Business TV Alexander Pepper: Building teams &avoiding fads

In this business tv show, Alexander Pepper, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, talks about the best ways businesses can approach these concepts, helping them to obtain focussed performance metrics and effective team development;

"The most important thing here for me is kind of the performance metrics that you use in your organisation. The balanced score card, the concept of a balanced score card or an integrated score card is vitally important. So you need to have a number of measures, a relatively small number or measures so that people can understand them and get their head around them but not so small that you're focusing only on one or two things and you need to get the whole of an organisation lined up around those four or five areas, those four or five sets of measures and overall giving a kind of equal performance across the whole range, so there's got to be a focus on client satisfaction, there's got to be a focus on people, the people experience, what its like to work within the organisation but not so you forget that its customers that pay the bills.
There's got to be a financial performance but not just so you get driven by numbers. There's got to be recognition that risk is important, quality is important but not so you're producing things that are excellent quality but the economics of it don't make sense. If you get all those measures right and the team, the people in the organisation understand the importance of all of those things then you've got a high performing team and you've got a high performance culture.
The biggest mistakes that I see organisations are, one, focusing on too few metrics - focusing just on one area to the exclusion of other things. So it might be we want to be a real customer focussed organisation so we focus just on the customer and we forget about the fact that we've got people working here and how does that feel and we neglect the measures around that which causes a decline in motivation and the people experience and a consequence of that of course is customers aren't so great because they're dealing with people who aren't very happy. So that's one mistake, you know I see mistakes around trying to do things by form but not by substance.
So lets have a mission statement around this new high performance culture so you make some public announcement but actually there isn't any substance behind it and employers can be very cynical about that sort of thing and that then comes through and that shows in sort of the way that the outside see the organisation.
I mean another area is training and development; some companies spend huge amounts on training and development without really understanding doing, whether they're getting benefit, whether they're training the right things, whether they understand the return on investment. So a proper training and development program has to be integrated into the business.
There has to be a strong connection between what the business is all about and what people are learning and how they see their futures developing. So you can spend money on training and it can be wasted money and that creates disappointment and then you get the negative cycles coming and people say we shouldn't do that because its not worth it but if you think carefully and intelligently about what you're spending your training and development budget on and really
Well so this is quite interesting because high performance teams, high performing cultures are not a particularly new concept, its been around for a few years now and there's a lot of a new hard evidence to support the kinds of things that we've talked about. The focus on metrics, the focus on developments, the focus on team and community rather than individuals. There's a lot of good quality research to support those concepts. So in a funny kind of way one of the attractions of this is it's got some endurability. There's some sustainability here. We're talking about relatively simple concepts that are easy to understand which have been around for a while. So this is not a fad. This is not kind of the latest management fad this is something more substantial than that. I'm very keen on the concept of evidence based management, of not doing things just because that's the latest fashion in the management market place but there's some real hard academic research that supports and underpins the concepts that you're using and that then you seek to apply in practice."

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[businessexpertsalli]

I am with businessexpertsjax, i would be really interested in knowing more about the scorecard and how it works.

[businesstvdavid]

There's some really interesting things to think about in here.

[businessexpertsjax]

I'd be interested on hearing more about the score card!

[businesstvAmanda]

I agree with PWC - Training is hugely important for all organizations and making sure people in organizations understand how every department works and how they work together with each other. The scorecard concept is very interesting

[BusinessExpertLouise]

An integrated score card is an interesting idea.

[businesstvrebecca]

Interesting ideas, a proper training program can make a big difference

[businesstvmark]

I found this interview very interesting indeed.

[businesstvkelsi]

Great idea to have general areas for all employees to give an equal performance on.

[businessexpertsalli]

I thought Alexander had some great advice. It is good to think back to the basics occasionally and spend time doing the things that you know work!!!