by By DEO MAP
Building connections throughout your organization is the best way to ensure that everyone is dialed in to the mission and vision of your organization. When you have outliers – people who aren’t engaged with their work or coworkers – your entire organization will suffer.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are just one facet of how we can set goals and measure our process. The “5 Ps” is a framework to help your team members set personal and professional goals that matter to them and allow you, as the leader, to support them in achieving their highest and best potential.
Power
The important thing to understand about “power” in this context is that it isn’t necessarily about strength or having power over someone else. We’re talking about power as a concept of energy within a human being. We all know that energy is not an infinite resource, despite how it may appear.
As business owners, many of us have worked over 80 hours within a week in our practices. Many of us wake up early in the morning, often before our partners or children are out of bed and come back home after they have gone to bed. We have missed workouts, mismanaged our schedules during the day, and resorted to junk food for quick and easy meals.
Where’s your energy? What’s energizing you? If you want to lead people well, you need to have the energy to lead them. When you allow your energy to be depleted and you allow yourself to break under pressure, what kind of leader does that make you? Our society just tells us to hustle and grind through whatever we are going through, but that’s not how this works. That’s not healthy leadership.
Imagine yourself as a battery. You have to be conscious of where your energy goes, as well as how you can recharge your energy once it’s depleted. As entrepreneurs and leaders, we often believe that fun, rest, and relaxation come after we have burned ourselves out.
Every human should have a consistent and regular habit of creating physical, mental and spiritual health. Your power comes from how you, as an individual, are energized.
Purpose
Purpose is how we deliver our unique impact on earth, how we create value for other people. While purpose is an integral part of how you connect with your team and your organization, it isn’t a fixed property: it can change, grow, and redirect over time. Sometimes our purpose isn’t clear, but it shouldn’t pull us from trying new things and finding our purpose.
We all have a role to play, whether we know it or not. This is an area where we can always make progress. For example, if you have found that your purpose is to create avenues of continued education for your employees, that needs to be something that you set aside time for each week. Each one of us needs to actively be discovering our purpose, refining our purpose, and magnifying our purpose.
One of the things that we say often is “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” One of the best ways to feed your personal and professional growth is through enhancing your purpose. It’s not tied to temporary, frivolous things like income. Sure, income can be a result of your purpose. But the income itself isn’t your purpose. We are meant for bigger and more tangible things than a dollar amount.
People
The shift to a more digital society has changed the ways that we relate to others, often complicating relationships by creating the false assumption that digital relationships are equal to other types of interactions. Connecting with others is what makes us human, and we need it. The COVID-19 pandemic made this more evident than ever before, forcing many of us to realize how badly we needed other people.
While the pandemic was significantly isolating for all of us, the advent of modern technology has already started to isolate us in one way or another. Digital relationships are no replacement for the real thing.
Relationships need to be built and cultivated with a sense of intention: if focus is taken from these efforts, these relationships will suffer and fail to thrive. A critical thing for business owners to understand is that your business is not the important thing in the life of your team members. There are so many times when we expect it to be, but the reality is that it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. If we aren’t leaving space for our team members to have healthy relationships outside of work, how can we expect them to want to spend any time in our environment?
Your team needs to be in an environment that allows them to have what’s most important to them. Challenges in our relationships are often the biggest source of lost energy and power, which can then drain the efficacy of your organization. Your team needs to understand that their relationships inside and outside of work are a priority.
Prosperity
According to Merriam-Webster, prosperity means the “condition of being successful and thriving.” Prosperity means more than just money; it’s making sure that you have “enough.” What does fulfillment look like? What things are the most important in your life? What is an appropriate compensation for the value you create? Answering these questions creates a far more accurate picture of prosperity. Earnings, financial strategies, and debt reduction may be a part of a prosperity plan, but not the only focus.
Prosperity is about being clear on what your “enough” is for you to be fulfilled and connected to your people. If you want more – whether that’s flexibility, pay, influence, etc. – you have to create more value.
In order to have a better understanding of what prosperity means to each of us, we need to actively be doing three things:
1. Considering what prosperity means to us.
2. Have a strategy, milestones, and targets that are regularly assessed and adjusted.
3. Regularly consider how we can create more value to drive more prosperity.
Perform
We need to make sure we have some system of measuring the output of our team members, allowing us to quantify our goals and the goals of our team members. Measuring team member performance helps calibrate those goals by providing insight into where someone is doing well and could be stretched.
Performance gives you and your team tangible data for how everything can improve, and it’s verifiable proof that you are reaching your goals and milestones. To truly get the most out of the performance metric, your team needs to be aligned with the core values of your company.
Most importantly, performance is about being effective, where you connect the personal to the professional. This is going to look different depending on the employee and the role they serve in – essentially, the performance of a dentist will be different than a front office manager.
