Page 89 - Performance Leadership

78 • Part II Operational and Analytical Dimensions

and systems to follow up on a real time alert, it makes no sense to sup-
ply the information faster. In a way, information should be “right time”
instead of real time. The required periodicity of information as a feed-
back mechanism depends on the speed of the other parts of the man-
agement process. Sometimes this means that processes to take action
should be redesigned to speed up, and sometimes this will mean feed-
back simply shouldn’t be that fast.
Right-time information makes the alignment between self and self-
perception and the alignment between external perception and self
actionable. The window of opportunity to take corrective or preventive
action is an important consideration in establishing right-time infor-
mation needs.

Horizontal and Vertical Alignment

The biggest problem with performance management is that everything,
including the pretzel model, is structured in a hierarchical way. Strat-
egy implementation is a top-down process, in which we need to iden-
tify everyone’s contribution to the central, corporate goals. We say that
we “cascade” scorecards down into the organization. We “roll up”
budget numbers. We “drill down” to see where deviations from the plan
occur. And we “work our way up” the corporate hierarchy. Each busi-
ness domain only “reports up” strategic objectives; and most of the
reporting is “self-reporting,” that is, reporting based on a business unit’s
own data. Typically, managers are not aware of what their peers report
and neither are senior managers—two levels higher—intimately aware
of the subtle detail either. Alignment is a vertical exercise, our man-
agers only get “the big picture” (if they get a fair picture at all).
Vertical alignment makes sense, at least in part. People need hierar-
chy. This has been the case since the dawn of society. Families are hier-
archic, the church has a hierarchy, the military has a very strong sense
of hierarchy. Then business came along as a new societal structure,
again hierarchic. Hierarchies are very effective for managing people.
People rise in the hierarchy through seniority based on a long career
path. Leadership, which we earlier defined as the ability to achieve
results through other people, is best served by a hierarchy, as it allows
leaders to hand down instructions and collect and compile feedback.