Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Does your company lack good evaluating tools?

To measure may seem rather routine, but lack of clear evaluating criteria is often a company’s leading cause of poor performance. When leaders and workers create clear rubrics together, an entire group’s vision for success is made clear, and so it makes sense the performance improves.  People know what is expected, and the same checklist used to complete a project is also used to evaluate it.

Remember you’ll get what you ask for,  and no more. The reason so few folks find quality results, is because they donA’t know what these results look like. Have you noticed that? When specific requirements are clear, the human brain finds unique pathways to take get there. It’s the difference between a photograph that comes from a camera in clear focus and one that comes from a blurred lens and a murky scene.  

When clear focus is missing , workers often complain that they  have no idea what their supervisors want… and yet these same leaders bemoan the fact they can’t get ahead. One frustrated manager approached me after a talk I gave about highlighting specific expectations so people’s brains can register what to go after.  “I give my boss whatever he asks for and it’s never the right thing,” she complained. Yet when I asked him to list what he wanted,  he seems unclear himself. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he’d often mumble.

During our discussion,  fellow workers rallied to her side. “I doubt if he’d know what he wanted if it ran into him!” one man shot back, when I suggested they ask him. What this boss expected changed from day to day, they complained. Sound familiar? The group left the brain based conference with a plan to list five key criteria for their next project. They will get their boss to sign the criteria and will use it as a checklist to create the work. In that way,  they will help the boss to envision just what he wants before they start the project.

Does carefully measuring improve your performance?