[MUSIC] Welcome. We spent the last few segments talking about accountability, and how accountability is an important framework for performance. And in earlier lessons, we talked about all those key elements for your performance process. Expectations, mission and purpose, vision, key performance indicators, and individual performance goals. These elements allow us to know when we have a performance gap. In this next lesson, we'll explore how to diagnose problem areas and performance gaps. The keys to recognize and the keys to think about when we are addressing or identifying performance issues is that there really are going to be two primary factors that influence why someone does or doesn't achieve a goal. And those reasons have everything to do with their skill set or their mindset. So their abilities and/or the way that they think about their work. We're going to go into that in much more depth, but I wanted to give you that high level perspective as we get into some of these discussions. If you have your expectations established, you have your key performance indicators for every role identified and you have individual performance goals for every individual employee. You have a lot of tools available to you to measure people's outcomes against. So individual goals, if we just look at those, those are pretty clear. We identify what someone needs to do in their position within a certain timeframe, remembering our SMART elements, and how will we measure that. And they either do or they don't achieve it, and that can become the basic way that we can identify whether or not someone is performing, do they hit their goals or not? But, the key here is recognizing that why people do or don't hit their goals varies, and that's what I want to spend some time really talking about. Those real two primary drivers that help us diagnose performance, because they're at play all the time. And my hope for you as a manager is, by synthesizing what those two things are, you can better identify how to help the employee improve. So I want to talk to you a little bit about results first of all. So let's take a goal of, we expect that someone will earn $50,000 in revenue in the month of October. Okay, let's just use that as a goal. Now let's say that that person only generates $20,000 of revenue in the month of October. So, that's a measurable outcome, that we can evaluate. It's easy to say they didn't hit it, and now what we want to do is figure out why they didn't hit it. Right? Now what happens in most organizations is we look at the result so we look at that $50,000 goal to the $20,000 result and we focus on the result. And we might even have conversations with employees that sound something like, hey you only got $20,000 toward your $50,000 revenue goal. You need to get more money, you need to get more clients. You need to make that up in the next month. How are you going to do that? How you're going to account for this gap you need to improve? And that's what we do, it's almost like we point at the result and say, change, change, change. And somehow miraculously the result will improve. So let's use an example of, if you were unhealthy and you went to the doctor. Let's say you have a fever, and you go to the doctor. And so many times the conversations that managers have with employees sounds a little bit like what I'm going to share with you, which would be sort of silly if you went to the doctor, right? Let's say you go to the doctor, you have a fever, and the doctor says, dear, you have a fever. You need to get that down. You gotta work on that, get your fever down. You shouldn't have such a high fever. You don't want to have a fever. That's not good. How are you going to get better? You gotta get better. You gotta get a better fever, get a lower, you don't want to have a fever, right? [LAUGH] It's sort of a silly conversation, right? You can imagine having that. What we know is that the fever is a symptom of something going on in the body and the same thing is true for a result of a goal. If the goal was 50,000, and the employee got 20, that's a symptom of something going on that isn't effective, right? That's what a gap means. It means that there's something else I need to figure out here to help this employees improve. I can't just look at the result and tell the employee to make a better result. It's not going to work. It's certainly not sustainable. And that, for a lot of people who manage sales environments, that's why you have these peaks and valleys sales performers, because they do that. They just go all out to get this better, but they're not really improving their performance. It's not sustainable right, this is what we know for sure. So if we think about the results that we get as simply a symptom, then what are they a symptom of? And they are a symptom of someone's ability to do their work, or someone's thinking about their work. We're going to dive more into that in our next segment, when we talk about something that I call coaching algebra. In summary of this video on diagnosing performance gaps, we want to remember that performance gaps, all they do is indicate for us that something is or isn't working, right? And in the case of developing performance we're looking for those area that can improve. And remember that the results that we can observe are symptoms of an employees ability, or of their thinking, right, their skill-set or their mindset. And we want to make sure that, we can't just focus on results, we can't just point to a number and say, hey get that higher, hey get that lower. Because that's not how we improve performance. If we want to improve performance, we have to identify properly what's at play here. Is this a skill set issue, is this a mindset issue? And how do we help the employee move forward to get that work accomplished, to build the skills they need, to change the way they're thinking, and move forward to get the kind of results that we need them to get in their position.
