I’m reading a great book called Convince Them in 90 Seconds Or Less which is written by my good friend Nick Boothman and I was looking to write a blog post about how leaders can create rapport quickly, which is an important skill to develop, and that blog will be coming in the next few days.
First I wanted to share a simple approach that Nick covered on how to improve performance and get better results. Like much of what Nick writes it’s practical, powerful, easy to understand and actually easy to implement.
The approach he covers he calls KFC, which stands for Know what you want, Find out what you’re getting, and if you’re not getting what you want then Change your approach.
As a fan of simplicity I love this approach. We have a natural tendency to over complicate things, so when I find a simple clear approach that will work for everyone, I feel compelled to share it.
Know want yo want
Too often people are not clear about what they want, and if that’s the case then it’s going to be very difficult to put a plan in place to achieve it. We need clarity over our goals and our objectives, and need to define them in a way that is measurable.
Just saying you want to be healthier is not a goal, it’s a general aspiration. It’s something that is difficult to measure.
We need to be smart and set it up as something that we can clearly assess. Which could be I want to go to the gym 3 times a week, I want to lose 10b by the end of the year, or I want to be able to get into an outfit that I have outgrown. It needs to be measurable.
Find out what you’re getting
Once we have our measurable goal, then we need to measure it regularly, check that we are getting the progress, the results or the outcome that we are expecting. If we don’t measure, then it’s not easy to see whether what we are doing is working or not and we could easily fall into that happy under performer situation. One where we are happy but ignorant of our true performance, and in my experience when that happens when we finally get to the end, we find out we failed.
One of my favourite sayings is “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”. I know it’s not always easy to hear negative feedback, but we need to see it as input into our next attempt, rather than just as a criticism of previous attempt.
So we need accurate feedback, we need to be able to assess the progress we are making and we need to do it regularly
Change your approach
When we find that the progress isn’t what we are hoping for, then it’s time to change the approach. If we don’t change the approach then we are flirting with madness. Because madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If the approach doesn’t reach the goal, then we need to make changes, it might just mean small subtle tweaks or it could mean a major re-engineering, but we have to do something different if we want a different outcome.
We often hear the expression taking a trial and error approach, but I prefer to think of it as trial and improvement because we need to be using the feedback to make improvements.
I love the simplicity of this of the KFC approach and I like the acronym as it serves as a great reminder for the three steps of the process that we need to be following all three to improve our performance and get the results that we are looking for.
So if you want to improve remember KFC!!
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