CAP Your Performance

We’ve just bade goodbye to an eventful year 2020 and ushered in a brand-new year 2021. The pandemic has thrown up many a gauntlet to all of us in terms of social distancing, health care safety, disruptions in supply chain, business loss, contraction of economic growth, job loss, furloughing, retrenchment and so on. Since it is now certain that the Social distancing will remain and the existing business model in many a case has to undergo radical changes in the new normal, the business enterprise and / or the corporates therefore are chary investing in Capex, Opex and / or in people. Although it is true that People only can save the organization out of this deep crisis as posed by the pandemic yet most of them have resorted to act on manpower restructuring, rationalizing characterized by right sizing or downsizing.

The moot point then is how to keep pace and adapt oneself to such changes and yet been able to keep himself /herself relevant to the organization in terms of the roles and responsibilities one is pursuing. Now this requires us to add new skill sets, understand the external environment better and closely monitor the changing customer behavior to quickly adapt to the volatile demand and deliver performance. The entire situation is characterized as VUCA i.e., volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous as we know and the same is accentuated by D as its prefix and suffix i.e., D VUCA D which means that D=Disruption in VUCA environment which is D= Diverse (in Diversity) in nature. *

What is that one thing therefore which can keep ourselves afloat in such a DVUCAD environment? It is our sheer PERFORMANCE which is the very basis of an employers’ expectation in the corporate world. It is a cliché to know that “Change is the only constant in this changing world” and the process, not the outcome of change is painful. In situations where organizations are adopting for a change and / or in situations / events like mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, accomplishing turnkey projects, crisis management, disruptions etc. (which is the order of the day) what we can strive to achieve and control is our performance only and not the volatility and various other extraneous factors and complexities which is shaping the events, it’s outcomes even. But HOW to focus on PERFORMANCE which can save the day for us (Leaders’) in changing times?

The way we respond to any event/situation/circumstances usually determines the outcome i.e., E+R=O (where, E=Events, R=Response and O=Outcome). It is often seen that instead of taking the responsibility for the event we squarely put the blame on it and take refuge under it. Unless we stop blaming the event for the outcome and instead accept full responsibility for it, we cannot drive performance either for self or for others say, the team members. A better understanding of the PERFORMANCE Eco System (Illustration 1 as given below) together with its Drivers’ and elements would necessarily lead us to master the art of PERFORMANCE. A closer look at a simple Performance Eco System as given in the exhibit below will help us to understand what actually drives our performance. We are all aware about that famous oft quoted concept that Performance = Potential minus Interference, which has almost become a cliché however as against the same let’s explore a different aspect of Performance which is explained as Performance = Ownership+Commitment+Accountability=Potential. Unless we take ownership and are not committed, nothing happens. The answer lies in the question how to CAP your performance? Where, CAP is Commitment, Accountability leading to performance. The Strategy House in the following exhibit lucidly explains the important pillars of the eco system as to how performance leads to potential or alternatively potential leads to performance. In Performance we want to Achieve and in order to achieve we need to be aware of what we want to achieve, aspire for it, align ourselves 100% with the goal and with the team and accentuate our efforts to take the necessary Action which is the next pillar. Now in order to initiate Action we are required to plan our action, take a pledge to proceed and review, monitor and track the progress regularly and consistently without getting distracted. And our Action taken will determine how do we Deliver? Delivering is again dependent on the skills we possess or acquire over a period of time couple with the scale of our actions we envisage and the speed of our action taken i.e., the agility of our action, decision and implementation to achieve the desired performance. However, as leaders are supposed to and should always hold ourselves Accountable for the integrity best exhibited in terms of our personal and business ethics and enable and empower ourselves towards being accountable to all our actions, consequences and the result. And finally, this integrated chain of aspiring to action to deliver with ethics and integrity convincingly leads us to our much-desired Performance which is the ultimate outcome to be standardized, sustained and spearheaded to be replicated fast both inside out and to outside in for all our stakeholders’.

Exhibit 1

To sum up we would say that the Driver of our POCAP model is accountability & commitment and the final output is Performance. And integral to the abovesaid process is three key elements of Communication, Collaboration and Coordination without which the entire eco system can not work. A seamless coordination, collaboration and coordination in terms of synergizing all our efforts is the key to an authentic leadership in terms of leveraging the true potential of an accomplished leader to deliver the much sought-after performance.

INSEAD, Cement Industry Professional, Lead Management Consultant, Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain & Logistics.

*D-VUCA-D: Leadership Altitudes, by Prof. Ian C. Woodward, INSEAD Singapore.