Every organization wants their new hires or transferred employees to “hit the ground running”. This is especially true for millennials who have significantly different expectations and new managers. The faster they get up to speed, the faster they start delivering results. An effective onboarding system will position a new employee or manager for success. It shortens the learning curve and ensures they are a contributing member of the team. Effective onboarding systems focus on these basic tenets: (more…)

Bruce Dougan joins Group50 as the head of its Organizational Development Practice
UPLAND, Calif. — Group50^® Consulting announced today that it has significantly expanded it consulting resources and tools in Organizational Development and change management.

Jim Gitney, CEO and Founder of Group50® commented….”Strategic Execution^TM is the cornerstone of a company’s success and our sweet spot. Our clients want to work with a consulting firm that has broad expertise and deep bench strength. I am pleased to announce that Bruce Dougan has joined Group50 to head up its Organizational Development practice. Bruce combines Technical, Operations and Human Resources expertise to Group50 as a result of his various senior level positions over a 15 year career at Procter & Gamble and his consulting background. He (more…)

For most employees, the yearly ritual of sitting across the table from their boss and receiving feedback on their prior year’s performance is completed. According to a study done by Leadership IQ, only 13% of managers and employees feel that year end reviews have a positive impact on them and only 6% of CEOs thought the performance reviews their organization used were effective. They believe that evaluations don’t impact strategic execution.

So, given these dismal statistics, why do organizations continue to spend so much precious energy and time utilizing a system that is at best distasteful and at worst a waste of corporate resources and good will?

The answer isn’t all that complex. It is what we have been taught to do during our careers and, given the lack of an acceptable alternative, something we continue doing. After all, we must do something to tell our employees how they are performing. Yearly evaluations have become a “check the box” ritual.

This ritual can be retooled into a Strategy Execution Consulting Services process that maximizes the productive input (more…)

Successful businesses work. There are many definitions of success in business. One component common to all business success definitions is the generation of positive cash flow in the short-, mid- and long-term. Many variables factor into a business’s ability to generate positive cash flow; from an operations perspective, none are more critical than culture, strategy and execution. In this post we will focus on (more…)

I was just forwarded a study by Mark Murphy, Founder & CEO of Leadership IQ. As I read it, I was fascinated by the results. In a survey of 48,000 CEO’s managers and employees, only 13% of managers and employees and 6% of CEOs thought their year-end reviews were effective. For my entire career, I have not been part of the 13% or the 6%. Why?

As the study points out, there are three primary reasons:

1. The first was a lack of differentiation: reviews aren’t synced to performance so there’s no real recognition for being a high performer
2. The second reason why people really dislike performance reviews is because the boss’ feedback isn’t relevant. Employees are walking away from performance reviews shaking their heads and wondering if the boss even knows what they did this year.
3. This is the third big reason why employees don’t like performance reviews. Most managers conduct performance reviews from a boss/employee perspective rather than using it is a coaching and mentoring tool. They sit across the desk from employees and say “this is your ‘grade’ and this is your pay” and they hope employees don’t have too many questions, because there are another dozen more reviews to conduct.

Ever feel this way as either a manager or an employee? Yearly performance appraisals are typically a “check the box activity”, that is done because it is policy, rather than using reviews as a tool to engage employees in open and transparent dialogue on the needs of the company and the employee. Yearly reviews cannot accurately reflect what an employee is being held accountable for, because the objectives of the business change real time, not yearly. Many leaders approach their business on a cyclical basis, but they are fooling themselves, because their business is dynamic and real time. They need to communicate these changes as they occur, and if that impacts the performance objective of an employee, that employee should know about it and begin supporting it.

I am in favor of scrapping paper based yearly evaluations as part of an effective organizational development strategy, because I have never seen one work well, and the aforementioned study bears this out. It is truly a shame for a business to expend this much effort on yearly appraisals to achieve these kind of results. If the finance team were to do an ROI on the yearly cost and the obvious lack of benefit, they would recommend scrapping a paper based system all together.

I am not against evaluations though. I am in favor of a real time system that allows for employees and managers to have two way discussions about what the business is going to hold them accountable for: clear and concise performance objectives.

That is why Group50 has spent so much resource and time supporting our newest product offering Cascade: a low cost, cloud based system that gives employees, managers and senior leaders that ability to all be on the same page, to communicate with each other on how objectives are being met on a real time basis and to instantly change objectives throughout the organization when business conditions require it.

You can see a short video on Cascade here. After viewing this, please post a comment, give me a call at (909) 949-9083 or drop me a note at jgitney@group50.com to let me know what you think about ETW, or the study.

About Group50 and the author:
Group50’s focus is on strategic execution^TM. Jim Gitney, the CEO of Group50 has worked with organizations of every size in support of their movement to a culture of effective strategic execution, and realize their potential in the marketplace. You can request more information here, email info@group50.com, or call (909) 949-9083 for more information. To see the services that Group50 provides, go to our home page

I was talking to several CEOs the other day about the challenges of today’s business climate and the parts of our businesses where we can continue to realize productivity gains. We all agreed that opportunities existed throughout our businesses to improve productivity, but quickly honed in on a discussion around how well our employees were aligned with our Vision, Mission, Values and Corporate Objectives. Everyone squirmed for a moment thinking about organizational alignment and organizational development, (more…)

I was speaking with a client the other day who was expressing frustration with being able to align his organization with the company’s strategies, vision, mission, values and tactics. He felt as if the yearly off site meetings and quarterly communications to employees weren’t causing the company to build a culture and performance mindset around those. He mused that there must be a better way to accelerate behaviors in the organization and create a culture of strategic execution.

As we spoke further, we talked about the need for:

• Clear and concise strategies, mission, values and tactics
• Constant communications to all levels of the organization
• Measures that are cascaded down to each level that support the strategic initiatives
• Accountability for all managers and employees
• Full transparency in the company
• The ability to have communications both up and down about what is working and what isn’t
• An understanding of the company’s strategic and operating gaps

We agreed that a significant shift in culture and performance was a difficult objective. We also agreed during our conversation that cultural change isn’t achieved by yearly reviews and occasional communications. The tactics to implement such a change need to be well thought through and executed with rigor. It is one of the single most important set of activities for the company’s leaders and needed to be a daily activity. He would have benefitted from a change management framework such as Group50’s Business Hierarchy of Needs® to guide his organization’s strategic planning, change management and implementation efforts. As we talked further, we agreed to keep a dialogue going and focus on strategic alignment and performance management as part of our on-going work with his organization.

Several articles with further information on this topic include:

• Performance Management as a Business Strategy
• Organizational Alignment: The Good and Bad News
• Cascade
• Morphing Evaluations Into Strategic Execution

About the author:
Jim Gitney is the CEO of Group50^® and specializes in the development and implementation of manufacturing and supply chain strategies. Jim and the Group50 team are all former executives with well-known manufacturing and distribution companies who understand what it takes to put together and manage the implementation of a successful strategic plan. Group50 has designed a series of strategic assessments, workshops and strategic execution tools that eliminate the existence of Anti-Strategy. You can reach us at (909) 949-9083 or send a note to info@group50.com.

Good times, bad times, you know we’ve had our share….  Anytime is a good time to reexamine the principle of “getting Lean” or improving processes by applying a set of tools that will deliver significant reductions in cost and lead time.  Sigma techniques as championed by “blackbelts” is often the rallying cry.

But what about Quality (with or without a big Q)? Is quality or Total Quality now passé, having been supplanted by Lean and/or Six Sigma? Are all of these synonyms? Are they just dressed-up, consultant-speak ways of describing historic “best manufacturing practices?” Do they work together, or do they (more…)

Businesses are just now beginning to wrestle with harmonizing between generations of workers and managers that may be as different as any combinations that have preceded them: the post WWII Boomers and Millennials. Can they get along and how do you create a culture of strategic execution with them?

There continue to be many Boomers still in the work force, partly due to their need to delay retirement in hopes of rebuilding wealth lost during the recent downturn. Millennials, generally viewed as having been born between about 1980 and 2001, are beginning to establish themselves professionally in the throes (more…)

In business, there are four key elements: equipment and technology, processes and systems, information, and people…but people are the active ingredient and coaching and development are critical to success.

The most important work an effective leader can do is to get the most out of his/her people, helping them perform at highest levels today and grow to contribute more tomorrow. The leader who can coax “growth spurts” out of the people in the organization adds the most lasting value to the business, a value that multiplies as others take up the mantle of effective coaching and development.

Yet, giving feedback to employees, particularly formal “review” feedback, is often one of the least-liked tasks for many managers. It can be uncomfortable, particularly if there are disagreements about areas for improvement. But, good coaching should be somewhat uncomfortable, at least for the person being coached. You don’t learn when you are comfortable, but when you are uncomfortable…and coaching is all about (more…)