"It’s my job to ensure results"

March 3, 2011 By

If you didn’t see this op-ed piece in the March 2 New York Times – “Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You” – it’s worth a look:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/opinion/02culbert.html?emc=eta1

Regardless of your perspective on the questions raised by recent events in Wisconsin, the column makes some excellent points about the power of ensuring employees are focused on results in a clear, fair and systematic manner.

 

The author makes a point that’s very familiar to us: without clear expectations established around results for customers and agreed upon measures for performance, employee performance reviews can stifle, not support, a focus on results and on innovation.

 

 

Under such a system, in which one’s livelihood can be destroyed by a self-serving boss trying to meet a budget or please the higher-ups, what employee would ever speak his mind? What employee would ever say that the boss is wrong, and offer an idea on how something might get done better?

Only an employee looking for trouble.

 

 

We call this the “whack-a-mole” culture. What happens when an employee sticks up their head to point out an issue or to make a suggestion? If they get “whacked” for it, how many times are

they going to do that? Or are they going to (correctly) conclude that, if they want to work in an organization where they can contribute, they need to go elsewhere?


Managers and leaders at all levels have the power to create a work culture that helps employees succeed and that clearly defines success in terms of results delivered for the customer. As the column notes, in such a system:

 

Instead of the bosses merely handing out A’s and C’s, they work to make sure everyone can earn an A. And the word goes out: “No more after-the-fact disappointments. Tell me your problems as they happen; we’re in it together and it’s my job to ensure results.”

 

 

 

Sounds about right to us.

We’ve been sharing rich resources recently to help governments create Employee Performance Management systems that accelerate performance. Check out our previous posts on aligning employees to the organization’s priorities and why managing employee performance matters to your customers. Look for links to our EPM webinar series here as well — coming very soon!
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Cool Tools: Profile of Four States Using Performance Budgeting

September 7, 2010 By

We recently found a terrific resource that we wanted to share.

In February 2009 the Government Performance Project and the Pew Center on the States released “Trade-Off Time: How Four States Continue to Deliver.” This report – which you can download by clicking here - profiles how the states of Virginia, Utah, Maryland and Indiana are aggressively using performance management techniques, including performance budgeting, to address the extraordinary challenges they face in funding and service delivery.

From the report:

“The Pew Center on the States has followed state government performance for more than a decade, studying good and bad practices and analyzing what works. Our research has shown that results-based budgeting systems can aid states during economic downturns by cutting wasteful spending on programs that are not showing results, and directing resources to programs that evidence has shown to be more effective. Such an approach also can provide lasting benefits, laying the foundation for a leaner, more effective government during the next economic upturn.”

We’ve repeatedly seen the benefits that come from sharing tools and information – it’s a big part of the reason we have this blog. We hope you’ll be able to take this report and put it to good use in your own organization – and let us know what you learn!

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Customer Focus, With a Side of Hash Browns

August 16, 2010 By

When you go out to a restaurant and order breakfast, what do you, as a customer, expect to get?

Do you need, or even want:

  • The policies and procedures for the restaurant’s employees?

  • The inspection schedule for the dairy farm where your milk comes from?

  • The operations manual for the farm that raised the source of your bacon?

Of course not. And if you got all that dumped on you when you ordered breakfast, would you ever go back to that restaurant? (Didn’t think so.)

Those processes are all important. You trust they work effectively so that you don’t have to think about them. But what you expect – what you as the customer came in to get – is breakfast.

What do your customers expect from you? Do they care about your processes?

Failing to understand the difference between what you do, and what your customers expect to receive from you, is a clear sign of a poorly performing organization.

Your customers expect you to provide them with services, tangible and intangible. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: are you focused on giving them services they need, or are you inflicting your processes on them?

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Accountability Follows the Money: The Power of Performance Contracting

August 4, 2010 By

Thoughts about accountability, money, and results from Marv, our founder and CEO -

Early in the life of our company, while I was working in a County that shall remain nameless, the head of the Design Unit within a Facilities Department was talking about accountability. He said that he wasn’t accountable for the design of buildings – that is, for the architectural plans – because his employees didn’t do the work. Those services were contracted out.

I thought his director was going to reach across the table and….

Fortunately for him, I intervened with a question. “So if a building designed by your contract architects collapses, who gets sued first?”

After a moment of recovery (and glancing up at his Director’s glare), he conceded the point. The County would be responsible even though – and maybe even particularly because – the services were contracted out.

This conversation was a very important learning moment. “Accountability follows the money” came out of that moment. If funds are appropriated by or conveyed to a government organization, that organization is responsible for how it is spent and what is accomplished.

There really are only two ways to deliver services: do it yourself through your own staff, or contract it out. (There is a third one, but it’s rare and doesn’t really count – get someone else to do it with their own money.)

So whether the services are provided by your staff or by your contractor, you are responsible for service delivery and results. This essential truth leads the way into performance-based contracting.

Here’s the choice: you can contract for results, or for something less. In Managing for Results, the clarity around the results you need to deliver makes it much easier to integrate performance measures from department Strategic Business Plans directly into performance-based contracts.

Unfortunately, though, most contracts are general in terms of performance expectations. At best, contracts typically will only detail what services will be provide and to whom. They may even have performance expectations around the number of people served or outputs. But if they aren’t built around results, you have no way to enforce that needed accountability.

You can Manage for Results – or you can manage for something less. You will most likely get what you contract for. If your contracts don’t include results….

This is the difference between Hoping for Results and Managing for Results.

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Our Essential Principles: Aligning Key Systems and Culture

July 13, 2010 By

From Marv, our CEO and Founder –

I’ve been sharing recently the Key Principles that drive our work as a company.

They’re simple and clear to state – and extremely powerful put into action.

The First Principle, though not popular in some quarters these days, is absolutely true: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.

The Second Principle came into focus for me when we took on reforming welfare in the State of Iowa: If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.

The Third Principle came to me while I served Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as his Director of Policy and Strategic Planning in 1993-1998. Gretchen Tegeler, my boss and the Director of the Office of Management, gave me the task of building an integrated management system that better focused Iowa State Government on results. Gretchen was on the Welfare Reform Council, so she experienced first hand what can happen when Government focuses on results.

The Third Principle is:

Customers experience better results and government is much more ‘on purpose’ when government focuses on results in everything you do – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, reporting, employee performance and collaboration.

Over those years in Iowa, we fundamentally changed and integrated our strategic planning, budgeting and performance measurement efforts to focus more on results.

We ended up in some good places, but we didn’t start out that way.

For my first review of the 20+ strategic plans for State Departments, I spread them all out on the floor of my office. I got down on the floor with a legal pad and started counting which goals were focused on the customer — and which ones were instead focused on, or stated in terms of, what the government itself would experience.

The score was 9-1 – State Government has it. Customers lose! Government wins!

No kidding – only 1 out of 10 goals was stated in terms of what the customer would experience. That pretty much defined the cultural problem we were facing.

Managing for Results was born from the failure of government to focus on its customers. What we discovered is that it is possible to integrate your essential management systems – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, employee performance, and to align operational performance with strategic goals. Budgeting for Results was born in Iowa in the early 1990s as we integrated Results Performance measures into the State Budget. Department Strategic plans began focusing on measurable results for their customers.

We created the Governor’s Leadership Agenda (which was Gretchen’s idea) which included 20 Strategic Results around which interdepartmental collaboration was directed. Each quarter, the department directors who were responsible for achieving the Governor’s Strategic Results met with the Governor to report on the measurable progress made to date and the interdepartmental plans they had for making continuous progress going forward.

Likewise, to reinforce the culture, Governor Branstad began asking about Results and Cost in his budget and policy meetings with Department Directors. Nothing sends a message about what is really important more than the questions asked by the Boss.

All this to get State Government focused on its core results, or purpose, for customers.

In our work with our customers over the past 12 years, we’ve seen repeated examples of the remarkable power that comes from aligning your systems around results for customers. Instead of having to battle your management systems, when those systems align around results for customers, the multiplier effect is very real and the impact is substantial.

We know, and our customers show every day, the power of putting these three Key Principles to work. In these times of restricted resources, continuing erosion in faith in government, and economic uncertainty, we know these Principles are more important than ever to making government work:

If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.

If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.

Customers experience better results and government is much more ‘on purpose’ when government focuses on results in everything you do – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, reporting, employee performance and collaboration.

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Our Essential Principles: Focus On the Right Results

June 15, 2010 By

From Marv, our CEO and Founder –

I recently shared the First Principle that drives everything we do as a company: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.

The Second Principle came into focus for me when, as the Administrator of Economic Assistance – that is, of welfare programs – for the State of Iowa, we took on reforming and fixing that complex, controversial system:

Principle Two: If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.

When we started working on Welfare Reform in Iowa we initially thought that the “right” result we were after was helping people out of the welfare system. Following that as our goal, we developed policies and practices that would have achieved the goal in fairly short order.

But we knew something was wrong – we didn’t like the picture we were painting. All kinds of ideas were considered, some reasonable, some bordering on perverse – like sending welfare receiving families to other states. The conversation became about one result, and one result only – lowering costs of public assistance.

But just getting families off of welfare had little to do with the original reasons for public welfare in the first place: to keep families from spiraling into poverty.

I can remember the conversation like it was yesterday. The Welfare Reform Council we had put together was considering the direction this result was leading us and they didn’t like it much. Tom Glen, the Labor representative on the Council, said it first:

“We’re focused on the wrong result. Its not about getting people out of the welfare system – it’s about getting people out of poverty.”

The other members of the Council agreed, and the entire initiative shifted. From that point forward, the policies and practices we developed were focused – not on getting families off of welfare – but on “giving people a ladder out of poverty and a way to reconnect with their communities.”

And because we were focused on the right result, our strategies shifted to support that result. We developed asset development policies. We changed our economic development policies. We created a state-wide system of workforce development centers focused on making it easier for low income families to reconnect with the workforce. We developed social contracts between the State and recipient families that set out what each would do by when to become self-sufficient. We provided extended child care and medical coverage to provide a bridge from welfare to earned income. And the list went on from there.

Iowa’s Welfare Reform initiative was a major success, and this approach was copied by other states and the federal government. It continues today to help families avoid or leave poverty and be full participants in the mainstream of Iowa’s economy and society. And, because we got focused on the right result, welfare recipient heads of household continued to fuel the broader economic and workforce goals held by subsequent Governors.

And because we focused on the right results, our customers experienced the right results.

One of the great privileges of the work we do is to help dedicated public servants become extremely clear about the right results for their customers. With that clarity, time and talent can be focused on delivering the best results for their customers. Whether it was Maricopa County, AZ, saving more than $25 million in one year on indigent health care costs, or Animal Care Services in Long Beach, CA, moving from crisis to triumph, again and again we have seen this truth:

If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.

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Our Essential Principles: Focus on Results

May 27, 2010 By
From Marv, our CEO and Founder –

I had lunch with an old friend recently where we discussed all of the large and significant forces dragging at the work of government at all levels these days. I was a little surprised when my friend looked at me and asked, “Given all of that, are you sure you still want governments as customers?”

My answer: Absolutely! In fact, we know that the work we do is now more important that ever. There are three key ideas at the heart of what we do in Managing For Results – three core beliefs that drive everything we do in our organization – that make what we do more relevant and essential than it has ever been. I’ll talk about all three of those principles in upcoming blog posts, but here’s the first:

Principle One: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.

It’s not an idea wedded to any particular political perspective. It’s not an idea popular with some who would believe government can’t make a difference. But we know it to be absolutely true – and to be what customers expect government to do for them.

During my 20 years in state government in Iowa, one of my jobs was as first the Manager, then the Director, of Iowa’s successful Refugee Resettlement efforts. This initiative, begun under Governor Robert Ray in 1979 and continued under Governor Terry Branstad, resettled more than 10,000 refugees, mostly from Southeast Asia, over 10 years.

Sometime around year six the U.S. State Department declared Iowa’s Refugee Program the most successful in the nation. Lofty praise does not come easily or often from Foggy Bottom, and in this case it came for one reason: more so than in any other state, Iowa was exceptionally successful in helping refugee families become economically self-sufficient. At one point, the program boasted that more than 90% of the refugee families resettled in Iowa had become economically self-sufficient in the first six months from their arrival on our shores.

This achievement didn’t just happen. We got those results through a relentless focus on the results we wanted to achieve—that the refugee families would develop Economic Self-Sufficiency, Social Self-Reliance, and Family Strength.

Every briefing of the Governor, every report, every staff meeting, every performance measure, every hire we made, every investment in technology, every new program implemented was focused on one or more of these key results.

And it worked.

Both Governors had a larger view – both humanitarian and economic. The humanitarian efforts were inspired and amazing by any standard. At one point we counted more than 15,000 identified volunteers involved in helping refugees achieve one of those three key results.

On a larger economic canvas, Iowa was also fighting for economic stability by diversifying our economy and expanding our workforce to grow the economy. Refugees helped spawn new industries and became the workforce for many others. Today, Iowans with roots in Southeast Asian countries, cultures and work ethics continue to contribute their brains and brawn to help drive the Iowa economy.

We’ve had the privilege time and again over the past 12 years to work with dedicated public servants across the country, and at every level of government, to help provide them with the tools and system they needed to influence results. We’ve seen their own relentless focus change things for the better – making their communities safer, healthier, and better places to live, and making their governments more efficient and effective in a variety of ways. So we know, with certainty:

If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.

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Managing For Results: Performance Management and Driving Change

April 26, 2010 By

We were pleased to be able to use our April webinar to feature a compelling story of an organization that is using a focus on results for customers to accomplish an amazing turnaround. John Keisler is the Manager of Animal Care Services for the City of Long Beach, CA, and, with his Chief of Operations Michelle Quigley, they shared their success and the valuable lessons they have put to work to make it happen.

 

The principles they shared aren’t unique to the field of Animal Services — they can be used by any team or organization to help drive culture change and improve performance.

 

John has graciously offered to share his webinar presentation as well as some of the internal worksheets they use in the hopes that others can learn from them. We hope you find them useful in your own organization.

 

You can download the powerpoint presentation by clicking here.

 

You can also download samples of their internal reports – the “live release rate” report can be downloaded by clicking here and the “euthanization rate” report can be downloaded by clicking here.

 

Thanks again to John and Michelle for their openness and interest in sharing their success!
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Managing for Results: The Relentless Pursuit of Clarity

September 9, 2009 By

Our friend and long-time colleague, Charles Curry, the former budget officer for the City of Austin, has observed that many organizations, both public and private, “enjoy the temporary comfort of ambiguity.” Sooner or later, your customer (or the local newspaper publisher) is going to remind you of the results that matter most to them.

We recall that when David Smith, the award-winning County Manager for Maricopa County, AZ, started Managing for Results there, he said he wanted to have a response to negative press. And the only response he believed that would work is reliable information about the results that customers actually experience. Like many government leaders, David lives in a tough political neighborhood and, because of Maricopa’s years of working with Managing for Results, he has a lot of good performance information about results achieved by the County.

Over the past 11 years, the members of the Weidner team have had the privilege of working with literally thousands of program teams to use Weidner’s Managing For Results tools to achieve uncommon clarity about who the customer is and what results they want the customer to experience at the operations level. They have taught us a lot about the journey to clarity.

Here is how we summarize the process:

If you can think it clearly,
You can write it clearly.
If you can write it clearly,
You can measure it.
If you can measure it,
You stand a good chance of getting it done.
© 2009 Weidner, Inc

It all begins with clear thinking about who your customers are — and what results you want them to experience as a consequence of receiving your services.

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