I.

LEADING IN HIGH PERFORMANCE WORK

ENVIRONMENT

The random house dictionary says that to lead is to go before, to show the way, to guide or
influence, to take the initiative, and to demonstrate how something can be accomplished. The
various meaning of the term include to precede, to persuade, to excel, and to be in the vanguard.
Perhaps we should settle for the interpretation offered in the Prologue’s conceptual mode,
namely, that leadership is the generation and direction of people’s energies toward the
achievement of personal and organizational goals.

To transform an industrial mindset and environment into a high performance, metaindustrial

work culture calls for innovative managers who lead by example and by learning (Kuhn, 1987,
O’ Toole, 1987)

The principal characteristic of the unique transformational leadership called for by the emerging
postindustrial scene are summarized below (Harris, 1983)

Leading in

• Providing improved, more open communications and information to personnel,

customers, and suppliers. This is accomplished personally and electronically, such as
through effective utilization of communication and computer technology.
• Creating more autonomy participation, so that workers have increasing control over their
own work space and opportunities for involvement in the enterprise. This is achieved in a
variety of ways: the democratization in the workplace ranges from sharing in planning,
problem-solving, and decision-making to team management and profit-sharing.
• Promoting an entrepreneurial spirit in innovative ventures, especially of a technological
or service nature. it can be done through encouragement and funding of new start-up, fast
growth enterprises, or by fostering intrapreneurial activities within existing organizations.
• Enhancing the quality of work life, so that it is more meaningful, fulfilling, and
psychologically rewarding.
• Generating innovative, high performing norms and standards that foster competence and
excellence, a means to productivity and profitability. It’s attained by cultivating work
attitudes, agreements, and policies that develop a new work ethic of professionalism in
which personnel strive to give of their best, to offer quality service at all cost.
• Utilizing more informal, synergistic organizational relations, so that cooperation and trust
are reinforced among the workforce. This can be furthered by resisting hierarchical and
status relations in preference to adaptive, temporary, cross-functional, or interdisciplinary
collaborative activities and networking.
• Advancing technology transfer and venturing, as well as research and development.
James Treybig, president and principal founder of Tandem computer Inc., states that:

The key to productivity in our business, and in fact in 90 percent of the jobs in our company,
comes from its emphasis on people. We develop people concepts; we involved people in what
we do… The bottom line for business is that the major change facing companies in the United
State today is the shifting roles of managers and individuals. Managers must integrate several
functions--- Caring about people, working on strategy, expanding communications, generating
creativity and innovation, raising productivity, improving quality, and strengthening the
organization.(Smilor and Kuhn, 1986, pp 5-7)

In essence, leaders are agents of planned change.

1. THE HIGH PERFORMANCE WORK ENVIRONMENT

We have seen that leadership that establishes a creative organizational environment can boost
performance and productivity, as well as the quality of customer service and profitability. In the
next step we will go into detail on improving individual behavior and performance.

So what really works for high performing organizations? A search of management literature
reveals the following:

✔ Joint goal-setting by managers and workers; objectives and targets are always a bit
beyond current levels, so that people stretch themselves and strive toward great
achievement.
✔ Installing and sustaining norms of competence and high performance in the system;
accomplished with worker cooperation and consensus, these standards of excellence are
incorporated into corporate culture (for instance, with a company slogan or logo << we
aim to the best>>
✔ Continual reinforcement of positive behavior and accomplishment, particularly with
support services.
✔ Constructive feedback to redirect worker energies from ineffective to effective work
habits and activities, so that people learn from failure.
✔ Capitalizing on human assets and potential by giving individuals and work groups more
flexibility, responsibility, and autonomy—while maintaining accountability for top
performance and results.
✔ Encouraging by managerial example (including risk taking and experimentation), spirit of
innovation and entrepreneurialism.
✔ Recruiting, selecting and rewarding top performers and highlighting them as role models
to all employees.
✔ Using training, education sessions, and self-learning methods to develop people’s
potential include personnel growth input, self-image building, and achievement
counseling.
✔ Eliminating underachievers ( who do not respond positively)
 ✔ Leading by staying close to personnel, suppliers and customers, so that managers
respond quickly to market and employee needs.
✔ Providing a mix of benefits, rewards, and incentives to encourage talented performance.

These are successful strategies for achieving maximum performance at work; imaginative
leaders translate them into concrete programs in their company or agency, and then devise even
better ones.

2. HIGH PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP (HPMW)

Bruce Qualset, of professional development services, had engaged in research with top
performing employees that pay off with results. And came’s up with a HPMW plan tested on:
navy pilots, saving and loan personnel, public utilities supervisors and moving company
managers….The HPMW process goes like this:

 Preliminary data gathering: The first step in this phase is identification of five critical
management concerns, such as performance, productivity, or communications. Then
executives define a top-performing employee by listing what is required for top
performance and describing how such people are selected. Finally, participants nominate
the high achievement employees capable of effectively resolving the targeted issues.

 Designing and conducting a workshop: participants schedule a plan to deal with the
problems they have identified. Groups are assigned to produce handouts and instruments
to help in data-gathering and analysis.

 Analysis and Reporting: In this process it’s all about reviewing the action learning
session, and analyze them for feasible solutions and organizational insights.

 Implications and Applications: this organizational development strategy seeks employee

input from outstanding personnel. It recognizes the high achievers within the enterprise
and uses them as behavior models for ordinary workers.

Top performers are today’s innovators who help to establish tomorrow’s organizational
standard.There are vital to any organizational.

I. INCREASING PERFORMANCE AT WORK

To improve performance and productivity in the workplace, the leader does more than shape a creative
environment. Manager must endeavor to understand and motivate people, beginning with themselves.

The leader who is concerned about performance management should become in that regard a behavior
model for other workers to emulate. Then executives or managers have a responsibility to hold those who
report to them accountable, by developing mechanisms that objectively appraise the work effort and
encourage top performance.

Individuals are also energy exchange systems in themselves; as leaders, we must energize ourselves and
other in goals achievement. Motivation becomes the mobilizing of our energy forces, both physical and
psychic, toward specific goals, objectives, and targets.

A metaindustrial leader does not seek workers who are submissive, passive, and dependent, but rather
stimulates personnel who grow personally and professionally and who optimize their talents and
resources.

Leaders need greater comprehension human behavior and motivation—simply, what makes people
“tick”?

1. HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE WORK PLACE

Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists have propounded many
theories for explaining why humans behave as they do.

Each of us lives within his or her own life space, which is as unique as fingerprint. This space
has both psychological and physical dimensions. Behavioral scientists call it our perceptual field.
Each individual views reality from within this space or perspective and develops a way of
reading meaning into it.

Think of life space, for a moment, in terms of concentric circles. At the core is the sense of self-
how we view ourselves as persons, positively or negatively. From that core, moving outward in
ever-larger circles, next comes our systems of needs, values, standards, expectations, and ideals.
Together, these influence our perception of what happens outside of us; it is the mind-set that
ultimately affects our acts or inaction. Thus, we are each different, so that we may disagree as to
what is real, true, beautiful, right, or wrong. Perception is relative, and explains why
disagreements or arguments may occur, say, for instance, between us and fellow workers.

Being a part of a cultural group can further influence and reinforce an individual’s perception
and behavior. As we seek to satisfy these-needs, we are motivated or energizedtoward certain
goals for ourselves.

We motivate ourselves or get aroused when we direct and sustain effort to attain or to avoid
something, so as to satiate a need. For example when we hungry, we are aroused to seek food.
Behavior is largely motivated, but there are several different forces within each person’s life
space that move us to act or avoid in certain way.
Furthermore behavior can be affected by habit, culture, or the activities of others. Behavior then
can be modified toward what increases performance.

2. THE CULTIVATION OF HIGH PERFORMANCE

Our second concern in this learning report is to identify the behaviors that contribute to high
achievement and the ways to foster that kind of behavior on the job.

For more than a decade, professor of organizational behavior Jean Lipman-Blumen and her
colleagues at Stanford University have been studying human achievement, particularly how to
measure such traits. She and Harold J. Leavitt have created the L-BL Achievement Styles model,
which classifies people in three achieving groups: direct, instrumental and relational (Abrams,
1985):

a. The direct class of achiever has been subdivided into three further categories for greater
comprehension:

• Intrinsic-direct achievers become totally absorbed in the task and get gratification from
doing it well; such persons have an internalized standard of excellence and do not depend
on external accolades or incentives
• Competitive-direct achievers have to surpass all others or all others who are considered
standards of reference.
• Power-direct achievers wish to take charge in nearly every situation regardless of
motivations or intentions.

b. There are also three categories within the instrumental classification:

• Personal-instrumental achievers do not distinguish between means and ends, but use
whatever will accomplish their purpose, for instance, the intellectual who uses knowledge
to accomplish social goals, such as to prevent child abuse.
• Social-instrumental persons are likely to employ relationships, rather than abilities, to
attain objectives; for instance, a lobbyist targets a relationship for what it can deliver.
• Reliant-instrumental achievers look to everyone or every relationship to help them
advanced; they depend upon others to carry out their goals for them. Such a type might
become a teacher or counselor.

c. In the final, the relationship, class, there are also three subcategories

• A contributory type identifies with another achiever, takes on that person’s goals,
and helps the other achieve those goals; the spouse of a corporate executive or
government official might very well be a contributory achiever.
• Collaborative persons are team players who achieve, actively or passively, through
the group relationship;
 • Vicarious achievers accomplish through force of circumstances that bring people
together, and enable one to achieve in place of another or the experience of the
other.

Leaders may find this model helpful in the analysis of work achievement among diverse
personnel and in varying their own management style to suit the personality of the employee or
colleague. For successful team building and management, a group needs strong people of all nine
types. A leader can also use this concept of achieving styles to resolve conflicts by helping
personnel to modify or alter their style.

Various researchers on high performers have concluded that:

• Metaperformance is linked to a strong self-concept and self-esteem; average persons will

improve their performance when they are helped positively to visualize themselves as
achievers and winners.
• Creative, top performers seem to be more whole-brained---they use both right-brain
capacity of perception and intuition along with left-brain logic.
• High performers are flexible, not rigid, and learn to get around bureaucratic obstacles and
obsolete and ineffective policies, rules or regulations, in order to get a job done well.
• High-achieving executives have been found to be as caring about their employees as
about their profits, and to seek advice from subordinates.
• Peak performers demonstrate unusual qualities of creativity, risk-taking, and commitment
to both their work and change.
• Managers who encourage employees to do their very best and to upgrade their
performance are usually rated high by workers.
• Employees exhibit high internal motivation, work satisfaction, and performance when
they feel responsible for its outcome, and when they have a continuing knowledge of the
results of their work activities.
• Peak performance can be increased through human resource development methods.

III. IMPROVING LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Effective communications is essential to high performance. Yet in several surveys of

corporations conduct by the American Management Associations during recent decades,
management communications was consistently identified as the number one difficulty in
business life. In this part of this report we will focus upon the important issue of human
interaction at work. Our primary objective is to better understand what is involved in the process
of human communication so that we can improve our interaction skills. And our second aim here
will be to examine organizational communications and how it affects performance and
productivity.

Communication is our most important tool and is at the heart of all organizational operations.
Communication can be the basis for understanding, cooperation, and positive action; without it,
such goals would be undermined. The vitality, creativity, and productivity of organizations
depend on the content and character of their communications. Through the interaction process,
information and knowledge are transferred between people. When the process is inadequate,
messages are distorted, frustrations develop, and people or their organizations are rendered
ineffective. Failures in communication contribute to management problems, and the cost of
miscommunication may be incalculable.

An overriding objective of any communication program should be to effect a behavior change.

The desired change might be an attitudinal change or it may be a significant change in work
processes to support a major shift in organizational direction. Effective leaders communicate
strategically, translating important business objectives into terms through which employees
readily understand 'what's in it for me?' In response, employees are engaged, align their actions
accordingly and work towards propelling an organization to success. All too often,
communication programs fail in that they do not tell employees what the employees want and
need to know.
Dynamic organizations acknowledge the significant value that effective communication can
deliver, especially in the climate of persistent change. Communication is no longer considered to
be the 'soft stuff' but is seen to deliver tangible results. Improvement in customer satisfaction,
service delivery and product quality, increased employee satisfaction and retention of key talent
are just some of the areas in which effective communication will impact the bottom line.
1. Whose responsibility is communication?
Effective communication should pulse in all directions through an organization like a heartbeat.
But it doesn't just happen. Nor is it solely the responsibility of communication functions. To
achieve this level of permeation, responsibility for the communication process must rest with
management at all levels across the organization.
Poor communication is repeatedly cited as a key contributor in the failure of major change
efforts. Not surprisingly, communication skills are increasingly regarded as a critical skill set for
leaders, particularly in situations where the leader is an instrumental driver of change.
Rightly, communication skills, both in terms of personal ability and strategic capability, are
being given increasing importance in leadership competency models. Leaders who stand out
from the crowd are those with exemplary communication skills. Consequently, leadership
communication skills’ training has become a core component of leadership development
programs.
2. Leaders play three roles as communicators
Superficially, communication appears to be deceptively simple - write an email or send a memo.
In fact, it's a complex process that must be addressed from many angles to achieve the best
results. Leaders must understand all components of the communication process to apply them
effectively.
To have impact, careful communication planning and management, and clarity and consistency
of messages are key factors. Unfortunately, many communication efforts focus only on the
delivery of a message, and neglect the vital planning and management of the process. The speed
and volume offered by technology through such channels as email and intranet are often
erroneously equated to effective communication.
This model shows the three integrated communication roles a leader plays:
 As a communication infrastructure builder, the leader must consider a number of issues:
• the organizational culture;
• the current communication climate;
• identification of various changes that impact stakeholders;
• Integration of communication with other human resources practices.
In developing a strategy for any communication program, the leader should:
• analyze each stakeholder and the impact of the change for them;
• determine measurable communication objectives;
• develop a clear, consistent message that is meaningful to the stakeholder;
• select and use appropriate communication channels;
• Measure the effectiveness of the communication effort and adjust the strategy as necessary.
It is only at this point, in the leader's tactical role as communicator, that message delivery
becomes important. The leader may utilize a range of fundamental communication skills, such
as:
• presentation skills
• asking effective questions
• listening skills
• facilitation and problem solving
• conducting high impact conversations
• coaching and mentoring skills (one-on-one communication)
Components of each of the roles will be required in mixed degrees to effectively manage the
communication challenges of different situations. The leader must understand these roles and
determine the degree of attention that the current communication program demands from each
role.
3. Drivers of effective communication - Leading, Involving, Listening and Informing
Overlaying the leadership communication model are the four drivers of effective
communication: Leading, Involving, Listening and Informing (LILI™). Traditional
communication approaches focus only on informing. However, this forms only a fraction of the
communication equation. By looking at effective communication in this context, it is easy to see
why communication programs that only inform fail to deliver results.
Communication is necessarily a two-way process. A communication strategy will evolve and
adapt over time in response to many inputs. To shape a strategy that is meaningful and, as a
result, effective, leaders should incorporate each of the four drivers, as appropriate to the
situation.
The leader must know and understand his or her audiences and their information needs.
Listening to and involving stakeholders in decisions provides invaluable input and feedback,
essential to communication effectiveness. Leading by example, 'walking the talk', sets a powerful
behavioral model of commitment, and sends a clear message in times of change.
4. Leadership communication competency models
In improving leadership communication effectiveness, an organization must first determine the
leadership skills and behaviors, that is, the competencies that constitute communication
excellence. A comparison of the current level of communication competence of an
organization’s leaders with the desired level of competence will quickly indicate the nature and
extent of the 'skills gap' and training needs of the participants. This assessment will guide the
development of the tailored communication training process where leaders can readily acquire
new skills.
Factors such as business context, organizational culture, and leadership challenges are taken into
account when developing training programs. Customization and careful evaluation of training
programs will ensure that the training delivers a sound return on investment and positive
business results.
Continued acquisition of effective communication skills is an ongoing process. Leaders must be
encouraged to continually apply and hone these skills practically.

LEADERSHIP RESEARCH ABOUT

LEADING IN A PERFORMANCE WORK ENVIRONMENT

INCREASING PERFORMANCE AT WORK

IMPROVING LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Presented by Mrs YANG Na

Master in Public Administration