Set standards, and determine HOW they will be done. Decide standards that will apply to each activity, as well as how standards will be achieved. Understanding level of performance required gives employee a sense of achievement - which is one of key ingredients to achieving performance standards. This is true for employees at any level.

Establish communication agreements. To ensure success, owner and employee must decide at outset how they are going to communicate progress (and challenges) along way. Will it be day-to-day? Week-to-week? The minimum time frame is week-to-week. Less frequent than that and it all falls apart.

The employee decides how to achieve desired results. The owner will be present and participating for this part, but it is essential that employee be leading process in order for them to have ownership. Help employee take responsibility for deciding how to accomplish results. You may need to determine if employee has skills and development to do this. If they don't, provide maximum guidance to them.

Get it in writing. If it is not in writing, within one to two weeks everyone will be confused and uncertain. The focus, responsibility, resources, constraints, timetables and measures all need to be in writing. The purpose of doing this is to make sure owner and employee are so clear on goals and process that there is no confusion whatsoever. It sets everyone

Establish a monitoring method. Make sure you get agreement on how performance will be monitored and how frequently. In order for process to go forward, employee needs to agree to monitor their own performance, and owner must agree to sit down and review it with employee on a pre-determined schedule. Let them know upfront that if they get busy and start canceling meetings, performance will not improve and expectations will not be met. I recommend having employee keep track of their progress in writing and advise owner weekly. A simple weekly progress update is a win-win solution and can take as little as 5 minutes. A monthly sit-down, face-to-face meeting is a must also.

What are benefits of setting effective performance standards and expectations? Employees are energized and empowered to take ownership of their positions. Owners become energized and inspired, ceasing to lower expectations in order to avoid confrontation. The productivity of company goes up. Everyone knows what is expected of them, which provides certainty to move forward. This process, itself, opens new channels of communication between owners and employees.

Today, in most organizations, presentation is conventional method of communication. But when you make leadership talk key method by instituting "talk" courses and monitoring and evaluation systems broadly and deeply within organization, you will help make your company more effective and efficient.

Link: Though such recognition is first step in getting off sidelines, it won't get you into game. To get into center of things, you must link your activities with results. Not your results — their results.

Clearly, your clients are being challenged to get results: sales' closes, operations efficiencies, productivity advances, etc. Some results are crucial. But other results are absolutely indispensable. Your job is to help your clients achieve their results, especially indispensable results. You must be their "results partner." Furthermore, you must help them get sizable increases in those results. The results that they get with your help should be more than results that they would have gotten without your help.

For instance, when developing company-wide objectives for leadership talks, you should not aim to have participants win a speaking "beauty contests" but instead to speak so that they motivate others to get increases in measured results. When you change focus of courses from speaking appearance to reality of results, you change participants' view of and commitment to courses and also their view of and commitment to you in providing those courses. So have participants define their indispensable results and link principles and processes they learned in course to getting measured increases in those results.

Execute: It's not enough to recognize. It's not enough to link. You must execute. "Execute" comes from a Latin root exsequi meaning "to follow continuously and vigorously to end or even to ‘the grave.'" Let's capture if not letter at least spirit of this lively root by insuring that your activities on behalf of your clients are well "executed," that they are carried out vigorously and continuously in their daily work throughout their careers. If those activities are helping them get results, you are truly their "results partner."

For instance, in regard to leadership talk courses, HR professionals can lead an "initiative approach." At conclusion of course, each participant selects an initiative to institute back on job. The aim of each initiative is to get sizable increases in their indispensable results by using principles and processes that they learned.

The initiatives and their results should be concrete and measurable, such as productivity gains, increases in sales, operations efficiencies, and reduced cycle times.

The participants should be challenged to get increases in results above and beyond what they would have gotten without having taken course. They should be challenged to get those increases within a mutually agreed upon time, such as quarterly reports. In fact, if participants don't achieve an increase in results that translates to at least ten times what course costs, they should get their money back.

Don't stop there. Getting an increase in results is not end of course, it should be beginning — beginning of a new phase of getting results, stepping up phase. The more results participants achieve, more opportunities they have created to achieve even more results. The leadership talk course should have methods for instituting results' step-ups.

One such method can be a quarterly leadership-talk round table. Participants who graduate from course meet once a quarter to discuss results they have gotten and provide best practices for getting more. Human resources should organize, direct and facilitate round tables. In this way, results leaders are getting should increase quarter after quarter.

When HR professionals promote such leadership talk courses, courses that are linked to getting increases in indispensable results and that come with "results guarantee," those professionals are truly seen as results partners in their organizations. I have used leadership talk as an example of how you can greatly enhance your contributions to company by applying Leadership Imperative. Don't just apply Imperative to such courses alone. Apply it to whatever challenge confronts you.

When you recognize how that challenge can be met through Imperative, when you link challenge to getting increases in measured results, and when you execute for results, you can transform your function.

You don't have to be as distinguished as Einstein or as awesome as Big Daddy Lipscomb, but you will in your individual way perceive simple, powerful center of things. You'll be in thick of most important game your company is playing — helping change your world and world of your clients.