MUSCLE BUILD YOUR ORGANIZATION
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Keep raising the standards

The heart of any management upgrading process is the establishment of higher performance standards across the board. This responsibility rests with the top manager, i.e., the CEO or division general manager, depending on the company. If you're a senior manager and you delegate this task, you will convey the message that managerial development is not really that important, and every manager will set different standards.

Raising performance goals entails analyzing the company's current situation (where you are today versus where you want to be), establishing higher expectations (ways of bridging the gap), selling the entire management team on the upgrading process, and developing an action plan.

Step one is the situation analysis: looking at every important position in the company and asking, "What do we expect of this job? How should this position be moving our business forward? How close does the incumbent come to the meeting the ideal?" In other words, you will be judging people's performance against the company's mission and priorities. This questioning will indicate where the organization's weak links are and will give you a good sense of which executives already have high standards and which are most skillful at developing other people.

The way to get started is to sit down with your top executives (e.g., division managers and key staff leaders) and ask these reviewers to assess everyone who reports to them. You should also ask them how they could enhance their own performance.

Here are some of the questions you should explore:

Who are our best performers, and how are we going to make them even better? How can we stretch them and accelerate their professional growth?

Which senior managers and department heads tolerate marginal performance? Which do not emphasize their people's development enough?

Where are our biggest performance problems, and what are we going to do about them? (You cannot build muscle in your organization unless you are willing to replace marginal performers.)

Which groups of managers (e.g., marketing managers, operations managers) have the necessary mix of talents and skills to achieve more ambitious goals? Who in each group is promotable, and who is not?

For example, I'd be interested in finding out specifically what each manager did this year to change the results of his or her unit. I'd look for measurable things such as formulating or implementing a new competitive strategy, successfully launching a new product, or quickly cutting costs in a downturn. I'd be less interested in plans that a manager has for the future, or a laundry list of routine programs he or she implemented, or personal characteristics such as how smart someone is, all of which are difficult to relate to better performance.

I'd also be interested in how each manager compares with the people whom the reviewer regards as future stars. Usually, people are better at comparing and ranking subordinates than at measuring someone's performance in a vacuum. By comparing people with star performers, you start to set higher standards and expectations. And if a unit has no stars (or only a few), you can also start to enrich the mix of talent there.

Nobody admits to promoting people on longevity. Most companies do and get organizational hardening of the arteries.

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