Performance Improvement Tip of the Day: SMART Mentoring

We hear a lot about "mentoring" in the context of management, networking, and career development. The idea of mentoring is to establish a close relationship, usually one-to-one, between someone with wisdom or expertise in a particular area and another seeking insight and professional development in that area.

This construct is particularly useful in the performance improvement arena. Through the one-on-one, relationship oriented approach, performance improvement experts can effectively guide those who are at more incipient stages of expertise. True to the mentoring construct, the experts don't take on the task of performance improvement themselves, rather they help their mentees to become familiar with performance improvement concepts and tools, understand how all of the components support each other, and assemble the "performance improvement engine" for themselves. When done within the setting of an "active project", with the mentor's gentle guidance and support in the background, the learning is made more poignant and effective.

Mentoring is also desirable from a structural sense - rather than consulting per se - because the mentee is always responsible for the project, and over time can function without the support of the mentor. In contrast to training, mentoring is generally more focused on the one-to-one relationship and, therefore, highly individualized to the mentee's needs. This further enhances the value of the process, and is more likely to result in successful activation, knowledge transfer, and performance improvement outcomes.

S - Support rather than lead
M - Make it individualized
A - Active project involvement
R - Relationship-based
T - Transfer of knowledge and wisdom

Performance Improvement Tip of the Day: SMART Dialogue

Referring again to Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age", the authors talk about the importance of dialogue (vs. monologue) as a means of connecting with "core desires".

The authors' concept of dialogue provides a great mechanism for improving "listening" skills as well, which we all agree are critical to leadership and change management. The authors define the following features of dialogue, which somehow align nicely with the "SMART" template:

• Secure
• Meets mutual needs
• Authentic
• Respectful (the authors use "considerate", but I exercised some poetic license here)
• Transparent/ Builds trust

How do these concepts connect? >>> If you engage in SMART dialogue, you will increase your influence with that individual, and thereby increase your capacity to lead change. 

Performance Improvement Tip of the Day: A "SMART" PI Project Checklist

In this "list-obsessed" world of ours, its hardly a surprise that one would create a "Checklist for Checklists". In healthcare, the call has gone out from Drs. Peter Pronovost and Atul Gawande to introduce Checklists as "patient safety tools". They are particularly useful when dealing with complex systems, and for reminding personnel of "basic operations" that can't be forgotten. When used properly, Checklists can ensure that necessary aspects of care are delivered, and free up highly trained personnel to think about when to deviate from a Checklist, and focus on higher level decision-making.

As we make our performance improvement teams more results-oriented, the Checklist becomes a useful tool to help keep the projects themselves on track. This helps to remind our project leaders about the steps they need to take in order to ensure that project goals will be met.

The "SMART" PI Project Checklist below - in keeping with our "SMART" theme - helps to provide a relatively simple, easily implementable framework for delivering improvement. In this context, "SMART" reminds us of the following:

• When designing Goals, Feedback, and Profiles, keep them "SMART" in order to ensure efficiency and minimize the likelihood of resistance or conflict. See prior blogs on each of these topics for more details.
• The "SMART" PI Project ensures that we:
• "Specify" ownership of the project.
• "Monitor" results in an ongoing fashion, and ensure that others in the organization help us with the monitoring.
• "Analyze" the current system in order to properly develop Goals, identify Barriers, and identify the Critical Processes that need to be undertaken in order to deliver results.
• "Redesign" the system intelligently building in decision support to ensure reliable outcomes, and enhancing safety mechanisms to catch problems real-time.
• "Train" ourselves, our staff, and our leaders to deliver better results using proven "behavioral management" techniques of Feedback and Profiling.

While this list can be individualized for the needs of particular institutions, the elements included are generally those that I find essential in delivering results. As you work through the list, you are introducing greater reliability into the system and establishing an increasingly mature culture of improvement.

Performance Improvement Tip of the Day: Providing "SMART Feedback"

One of the most essential aspects of behavior modification is feedback - its critical to auto-regulation in all systems: biologic, social, and behavioral. If a practitioner does not find out that an action is undesirable, then she cannot correct it.

Most organizations are not familiar or comfortable with providing feedback. They find that it takes too much time, or the culture of the organization is not "ready for feedback", or they are not sure of how to go about setting up a feedback system, or they are worried about how the recipients will react. The purpose of feedback is not to chastise or blame, but to re-orient, teach, guide, and engage.

Feedback isn't about occasional meetings with the department head, or annual performance reviews. Those are too far removed from individual actions to be meaningful. Feedback is about providing critique about a specific action, in a time-sensitive manner so that the memory is still relatively fresh in the recipient's mind, and can be acted upon soon enough to change outcomes.

PPII has designed a SMART Feedback Tool to help performance improvement specialists structure their feedback in order to gain the greatest engagement and responsiveness from their practitioners:

PPII SMART Feedback Tool

Other "COOL" elements to add to the SMART Feedback structure:

• C - Consistent - to establish a "culture of feedback" and fairness.
• O - Ongoing - to ensure that the performance of a behavior is reinforced and hardwired.
• O - Opportunity - for the recipient to provide further input into the issue or request clarification.
• L - Learning-oriented - the best feedback provides a framework and opportunity for learning. 

This SMART Feedback Tool was provided courtesy of 

Physician Performance Improvement Institute.