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Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart

Attention performance managers! In their book Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, Geary Rummler and Alan Brache give us a down-to-earth guide for improving both individual and organizational performance.

The reports of both the National Performance Review and the National Partnership Council are calling for agencies to design performance management and incentives programs to improve performance at both these levels. Many of us have been trying for years to link them, but usually with little success. Now, Rummler and Brache have developed a practical scheme for analyzing performance and, more important, for figuring out what to do to improve it. (It's particularly encouraging that their ideas and advice were developed out of experience helping Federal agencies.)

The authors have drawn a conclusion from their experience. "The majority of managers simply do not understand the variables that influence organization and individual performance. They are not aware of the 'performance levers' that they should be pulling and encouraging others to pull."

• Performance Variables
• Linking Individual and Organizational Performance

Performance Variables. Rummler and Brache use a framework of Nine Performance Variables that represent "a comprehensive set of improvement levers." The nine variables derive from a cross-match of Three Performance Levels and Three Performance Needs.

The Three Levels Organization, Process, and Job/Performer establish an "anatomy" for studying and diagnosing performance. Applying knowledge of this performance anatomy can prevent organization problems and continuously improve performance.

Three factors that determine effectiveness at each of the levels comprise the framework's second dimension the Performance Needs. These needs are: Goals, the specific standards or expectations that customers have for products or services; Design, the configuration that enables goals to be met efficiently; and Management, the practices that ensure goals are up-to-date and are achieved.

Taken together the nine Performance Variables (e.g., Organization Goals, Organization Design, Process Goals, Process Management, etc.) are interdependent. To be successful, improvement efforts must address all three levels at the same time. If the Organization Level of performance is not being defined, designed, and managed, then individual performance has no context.

Linking Individual and Organizational Performance. The book's key breakthrough comes in its view of the Process Level as the pivotal link between organization and individual performance. This level usually offers the greatest opportunity for improvement. It's where the "white space" the relationships and information flows between the boxes on an organization chart comes in. Even outstanding employees cannot improve organization performance if poor processes are in place. "If you want to understand the way work gets done, to improve the way work gets done, and to manage the way work gets done, processes should be the focus of your attention and actions."

The book's approach to individual performance management at the Job/Performer Level is consistent with most recent thinking about the need for such programs to be forward-looking and less judgmental. The authors offer this important insight into the relationship between motivation and performance management,

"If capable, well-trained people are placed in a setting with clear expectations, minimal task interference, reinforcing consequences, and appropriate feedback, then they will be motivated."

Clearly, the basics of performance management its planning, assessment, and rewards processes can give an organization leverage on what affects a performer's level of motivation.

Originally published on April 1994.