any organisation must ask themselves: “How can an individual improve their results without having the skills that enable him to do so?” One might possess all the clarity in the world about the work and the business, but to take the necessary action, it is just as important to have the required skills, knowledge, and attitude, which transform it into results.
This is why competence is the key to producing the best results. This holds particularly true for small and medium businesses, where I’ve observed competence to be the primary reason for poor results. Business is a science that includes everything from creating a profitable and scalable business model, creating marketing strategies to attract customers, building a sales system and team, establishing processes, systems, and structures in operations, developing a high-performance culture, hiring the right people, and setting management metrics. All of these encompass the essential skills and knowledge needed to create a successful business. As the owner of that business, it is imperative that we improve our own competence, as well as our team’s, in all of these areas. Only then will we be able to accelerate our business performance.
Now that you understand clarity and competence, let’s look at culture - the third crucial ingredient that the other two essentially depends upon. Even with the most clearly-defined goals, roles, systems, and strategies, and the most competent employees, a business can fail. If these components are not aligned with each other, it becomes akin to owning a Rolls Royce that does not have an engine.
Teams plagued by issues like gossip, blame game, and ego battles, can never sufficiently concentrate on the actual job at hand. They only remain concerned about their perception. Culture is what helps in creating an environment that encourages and motivates competence to take action and deliver results. Thus, it is vital for an organisation to have a culture that nurtures performance and enhances happiness. Even the most skilled and capable people can become unproductive if an organisation has a negative or toxic culture. Thus, creating, establishing, and promoting a high-performance culture, actively, is the only way to accelerate the performance of the team and the business.
To sum things up, P.A.C.E. is designed to precisely address the core elements responsible for creating results, and impacting a business’s performance. If learned and applied correctly, it will certainly transform your business forever.
