WHAT’S THE NEW FACE
OF
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN 2016
Today
most companies realize that pruning the
organization is becoming recognized as a necessary, legitimate survival tool.
To overcome resistance, CEOs must confront the human tendency to avoid
confrontation and accept that the process will unavoidably be emotionally
charged. Look at your people the way you look at your products. Few managers
would urge retaining a non-performing product simply because it had acquired
years of tenure and once delivered fabulous results.
"Culture
change" is a term commonly spoken about, but at these organizations it's
serious business. In the past, as long as my manager was diligent and
dependable and my secretary was loyal and industrious, that was all that a
company felt it could ask. Now loyalty and diligence are viewed as threshold
factors taken for granted, the price of admission and continued tenure with the
organization is contingent upon employees' delivering the goods. Both behaviors
and results are assessed in the performance-management systems of top-tier
organizations.
3 WAYS TO REVAMP YOUR
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
One of the primary reasons that writings about performance appraisals are such detested ; is that the advice proffered is so often either stale or wrong. Triteness abounds in performance - appraisal literature.
DEFINE PERFORMANCE
"SBU Head " is offered up as a job example-but the content of a SBU head's job rarely bears any relation to the real jobs a CEO has to assess. The banal acronym SMART is ceaselessly served up, each time by an author who assumes that the idea of creating objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound is fresh and enlightening. Managers are continually admonished to present no surprises in the appraisal interview, but often the trigger of a performance - appraisal deadline crystallizes a manager's vague concerns about a subordinate's shortcomings and forces a conversation that otherwise would not have occurred.
A
glaring error on too many performance - appraisal forms is that desired
performance is defined but not described. It's easy enough for a form developer
to stick in a Oxford Dictionary definition of accountability, leadership, or teamwork.
But what does it look like in practice? How do you know it when you see it?
Far
more useful than definitions are mastery descriptions-narrative portraits of
the behavior that one who mastered the area would likely engage in.The process
for determining which competencies will be assessed is remarkably different
from the one used to set goals and objectives. In setting goals and objectives,
the manager and the subordinate are the key players with an enormous amount of
work to do. They must determine the specific accountabilities of the
subordinate's job and identify the various roles she is expected to play. For
each of those roles or accountability areas, they must determine the goals and
objectives to be achieved. In some cases, the objective will be merely a
maintenance one: to keep things running as smoothly in the future as they have
run in the past. In other cases, the objective will involve significant stretch
and growth.
Having
determined goals and objectives, they will set checkpoints along the way and
determine what satisfactory performance will look like. Then, over the course
of the year, they will revise objectives as missions are accomplished and
strategies change.
OBJECTIVITY IS A MYTH IN PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
"Listen to what the
individual has to say" is advice that appraisers are perpetually given,
but nobody tells them exactly what it is they should listen for. Perhaps
the worst advice that appraisers are urged to swallow is to be objective, to
keep their judgments and personal feelings out of the assessment process.The
flaw in the objectivity admonition is the bogus notion that objective means
quantifiable; that if something can't be counted then it isn't objective and
therefore shouldn't be used. That's nonsense. The talent of a singer is not
measured by the number of notes she plays. The quality of a sales manager is not a
function of the number of sales calls done.
The
issue isn't whether or not behaviors can be quantified, it's whether or not
they can be verified. Numbers just happen to be easy to verify. While numerical
measures would be nice to have for every objective, the search for meaningful
ones is often fruitless.
REWARD
AND PUNISH IN EQUAL MEASURE
Engage every manager in frank, tough
discussions of each subordinate-and insisted that the same demanding discussion
process be carried down. I would recommend sorting your population into four
groups, ranging from poor to superior, and then asking for a specific plan for
the people in each group. Always focus first on the bottom group; weed out the
poorest performers will foster a climate of continual improvement. If everyone
in the bottom quartile is replaced, the third quartile becomes the new bottom
group and the focus of subsequent improvement efforts.
Jack Welch legendary exCEO of GE says "You
have to go along with a can of fertilizer in one hand and water in the other
and constantly throw both on the flowers," he says. "If they grow,
you have a beautiful garden. If they don't, you cut them out. That's what
management is all about."
With best compliments
Dr Wilfred Monteiro
www.synergymanager.net
