Tag Archives: eye chart

Success Profiles NCAA Bracketology

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Every year, the NCAA Tournament draws millions of viewers from all around the world.  As these viewers tune into what is widely considered one of the most exciting sporting events in the US, they also participate in online bracket pools.   Brackets are filled out by individuals making their picks based on a number of reasons: national polls, strength of schedule, loyalty, team colors and who is seeded higher.  One week ago, Success Profiles set out to help individuals make their picks by creating the first ever “NCAA March Madness Eye Chart”.  By looking purely at the games most important statistical information of offense, defense and overall strength, the Eye Chart is designed to help increase your odds of success in picking the winner of each game.

With the first two rounds of the 2012 NCAA Tournament completed, all eyes are on the brackets and the results.  After carefully dissecting our way through 22 different categories of statistical information, the Eye Chart picked 23 of the 32 first round game’s correctly for a 72% success rate.  In the second round, the eye chart correctly picked 11 out of 16 games correctly for a 69% success rate.  By removing the emotional bias, the Eye Chart was able to pick some of the upsets of the first round.  For those who would have picked Michigan to beat Ohio because it was a 4 seed versus a 13 seed might not have picked it if they had seen the overall statistical information.  If you were to look at the Eye Chart, you would see that Ohio is statistically stronger  in over 68% of the major categories raising the upset alert flag.

Of course, individual basketball games can be determined by unforeseen circumstances such as injuries,  so no system will be perfect.  However, using the “March Madness Eye Chart” you can increase your odds of success by over 70% and that is a competitive advantage!

We have included our picks for the next round based on the statistical information of the Eye Chart below.  We will continue to update as the tournament moves along.  Once the tournament is completed, we will do a final analysis including the points spreads of each game. To download a copy of the “NCAA March Madness Eye Chart” click on the following link:  http://blog.rightpeoplerightroles.com/2012-ncaa-march-madness-eye-chart/ 

 

March Madness! The Secret to Making the Right Picks!

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2012 March Madness PMECThe NCAA Tournament, March Madness, Upsets and the Cinderella Story.  Looking for ways to make the Madness more exciting? How about the secret to making your picks and your bracket better than the rest.  Success Profiles has created the March Madness Eye Chart, a comprehensive comparison of all 68 teams that made the dance.  Our large-scale visual tool gives you a side by side comparison of the most important categories of offense, defense and overall strength.  Click here for the full Eye Chart and to put the Odds of Success in your favor.

Succession Planning – Is your organization ready for the impact? Join Success Profiles and Healthcare Performance Solutions for a free Webinar on the “Succession Planning” There will be two times to conveniently meet your scheduling needs. Click on the links below to sign up and join us to learn how you we can take your organization to the next level.

Tuesday Mar 27th – 12:00 -12:45pm (EST)
Click Here to Register

Tuesday Mar 29th – 2:00 – 2:45pm (EST)
Click Here to Register

GEAR DOWN, NOT SHUT DOWN
To climb tough hills, you have to gear down, not shut down.

Structured talent management is a wise investment, especially in economic turmoil. Nobody ever got to the top of a mountain by stopping when it started to get steep.  And nobody ever got any better at doing their job by halting their efforts to improve.  But it is wise to slow down a bit in both cases and think about how to solve your problems in the most efficient way.  Mountain climbers think about energy.  Healthcare organizations think about people, time, and money.  One way is to leverage the in-house talent you already have.  Your in-house talent can pull you through tough times if you have put the Right People in the Right Roles in a disciplined system that maximizes your Odds of Success.

After all, most people want to invest wisely in their own people, but how do you know what is wise?   There are 2 ways.    The first way is to guess . . . I mean use your gut instinct.  The second way is to measure, benchmark, evaluate, review, and reiterate.  It is possible to get success both ways, but is it just as likely to get success both ways?    The margin of performance gained through disciplined business practices is extremely valuable to your bottom-line.  How valuable?   Well, it is not priceless.  How much should you spend on this ability?  How about MUCH LESS!

Especially in tough times, securing the benefit of a superior approach while spending less money doing so is smart business.  Smart business decisions allow you to provide first-class healthcare to more people, and in the Healthcare business, that is success.

A relentless determination to improve and eliminate waste through mistakes is at the heart of continuous improvement concepts, such as lean manufacturing.  This revolutionized the manufacturing industry, completely changing customer expectations of performance and service.  Healthcare is far from immune to these changes.  The new mindset affects both patients and providers alike.  High performing leaders and organizations remain constructively dissatisfied at existing standards.  Testing solutions your organization uses against new ways that arise, allows you to either validate your existing techniques or discover an improved way.  The improvements can come through speed, reliability, performance or price.

Excerpts from “A Discussion with Jon Cecil, CHRO at Lee Memorial Health System: How We Successfully Navigated Our Recent Financial Turnaround”

“Understanding the challenges, the senior leadership team worked to accelerate the change in our organization’s internal culture. Over the last few years, we had prided ourselves on our cost and waste reductions and quality improvements through many initiatives, including our Productivity Committee and Lean/Sigma team. It became shockingly obvious this pace of change was not enough.   At first we were in denial about our reversing market, the accuracy of our volume trends, and our management operating data validity. We initially disagreed as a team. It prevented us from decisive action, and we lost valuable time in making the level of improvements we need to make.”

Tip #1: The data doesn’t lie. Avoid getting mired in the minutia, validate your data, and quickly react to trends as they are occurring.  Senior leaders must pull together and stay focused on fixing your financial situation, or you will not be able to achieve your other strategic goals. Reach consensus quickly with senior leaders and be sure that all levels of leadership are on the same page with you on what the game plan will be. The further the leader was from the top, the more effort was needed to convince them that the crisis was real.  

Tip #2: Don’t take too long listening to the dissenters; they can absorb time and disrupt your teamwork. Make certain the dissenters’ opinions are heard, reviewed for merit, and then move on. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off. Make sure all leaders take ownership in the situation and most importantly, don’t punish each other by playing the blame game. Leaders must not be distracted by looking at what others should be doing, but stay focused on what they and their team should be doing.

Tip #3: Engage the front-line leaders ASAP because they are usually an untapped resource of great ideas and value added initiatives; they should also be engaging their line staff for more untapped great ideas. Your front-line leaders are a great resource if you have a process to elicit their feedback, ideas, and advice. Take advantage of this feedback early on because it will take time for the ideas to gain acceptance and get traction.

Tip #4: If people know the score and keep the score, the score will improve. You cannot underestimate the importance of communication. The more you “overcommunicate” exactly where the organization is and what is at stake, the more likely people are to work together to solve the challenges you face. When all staff know what the leaders know, the adjustments that the organization needs to make are viewed as logical given the undesirable hand you have been dealt.

“We recently brought in a relatively inexpensive but very good motivation speaker to share with them the characteristics of personal and organizational greatness. This was a good uplift and inspirational for many. It recharged some batteries for our leaders.”  

Tip #5: Process improvements always, always, ALWAYS takes longer than you expect. As good as you think you are at redesigning the way work is done (process improvements), driving out waste (lean techniques), reducing variations (Six Sigma), and adding real value to patients, there is always another level of performance you haven’t explored yet.

Tip # 6: We had to remind ourselves to get off the treadmill, celebrate the wins and recognize exceptional performance. Take a time-out and recognize the heroic performance that everyone has exhibited. It will become the “rocket fuel” they need for the next level of performance. 

Tip #7: CEO Jim Nathan has always repeated his personal philosophy that FTE reductions should be considered a failure in leadership.

Tip #8: Finally, we had to accept that HR could add significant value by raising the bar of performance by every measure. We were initially under the impression that if we fundamentally changed the ratio of HR professionals to total staff (previously 1:140 and now 1:200) that we somehow couldn’t deliver on good internal customer service. Well, we were wrong again.  Our team now recognizes that you just never know what’s possible until you test yourself.


The Performance Management Eye Chart — Part IV

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What Does Being In “Over Your Head” Look Like?

Performance Management Eye Chart

(pssst . . . it’s the columns on the left)

The “Peter Principle”, nepotism, favoritism, grandfathering, tenure, ‘Good Ol’ Boy” Network, buddy system, and on and on . . .  We have a lot of terms for promoting and carrying leaders that are not performing to expectations.  Very few of them are compliments.  In most cases, this practice reflects a weakness in business leadership

Several common appointment mistakes produce sub-optimized performance when leaders and managers are put into situations where they are literally in “over their heads.” The easiest way to describe this “over-leveraged” condition is that the department’s complexity, or degree of difficulty, exceeds the threshold level where the manager has better than a 50% chance of success.

For a C level talent or ability, this is virtually any management position (regardless of complexity) because their odds of success are only 40% at best, even in the lowest-complexity positions. The decision to appoint C level leadership ability to low-complexity departments should be made only when the obstacles and barriers are easily managed or when the person has some previous experience in managing the day-to-day operations.  If the manager begins to struggle or fail, the reasons are usually very apparent: they are in over their heads.

How about those B’s?

As noted by Thomas J. DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan in their 2003 Harvard Business Review Article, Let’s Hear it for B Players, B level managers are solid, consistent performers who are competent, experienced, consistent, and loyal.   The average organization has between 50% and 60% of their executives, directors, and managers at the B level of leadership ability. These managers make up the backbone of any organization.  For a B level leadership talent, the ability to manage low – and medium -complexity situations produces favorable results 75% and 60% of the time, respectively (see Odds of Success diagram below).

The only time that B level leaders and managers have low odds of success, when they often are in over their heads, is when they are appointed to complex assignments or departments.  It is here that the odds of success dip below the 50% level to 45%. It’s not that they cannot be successful, it’s just less likely.  If the decision is made to appoint a B level talent to this level of complexity, they really need to be “over-achievers” or at the B+ level to succeed at all costs or a steep price.

  • They define success differently, not in purely financially or status terms.
  • While they work hard at work, they prioritize “life-work” balance and prefer to work 50 hours per week instead of 70 to 80 or more.
  • They are usually excellent team players and avoid the spotlight of self promotion.
  • They may have been A level performers at one time and have dialed back their career focus, often due to other priorities or “throttling” down to semi-retirement.
  • They have longer tenures in organizations because they are less likely to leap from job to job in order to fast-track or advance their careers.
  • They carry a significant amount of an organization’s intellectual capital due to their experience and tenure.

The Performance Management Eye Chart (PMEC) is a visual tool that compares leadership effectiveness and cultural engagement at glance.  Leaders can instantly see which departments have healthy cultures of excellence and which ones are facing difficulties. With a unique style of presenting information in a way that allows both detailed focus and overall vision, the Eye Charts synthesize and present meaning, allowing you to see the complete performance picture.

The truth is, in any organization, it is a smart, disciplined mix of leadership talent that matches the complexity and challenge of each department that best leads to success.   A Level Leaders should be placed in the most challenging roles, but trying to hire only A Level Leaders is expensive, difficult, and creates teamwork problems.  It did not work for Enron and it will not work for anyone else.  B leaders are excellent in the right place, and C Employees make worthy contributions to organizations every day.

Put the right people in the right roles by starting that process with the Performance Management Eye Chart, which will quantify and illustrate the impact that leadership has on overall performance and the existing culture in your organization, one leader and one department a time.

The Performance Management Eye Chart — Part III

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The Ineluctable Impact of Leadership and Cultural Engagement

Today’s obscure but incredible word is ineluctable.  To define, something which is ineluctable is something which cannot be avoided, changed, or resisted: inevitable.  To use it in a sentence: “Given the business practices of past management, disappointing results proved ineluctable.”  Or this sentence: “Once the Hospital’s leadership adopted the Eye Chart Tools and followed through with the recommended courses of action, success was ineluctable!”

Good leadership affects every aspect of operations, including the patient experience, employee morale, and financial results.  Top-performing HealthCare organizations work hard to get it, get more of it, and improve that which they do have.

A study by Success Profiles in July, 2010, examined the leadership performance and cultural engagement index scores of 104 healthcare systems throughout the United States. Continue reading →

The Performance Management Eye Chart — Part II

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Opposites Attract  . . . but only if each opposite values what the other opposite has to offer.  In fact, I think we find it rare for opposite qualities to exist together in a way that is lasting and benefits from the pairing.  It can be even harder when we force two things together we find attractive but ending up acting like the same poles on a magnet, repulsing each other as hard as they can.  Sure, we will always have chocolate and peanut butter, but in the serious world of Healthcare operations, it is hard to find opposite things combine in a way that improves the result; and when we do it is hard to keep them together.  For example, every time we try to objectively measure performance in our organization and present it in a meaningful way, we seem to have to choose.  Do we want detail or a wide field of view?   Do we want to see everything at once, or do we want to see the numbers, in specific detail?  Yes, we want both.  How can we get both?

The Performance Management Eye Chart quantifies and illustrates the impact that leadership has on overall performance and the existing culture, one leader and one department a time, and puts the results together in one place. One can instantly observe the capability and performance of Continue reading →

The Performance Management Eye Chart — Part I

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Assessing leadership performance is similar to swimming:

You cannot assess competency with a written test.

Our key premise is that the most effective and fastest way to improve performance throughout an organization is to improve the effectiveness of leadership, one leader and one department at a time.   Meanwhile, it seems the key premise of some leaders is:  “Improve who?   Improve me?  Why me?” Continue reading →

The Talent Management Eye Chart

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After measuring the performance of hundreds of Healthcare Systems, Healthcare Performance Systems came to the same conclusion that Google did measuring 1 big organization (themselves).   Google called it PROJECT OXYGEN —  they couldn’t survive without it.  They and we both found the single most important vital factor in an organization’s success and to an employee’s performance is  . . . Leadership.

The best way to make employees more effective, improve operating margins and create incredible customer/patient outcomes is improve leadership effectiveness.

And the best way to improve leadership effectiveness is to align leadership talent with the demands of each position.   Doing this requires that business leaders have sophisticated performance measurement tools to more easily differentiate and interpret information.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Introduction to the Eye Chart Suite of Tools

Business leaders don’t relate well to and are not motivated by statistical coefficients and academic correlations. They need practical and applied causal links and measures of performance that they can readily see and relate to logically and emotionally. Do the measurement tools need to be scientifically valid and reliable? Continue reading →