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Understanding Human Performance How to Design, Implement, Evaluate and Improve Your Business Through Measuring and Engaging Human Performance        Authors:        Alan Weiss & Omar Khan ISBN   9788130930473   224pp PB  6x9" 2015 Original publisher  Global Professional Publishing Ltd. Published in India by         Viva Books List price       Rs. 595.00 Price after 20% discount= Rs476.00

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Terms applicable on advance payment only. Prices are subject to revision.Review:

“While Understanding Human Performance is tailored for business leaders looking to leverage human capital and build better companies, its perspective is certainly relevant to everyone involved in the process of designing and developing customer and employee-facing experience.”
-Marisa Peacock, Senior Reporter, CMS Wire

Description:

When businesses look to improve their performance, they usually look at profit margins, growth rates and measures like these. One very important factor that is often overlooked is performance.

When performance isn’t effectively measured, it is difficult to improve. Many organizations endure mediocre performance while having a preponderance of employees who are rate “above average” and “excellent”.

Omar Khan and Alan Weiss both world-recognized consultants, provide, in Understanding Human Performance, the pragmatics for why measurement is important, what should be measured and how to do it accurately.

Their concept is Understanding Human Performance. This concept, in their words: “The people you monitor, develop, and coach protect you and the company through their skills. People who are committed, don’t hide, don’t shun responsibility, and who can be relied upon in good times and bad. We need to measure their work, observe their behavior, and reward them accordingly.”

The objective of the exercise is business growth. A collateral benefit is happier employees and a more engaging, congenial working environment.
Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1—Whose Yardstick Shall We Use? The evolution and applicability • The human performance component of business performance • The inadequacy of human resources measures • HR fads and the failure of HR • The four components of human performance • The three lenses • Why measuring everything but what matters most destroys value • Premise: Everyone agrees that “human performance” matters, but there has been no satisfactory definition of it. Companies, in failing to systematically measure human performance while measuring virtually everything else, are operating with dangerous blinkers.

Chapter 2—It’s Just Business Why people must be measured • When good enough isn’t enough • Creating the right kind of “killer gaps” • The fallacy of the bell curve • You can’t reach out until you let go • Commitment always trumps compliance • Premise: Business is not a “pass/fail” game that caters to political correctness Nor is it sufficient to rank people against each other. How do so many people acquire “outstanding” ratings in a mediocre business?!

Chapter 3—The Right Relationships Forming partnerships with “buyers” and stakeholders • Every business is a relationship business • Why Naisbitt was the real business prophet • We work in communities, not cubicles • Partners treat each other as equals • Shouldn’t everyone think they’re an owner? • Premise: Performance is never done in a vacuum. The nature, scope, and duration of relationships determine performance standards and encourage a rising tide that carries all boats.
Chapter 4—Get It In Writing Using documentation and validating what you see • The danger of assumptions over real assessments • Beware of focusing on symptoms over causes • Beware of confusing means and ends • Ensuring we document both positive as well as negative deviance • Consistently produced results trump theoretical dogma every time • Premise: Like the mythical Procrustes, who stretched or amputated his guests’ limbs to make them fit his bed, it is too easy to whittle down or mutate what we observe to conform to our assumptions, our dogmas, our default settings and often limiting paradigms Validation and documentation enable us to base improvement on solid bedrock.
Chapter 5—Will You Accept the Facts or Your Lying Eyes? How to observe without being observed • The difference between cause and blame • Why labels and testing vehicles are bogus and blind • Cognitive dissonance run rampant • The fine art of observed behavior • Why perception is not reality • Premise: We tend to explain away or ignore the actual evidence in the environment that can improve performance and remove obstacles to it. But we’re too often blinded by the light (that we cause ourselves).
Chapter 6—Raising the Bar Forensics are not just for CSI • Why the limbo is finite and the pole vault isn’t • The strange case of the day-one deviation • Why others will create more growth than you can assign them • How to determine how high is “up” • Creating performance trajectories • Premise: Everyone talks about improving performance but it usually gets lost in a morass of self-interests, bureaucracy, and fear. Yet it’s actually a quite normal and agreeable human condition.
Chapter 7—Gaining Commitment, Not Merely Compliance Painting people into the picture • Why engaging and enrolling matter • The failure of mood surveys • The power of discretionary effort • How to enable and empower meaningfully • Improving the value of leadership and team interactions • Premise: You can order compliance, but you can only elicit commitment which has to be volunteered Engagement is not the same as a “snapshot in time” satisfaction survey which often distorts the essentials of the focused commitment that, when sustained, raises the bar on performance.
Chapter 8—Like Gum on Your Shoe Making change stick • It will take a team in more than name • The different facets of real alignment • Hype it as it happens • Measures that matter—the discipline of testable assumptions • Initiative versus staying power and follow-through • Premise: Most senior groups aren’t teams though it has become a fad to call every grouping a “team”. Change needs a real senior team that aligns in substantive ways, builds relationships and models behaviors that embolden, legitimize and ignite change activity at all levels of the organization.
Chapter 9—You Can Compare Apples and Oranges (Both Fruit, Both Roundish) Evaluating ROI and further needs • Getting a “return on energy” as well as investment • Strategy means knowing what you won’t do • All that glitters is not gold, but nor is it necessarily base metal • Finding common patterns among seemingly disparate phenomena • Getting everyone into the human performance evaluation and improvement dance • Premise: Human performance improvement allows us to identify what efforts are bearing fruit, how to rescue failing initiatives, to prioritize where energies and focus should go, and to create a bridge between human efforts and business success
Chapter 10—Crystal Ball Predictions for people and the world of work • Talent wranglers of the world unite • Behavior trumps results • The lessons of people in the streets • The technology plateau • The global worker • Premise: The world will see more informality and learn from the revolts caused by suppression, technology will become like electricity (appreciated but forgotten), and every worker will be involved in worldwide wisdom.

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