New ways of helping people to be top performers shown at Big Picture Seminar

Online, March 29, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Average performers can be helped to emulate the approaches and achievements of superstars according to Colin Coulson-Thomas delivering a Big Picture Seminar in Greenwich: "Critical success factors can be built into work processes and support tools and the superior approaches of high achievers can be captured and shared. People can be enabled to quickly understand complex areas and do difficult jobs. Large returns on investment can be quickly obtained."

Over 20 investigations led by Coulson-Thomas have identified critical success factors for activities such as competitive bidding, key account management, purchasing, pricing, and creating and exploiting know-how. According to the author of 'Winning Companies; Winning People': "Our focus has been upon important, demanding and potentially stressful jobs. We set out to understand why some people and teams are so much more effective than others in equivalent situations."

The research programme has covered over 4,000 organisations. 2,000 of them have contributed to studies to identify critical success factors for key business development activities. Coulson-Thomas reports "The findings are remarkably consistent across sectors, professions, corporate nationalities and different sizes of organisation. In areas examined so far we have identified a relatively small number of top performers and a much larger proportion of fairly average performers. There are also poor performers who create problems and impose additional costs on their organisations."

Understanding is the key to many critical success factors, for example in competitive bidding understanding the value/benefits being sought by customers, understanding cost of ownership issues, understanding factors considered when purchasing, understanding the business environment in which customers operate, and understanding their decision making processes. Coulson-Thomas' report 'Developing a Corporate Learning Strategy' reveals that "in many organisations most people have little understanding of how technologies work and their relevance for users. They are offered general courses rather than specific help to be effective at their jobs."

Coulson-Thomas has found that: "Performance can be improved by increasing understanding, putting additional critical success factors in place, and enabling whole work groups to adopt top performing behaviours. Smart companies can do all at once by providing people with the support they require as and when they need it, wherever they might be. In effect working and learning are integrated. Tools can be designed so that users become more confident and competent each time they are used."

Case studies showed seminar participants how communities of ordinary achievers can adopt the winning ways of superstars: "Job support tools can boost performance, speed up responses, increase understanding, reduce stress, avoid risks, enable bespoke responses, cut compliance costs, and generate quick paybacks. They make it easy for people to do tricky tasks, free people from dependency upon particular locations and support mobile activities, and the relocation and outsourcing of work."

"Outstanding returns can be generated as everyone raises their game. The costs and damage to reputation of poor performance are reduced or eliminated by built in checks. Because of these controls, and because winning behaviours are made explicit and better support is provided top performers can be freed to try out alternative solutions. Superstars can be enabled to push out the boundaries of achievement."

Areas examined by Coulson-Thomas' research programme range from communicating to visioning. Comparing the approaches of high performers with the practices of low achievers reveals critical success factors and winning ways that can be built into processes and support tools. The results are summarised and examples of support tools given in 'Winning Companies; Winning People; Making it easy for average performers to adopt winning ways' by Colin Coulson-Thomas. The book and a series of related reports setting out critical success factors for key corporate activities can be obtained from http://www.policypublications.com.

According to Coulson-Thomas there is huge potential for companies to benefit from his research, "Even top performers are only very effective at less than half of the critical success factors identified for an area such as competitive bidding. The performance of every company examined so far could be increased by putting additional critical success factors in place." There are also implications for people and talent management, education and training: "Organisations need to think about how they use and reward high performers and know-how, recognition and other issues."

The Big Picture Seminar series is organized by the business school of the University of Greenwich and takes place in the Old Royal Naval College on the University's world heritage site campus at Greenwich in South East London. Future speakers in the series include journalist John Kay of the Financial Times, economist Charles Goodhart CBE, and Alistair Mant, a specialist on leadership development.

Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas has helped over 100 boards to improve director, board and corporate performance, and reviewed the processes and practices for competing and winning of over 100 companies. He is the author of over 40 books and reports, and has spoken at over 200 national and international conferences in 40 countries. He can be contacted via http://www.coulson-thomas.com.