Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) is a principle used by many industries to improve safety and operational effectiveness. HOP recognizes that human error is inevitable, and strong systems—not just individual effort—are key to preventing failures.

What makes CAVU, The RelyOn Leadership Academy, unique is how we tie HOP principles into the Performance Ladder—a framework that takes the luck out of good performance by focusing on standardization, continuous improvement, and leadership development.

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HOP Principle 1: People Make Mistakes

Performance Ladder Step: SAFE

• Most companies target “Safe operations”.  However, people make mistakes and performance fluctuates.  Individuals, teams, and even organizations have good days and bad days.  And if safety is our number 1 objective, where does that leave us when we have a bad day, not where we want to be as an organization.

HOP Principle 2: Context Drives Behavior

Performance Ladder Step: STANDARDIZE

• Standardized organizational processes procedures are the context that drives behavior.  As we raise our expectations and move our way up the performance ladder by ensuring our procedures are standardized and complied with, we actually shrink the magnitude of the deviations because as a team we now know what good looks like, we can catch those deviations earlier.  Now when we have a bad day, we are still safe.

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HOP Principle 3: Blame Fixes Nothing
& HOP Principle 4: Learning and Improving Are Vital

‍Performance Ladder Step: CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

• Blame fixes nothing but learning and improving do.  Especially continuous learning during normal operations.  As we move higher up the ladder and put the continuous improvement look into action, where we’ve set a standard, briefed to that standard, executed to that standard and then conducted a debrief to that standard after every single job, not just when something goes wrong, we increase the frequency of lessons learned and further decrease magnitude of the deviations because we are now starting to fix things before they break.  Now were getting proactive.

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HOP Principle 5: How Leaders Respond to Failure Matters

Performance Ladder Step: LEADERSHIP/MENTORING

• How leaders respond to failure AND success has a tremendous impact on the trust and vitality of an organization.  When you provide your supervisors and managers with the leadership training they need to support, inspire, and motivate your frontline workers so that they want to get better, and they want to start looking for those deviations every day, the frequency of lessons learned increases and the magnitude of deviations goes down even further.  And while we may never reach perfection, we can get pretty darned close.

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The Performance Ladder strengthens HOP by reinforcing consistent execution, continuous learning, and proactive leadership—Don’t aim for Safe – aim for perfection so that even on a bad day, performance remains at a high level.

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