Hidden Champions and Bright Spots


Suppose you have embraced one or more of the organizational performance measures of the Global Measures of Court Performance of the International Framework of Court Excellence, and let’s say, for example, it is Measure 9, Employee Engagement. The short definition of the measure is the percent of the employees of a court who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work beyond their assigned.

You know, of course, there will be variation across courts and tribunals, across several courts in one jurisdiction, and across the 20 questions in the employee engagement survey, and so forth. Our common approach to using the results of such a measure is to focus on the average – the central tendency – and immediately identify the laggards, the poor performing courts, regions, and countries. And then we immediately speculate about what we believe may be the causes of the poor performance.

The all too familiar causes we identify – lack of resources, corruption, radical policies, political unrest, inept institutions, chronic managerial ineptitude or complacency, and incompetent managers and leaders (you get the picture) – are usually speculative and imprecisely framed in terms of broad intractable problems that typically overwhelm our capacities to find solutions. This approach does not yield actionable intelligence, which is the aim of successful performance measurement and management.

There is a better way.

It is  a shortcut to viable solutions, maybe not the ones that remain inchoate promises of solutions to the broad intractable problems mentioned above, but real concrete actions modelled by success: Identify the hidden champions or  bright spots among the positive deviants that score above  the average and figure out what they do differently than the laggards. The term “hidden champions” was coined by Hermann Simon in his 1996 book, Hidden Champions: Lessons from 500 of the World’s Best Unknown Companies. He writes: "The hidden champions go their own ways. Their procedures are quite different from those of other companies and of modern management teaching. Essentially, their only secret success formula is common sense. So simple, but so difficult to achieve! This is the ultimate lesson." (See the Economist, February 19, 2019, “Germany spreads the love: How decentralization can help inoculate against political unrest.”) 

Here's how the similar approach of identifying bright spots and copying success in the description of Measure 9, Employee Engagement, of Measures the Global:

Breakouts or disaggregation of the data by court unit or division, or by court location, have the potential of yielding insights and practical guidance for establishing baseline performance levels, setting goals and objectives, identifying trends and patterns, discovering “bright spots” that exceed norms (e.g., a unit or division of the court that stands out with exemplary responses to the survey or particular items), analyzing problems, seeing patterns and trends, discovering solutions, planning, and formulating strategy ….

When the measure is assessed at the level of a court department, division, unit, as well as different locations of a court or court system (e.g., main and satellite courthouses or separate juvenile courts) managers can learn a lot about organizational performance.  Simply by identifying other divisions or situations with superior results, (i.e., the “bright spots”), astute managers may be close to identifying possible solutions for “trouble spots.” Different courts (of the same level) or different divisions of a single court might be compared, for example, on the percent of employees who agreed that they understand what is expected of them (Item 1) and are proud to be working in the court (Item 20).  Follow-up queries can then be made to probe the comparisons.  Why are some locations more successful than others?  What makes them the “bright spots”?  What are they doing that the other locations are not?  Asking staff in both the most successful and least successful locations these simple questions can help to identify “evidenced based” good practices.

The power of Court Employee Engagement lies in its simplicity.  Much like Measure 1, Court User Satisfaction, it is intuitively appealing, easy to understand, and produces actionable data.  It highlights the importance of a court’s or court system’s workforce and encourages leaders, managers, supervisors and staff to find ways to energize and engage.  It readily reveals “trouble spots” as well as “bright spots,” and is easily translated into improvement actions.  By tracking the results of the survey over time, court managers can ascertain trends or changes associated with improvement initiatives. 

The lesson of the bright spots approach is deceptively simple: Don’t try to solve problems, copy success. 

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