I’ve worked with over 35 Fortune 500 companies and a larger number of mid-sized companies over the last 10 years regarding personal performance management (managing and improving the performance of their people). I’ve seen all types of effective, not-so-effective, and down right ineffective approaches to performance management. In this article I’ll share what I’ve learned to be the basics of effective personal performance management. Other articles will provide deeper, more sophisticated techniques, to improve employee performance.
Summary:
The 3 basics for effective performance and performance management are:
1. The employee needs to know what is expected of them. What outcomes they are expected to provide; and how they will be measured.
2. They must have what they need to achieve those objectives.
3. They should be positioned to leverage their strengths to achieve those outcomes.
Notice that these 3 keys are more about the management of the employee than the individual employee themselves. This is a foundational truth of performance management. Creating the environment in which the employees can succeed is more important – it plays a larger role in the performance of the individual – than the actual abilities of that employee. While this may sound odd or counter-intuitive to some, when you have the chance to see the inner workings of several companies each year you see it to be true. There are some companies that hire extremely talented people, then bury them under a ‘this is how we do things here’ culture, while other companies hire ‘regular’ people and have a work environment that allows them to consistently achieve amazing things.
On the importance of building a high-performance environment (versus selecting a great strategy), management expert Peter Drucker said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast every time.” And the same is true of creating a high-performance environment for your people. If you make it difficult for your people to achieve within your environment, your best people will simply leave and go elsewhere.
#1: The employee needs to know whats expected of them.
I have never met a productive confused person. If the employee doesn’t know what they are expected to achieve, how can anyone possibly expect them to achieve it? (And this is about outcomes, or results, not the details of how they get those results.) It seems obvious when written, but it is shocking how often employees don’t really know what their boss expects them to produce. Or how often the ‘goals’ or ‘objectives’ that are created at the beginning of the year, have almost nothing to do with what they individuals ends up being evaluated on at the end of the year.
The manager needs to make it clear to the employee, in a way that the employee understands and is actionable by the employee, what the manager expects that individual to produce. It should also be tied to the expectations of the team that the employee is part of. In other words, at least in theory, the sum of the expectations of the members of the team would equal the expectations of the team.
The employees also should know how these outcomes will be measured. For example, is a salesperson evaluated only on revenue they generate? Or on the profitability of the sales they generate? Do they get more credit for opening new accounts or selling new products or services? On what basis will their performance be evaluated?
On this point I encourage managers to be fair to the employees and tell them at the beginning of the year – that same time their objectives are being set – how they will be evaluated at the end of the year. This includes what it takes to achieve different performance levels. (For example, assuming the company uses a 5-point performance scale with 5 being ‘excellence’ and 1 being ‘poor’; what does it take to achieve a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?)
The consistent push-back I get from managers is ‘how can I possible know at the beginning of the year, how the year will play out, and therefore how I will rate the employee at the end of the year?’ Not meaning to be smug, and yet be honest, my answer is ‘that’s your job.’ And if you can’t do it, realize you’re simply putting all the risk and unknown onto the employee. Because without knowing how they will be evaluated and what it takes to achieve each performance level, the employees are really working in the dark. (The unfortunate compromise that I see time and time again is that although the employee didn’t actually produce the results the company needed – because the manager didn’t make it clear – they get ‘points’ for effort. So the individual gets a good performance score, even while the company didn’t get what they needed. This is when things start going awry.)
The most straight-forward way to do this is to look at the business expectations of the team (or department or whatever the relevant organization unit might be). And the ‘meets expectations’ rating of the team members should add up to meeting the expectations of the unit.
#2: The employee has what they need to be successful.
While we can go really deep in this area, for now we’ll stay at a basic level. Again here we can simply begin with the question, ‘how can we possible expect the employee to achieve their goals, if they aren’t given what they need to do so?’ yet, you’d be surprised how many manager seem to think their job is to give their employee’s as little as possible and still expect them to hit their objectives. It’s as if they are forcing them to make it through an ‘obstacle course’ filled with challenges and delays. They might do this under a misguided intent of minimize the use of company resources, but in reality that’s not their true objective (as the manger of the group). Their objective is/should be to help their team – each team member – achieve their individual objectives so the team achieve its overall objectives.
And this is where most managers make their mistakes. They assume goal-setting is a one-way conversation where they tell the employee what’s expected and leaves it at that. But this is where the ‘table should be turned’ and the manager should ask the employee what they need to achieve their goals. What resources, tools, authority, etc. do they need to be successful? Once the employee has been able to say, “okay, well if that’s what you what me to achieve then this is what it will take…” That’s when the manager can expect to have the employee truly buy-into to goals. Because the employee has had their chance to say what they need to succeed.
#3: Allow the employee to leverage their strengths in the achievement of their goals.
I write several articles that go into much more detail in this area as well, but suffice it to say. Here, again, many managers fail to allow their employees to succeed due to a misguided assumption of ‘fairness’. They believe that all employees should be required to perform their jobs in the same way, be equipped the same way, positioned the same way, and evaluated in the same way. Yet, that is what’s called ‘treating people like a number’, which almost everyone will admit is a bad approach. Telling the employee how they must, or should, perform their work is called ‘micro-managing’. No one likes it, and study after study proves it to be ineffective. Yet, manager after manager still do it.
Allowing people to leverage their strengths to achieve their objectives – at a basic level this means allowing the person to achieve their objectives in the way that works best for them (as long as they don’t violate the values or core principles/beliefs of the company) – is the best way to increase the performance of the team. Yes, this does put more work on the manager to manage their teams, but that is the job of the manager after all.
When working with Brad Anderson, the former CEO of Best Buy, he said it this way. He said, “most management systems are created for the convenience of the manager, not the performance of the team.” This requires the manager to treat and position each employee uniquely (as well as expects the manager to know the strengths of each member of their team), but the results have been shown time and time again to far outweigh the ‘cost’ of additional management time invested.
Simply stated, positioning employees so that they can leverage their strengths on a daily basis in the achievement of their goals and objectives is the closest thing to a ‘silver bullet’ for performance improvement that I have seen in all my years of being a student, practitioner, and consultant in the area of business and personal performance management.
So there you have it. The 3 primary keys to performance management. When you apply them with the members of your team you should see performance quickly improve.
Question: Which one of these is the most difficult for you to implement on a consistent basis within your environment? Why do you think that is?
