The “O” in the PEOPLE acronym stands for “Ownership.” Simply put ownership means that you own something and are responsible for it, and have control over it. In other words, responsibility and accountability. This is a piece of the puzzle that sometimes gets overlooked by management. People are given responsibility and are held accountable, but don’t have control of the process or parts of the process.

If you are given a car and unequivocally  told to get in the car and drive a certain distance, and the car runs out of gasoline prior to arrival, are you responsible? Perhaps. Can you be held accountable? Maybe. If you had no gas gage or means of purchasing fuel, did you have control of the situation? No. A simplified example to be sure, but it makes a point. (I hope.)

Unless you can have personal control over a situation, it is impossible to be held totally responsible for a given outcome. If you can’t control the process, then you can’t predict your responsiveness, either. Before someone can truly take ownership of a process they need to know who they need to respond to, what they are responsible for and levels of accountability.

These can be tough things to define, but until you really examine them, you can’t begin to solve barriers that may be holding you back.Ownership, properly defined, can help take your processes, employees and thus your business to the next level.

Performance is a common word, but one that people sometimes don’t really think about as they use it. A performance is something that you attend for entertainment, or perhaps you look for a car with high performance, and those uses have something to do with the way we use the word at the PEOPLE Academy, Inc.

A performance is the way someone does some action. Generally in a professional sense it means how someone does the actions involved in completing their defined job functions and that little extra that isn’t defined in the traditional sense. That means that both parties have to have a clear notion of what is expected to be achieved.

The phrase “what does good look like” is one way of defining what needs to be achieved. What does a good performance look like? What needs to be accomplished to have “good” results? What have those results looked like in the past? What do they look like now, and what do they look like moving forward?

This may seem pretty basic, but this is a shortfall that many companies have. Business owners and managers have one concept or idea about what good looks like and they know the driving force behind the reasons, but perhaps supervisors and team members don’t. They may have an idea about what is expected in their basic job function, but they may not have a handle on the “why” and the why is a huge part of motivation for the things we do.

Defining “what good looks like” is step one in the process. Having the tools to make it happen is the rest of the story.

Efficacy is the ability to bring about a change. That change can be something in your personal life or in your professional life. Efficacy is also the first E in the acronym of the PEOPLE model.

It is something that employers really need to look at when they assign tasks to folks. Often a team leader, a supervisor or any employee gets asked to perform certain tasks and they are doomed to failure right from the start because they can’t perform it. This inability to perform a task is because of a lack of “X”

“X” may be the authority to order a tool, be that tool a software package or even something as simple as a screwdriver. Have you ever heard “for the loss of a nail a battle was lost”? There were a lot of steps in between that nail and the potential victory, but what it boiled down to was the efficacy of a blacksmith to order the nail to shoe the horse, etc, etc.

If that smith would have been given the authority to order the nail, things may have gone an entirely different direction. do you have someone in your organization who should have authority over some aspect of a task they’ve been assigned? Or maybe that person is you and you need to have a discussion with someone higher up about your efficacy.

This is just a thumbnail view of one of the six aspects of the PEOPLE model, and hopefully just seeing this small portion gives you something to think about.

This has been the strangest year for weather. We’ve had t-shirt weather in December and now suddenly it is the frigid tundra and we’ve had our first snowfall of the year. It worked out that it happened the night I had a show to attend in Philly, so that was a pleasant ride. Swirling wind with large lazy snowflakes riding on it. My only consolation was that someone else was driving for once.

But there I was in the third row seat of a van, not really able to see where I was going, with the windows fogged up from the conversation and hot breath of six excited people.

My head is like that ride sometimes. I know I am headed in the right direction but I am not quite in control. That can be alright, and/or it can be really scary. That’s when it’s good to have people to reach out to. But what if you are the one that people are reaching out to, and you don’t know what to say or a direction to take? You can’t tell people what to do, you can only help to guide them through their thought process.

That’s easy enough if you have the right tools. I have found that going through the PEOPLE model framework helps to define that journey. To learn more, go here and sign up for the e-mail series on client exploration. This short series (7 e-mails) contains a lot of information on growing your business and talks about tools you can use.

I have been surfing a total of one time in my life. Wait, maybe you could call it surfing or you could call it practicing drowning with a large piece of fiberglass tied to my ankle and sticky goop stuck to my sparse chest hair. (if you aren’t familiar with board wax, don’t worry about the goop)

The odd part of my partial drowning was that I enjoyed it. I spent hours trying to stand on a board in the midst of waves and never succeeded beyond kneeling, but I ‘got it’ from a psychological standpoint. I could feel the ‘one-ness’ with the ocean and I could see that given time (and possibly a couple lessons) I could grow addicted to it.

But what would it gain me? Possibly some Zen-like moments. Definitely a feeling of mastery over something. Quite likely some core exercise for my body and stuff. Alone time, which I like sometimes. I’m not sure what else.

What would it cost? Well, easily a great deal of time and some money. Waves are free, but driving back and forth to them and buying a board, etc. Time I don’t really have abundance of. I have lots of temptations, but all things – new things – have me deciding what I am replacing. If I spend four hours a week on X, Y has to go. What can I eliminate?

You might wonder what this is really about. I’ve heard a lot about the ‘newest thing’ from Google, Google wave, and I’m not sure whether I should ride this one or not. I am weighing the pros and cons and asking everyone I know who uses it; what is the cost/benefit of this.

Life is like that. Best bet, if you want to get the most out of anything, get a tutor/coach/mentor/instructor to teach you. Learn the basics, at least, from an expert, and then go from there.

Now, back to surfing the waves on the ocean, maybe I made a mistake trying to learn on my own. Maybe I made a mistake thinking I don’t need any help (definite) and maybe the waves hitting the Texas shore aren’t the best introduction to the sport.