Why Settle for “Good” Performance?

The Situation
Why settle for “good” when you can make it “great”? That was the situation for the team at Petrolo Oil Company*.  Already an industry leader, Petrolo was performing well – production revenue was up and everyone was busy. But, unwilling to settle for “good enough,” one Petrolo team launched an improvement effort based on a proven way to achieve optimal performance while simultaneously building a winning work environment.

The Solution
The Petrolo team focused on the following business imperatives:

1. Keeping people safe
2. Protecting the environment
3. Producing more reliably and efficiently

Their solution was to use CLG's Performance Catalyst^®, which provided team leaders with a clear path to executing strategy by connecting behavior to results and accelerating performance across a range of indicators. CLG's PerformanceCatalyst^® is a proprietary approach that helps organizations experience significant improvements on the things that really matter and assists companies already experiencing success by taking results to the next level.

The team's improvement effort married the following three components:

• Strategy:  clear direction supported by team competence and opportunity to pursue improvement

• Process: clear processes mapped for improvement

• Behavior: clear team leadership support for High-Impact Behaviors^SM and the capacity to use the powerful shaping practices of Applied Behavioral Science (ABS).

The Results
By focusing on High-Impact Behaviors^SM results achieved included record improvements – far faster than anyone could have possibly imagined. As early as10 months into the improvement effort, Petrolo executives were able to celebrate significant gains by this team – steady, upward improvement on all key performance dimensions, including:

• Mechanical equipment downtime lower than in the previous two years
• Ten straight months of zero bad actor failures
• Twenty straight weeks of 100% equipment surveillance
• Below-budget spend rate
• Overall year-to-date spill volume 88% below that achieved the previous year
• Zero incidents and eight months of 100% on preventative safety behaviors

*A pseudonym

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