DO YOU NEED A ROADMAP TO HIGHER PERFORMANCE?

                                                            John Pickering, Ph.D., President CCHPO

The Commonwealth Centers for High-Performance Organizations (CCHPO) is delighted to be identified by ICMA as a Leading Practice in local government performance improvement, and we are equally delighted to join the Center for Performance Based Budgeting (CPBB) as charter members of ICMA’s newest center – the Center for Management Strategies (CMS).  Both CPBB and CCHPO will be posting a series of blogs over the coming weeks and months on the CMS blog site to introduce our organizations to the ICMA membership, but because both organizations have been working with local governments for years, we already have many friends in local government. Please visit the ICMA Center for Management Strategies’ booth, located in the main ICMA pavilion, in Phoenix to renew old acquaintances (and hopefully form some new ones).

Much of CCHPO’s work is based on its High-Performance Organizations (HPO) Diagnostic/Change Model© and the diagnostics that derive from it – this material was spawned at the University of Virginia’s Senior Executive Institute for local government executives -- http://www.coopercenter.org/ leadership/index.php -- and at the US Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Executive Institute for federal government executives --  http://www.leadership.opm.gov/Locations/FEI/index.aspx -- both are located in Charlottesville, Virginia.  We use this material to introduce a common language and set of lenses for helping members of organizations to diagnose themselves.  Our material is synthesized from “casting a net” over the applied best practices of public and private organizations and from the leadership, organizational development, and performance improvement literature found in academic and practitioner books, journals, and social media.  We don’t see ourselves as “experts” in understanding your organization; you’re the expert there. We seek to bring ways to help you and your leadership team diagnose your organization – to see it through a different set of “lenses” -- and to help you devise a path toward higher-performance. 

Let’s start with what we mean by high-performance.  When we first started using this term to describe an organization’s desired future state almost two and a half decades ago, we had to define high-performance for people we were working with because no one (as far as we can determine) was applying that term to organizations, teams, or anything else outside of vehicles with big motors.    Fortunately, we seem to have guessed where the management profession was going in its desire to improve organizational performance.  When we entered the term “high-performance organizations” into Google several years ago, we got 27 million hits. Of course, we’d love to say we caused the field to adopt the term, but…….

For us, a high-performance organization is defined as simultaneously and sustainablydelivering:

• appropriate product and service quality with excellent execution quality,
• outstanding customer value, and
• sound financial performance.

Our shorthand for this mouthful is “Pick 3+”; over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be defining these terms in more detail and laying out some of our “lenses” for examining organizations. 

Stay tuned for such blog topics as:

• an overview of our HPO Diagnostic/Change Model©, with its six “change levers” for building high-performance organizations,
• a twenty-first century definition of “leadership”, hint: it doesn’t mean just top management,
• an exploration of our Seven Key Diagnostic Questions©, which drive leadership team discussions in change teams,
• the need for reinventing the concept of  a “public employee,”
• the importance of employee engagement in building high-performance organizations,
• an introduction to our HPO Organizational Self-Assessment Survey©, and
• brief examples of local governments who have taken our material and applied it in their organizations to improve their performance.

NOTE TO ICMA CONFERENCE ATTENDEES:  CCHPO will be offering free mini-assessments and consultations based on our HPO Organizational Self-Assessment Survey at the ICMA Center for Management Strategies booth in Phoenix.  Similarly, our partner, CPBB, will also be offering mini-assessments based on their very practical way of using performance-based budgeting to drive critical organizational analyses; both of us would love to schedule you for a mini-assessment.