jim.shamlin.com

5 - Performance Management

The authors suggest that performance appraisals are rituals that managers and employees both dread. (EN: The statements they make here are largely speculative, and I don't think it really gets to the real reasons that these events are the cause of so much anxiety - other writers have better explored the subject.)

This is followed by the assertion that performance management is the primary responsibility of the front-line manager and, if done correctly, can keep employees motivated and engaged in activities that make a positive contribution to the organization.

Performance Management Versus Performance Appraisal

A performance appraisal is a periodic assessment of the employees' contribution to the mission of the organization - it is likened to a report card, which indicates success and failures. Performance management, on the other hand, is the ongoing effort that encourages employees to contribute to the mission. In that sense, the scores of the performance appraisal rate not only the employee's ability to contribute, but the manger's ability to coach the employee to perform.

This is where many managers fail: they tell the employee what is expected, and assess the degree to which they meet those expectations, but fail to manage employees - they offer no guidance or help to them in improving their performance.

The authors provide a list of random observations about performance management:

(EN: Many of these, perhaps all, should begin with "it should" because the performance appraisal system is dreadfully broken in many organizations.)

The Performance Management Process

The authors describe performance management as an ongoing process. Performance appraisals are milestones or events, but should not be very significant ones, as they are moments in which an employee's progress towards goals is communicated as a formality.

Communicate Performance Standards and Organizational Expectations

Performance standards are fairly simple to derive: the organization sets goals, and identifies what is needed from its employees in order to meet those goals.

(EN: I'm not sure "standards" is quite the right word for most workers, as the notion comes from mass-production where a worker is doing a known task with a known outcome repetitively - and a standard is set to ensure uniform and consistent output. From knowledge workers, neither the outcome nor the tasks required to achieve it are well enough known to standardize their efforts. So to make a nail that conforms to standards means it is a standard nail in its length, the size of the head, the angle of the point, and so on. But what standards are applied to doing something that hasn't been done before? I think they may be onto something, but "standards" is the wrong term to describe it.)

At the highest levels of the organization, these goals and the standards that derive from them are highly abstract. The task of lower levels of management is to translate these high-level visions into more and more granular standards.

(EN: This is often badly done. The aspirations of the organization must not only be broken down to molecules, but when they are placed on employees, the goals must be ones that they can feasibly accomplish, given their resources and skills. Where an employee is given a task that cannot be done, no amount of motivational cheerleading will enable him to accomplish it - and placing him upon the expectation that it can be accomplished is demoralizing.)

To the employee, the goals of the organization help him to understand his work and how it contributes to the common vision. He considers not only what to do, but how to do it, in considering the expectations that his employer has of him. Ideally, in a way that is objectively measurable so that he and his employer can both witness the way in which his actions succeed or fail in fulfilling those expectations.

The kinds of things that an employer must communicate to a worker include:

One significant problem is that many firms skip the task of defining goals and expectation and making them relevant to the workers. That is, they are abstract and vague for the organization, but the employee needs concrete and specific direction.

If you miss that step and expect employees to figure it out on their own, then you run the risk that the employees will come to the wrong conclusion, or at least a different conclusion that the organization might like. Some employees will never "figure it out" for themselves, and others may misunderstand what is necessary. Very often such people are fired or dismissed for this failure - when the real failure is that of management to provide them with clear and complete information about expectations.

(EN: There is a very bad premise many managers use, explicitly or implicitly: they assume that employees who don't figure it out are stupid. The problem, however, is that they are actually quite clever and are often attempting to find a way to follow unclear orders. Specifically, they will figure something out based on limited information, using inference and assumption to fill in the gaps in the information provided to them, to arrive at a distorted but logically valid way of meeting vague expectations.)

A stray note: managers must help their employees to succeed, not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of their organizations. The organization does not achieve its goals unless each employee achieves his. Hence by enabling and facilitating the work of his charges, the supervisor is doing his part to accomplish the mission.

How to Set Goals

It is the responsibility as a manager not merely to place responsibilities upon employees, but to plot the map that will enable them to fulfill them.

An examples: a production-line employee is expected to achieve a specific piece-count in an eight-hour shift, fashioning those pieces to be perfectly identical to a model. Doing so requires him to have certain resources, the parts and tools to assemble the piece, as well as knowledge of what the final model should look like and what steps must be taken to assemble the pieces appropriately. If any of these requisites is not provided, he will not be able to meet the expectation, no matter how motivated he may feel.

Both performance and morale are significantly improved when the goals are clear and can be accomplished with the resources and knowledge an employee has, and within a reasonable amount of time to get the task done. That is, the employee is highly motivated because he is able to do the task. Where anything is missing or uncertain, performance is hindered or prevented an morale is devastated.

Feedback is mentioned as a way to keep employees on track, but feedback cannot enable an employee to succeed when any of the required items is missing. (EN: Feedback can fill gaps in knowledge - where management has given faulty or insufficient direction in the first place, feedback can augment or correct the original orders.)

The authors refer to the acronym "SMART" - for specific, measurable, actionable, results-oriented, and time-bound, but do not go into much detail. (EN: This is a common acronym and the reader can, and evidently must, find out more from other sources.)

Successful Employees

The authors define the "top drawer" employee types, those that organizations most desire: Solid Performers (reliable and consistent in accomplishing their tasks and supporting the mission of the organization) and High Potentials (those who may not be reliable to consistent, but who have the potential to become so if they are developed).

(EN: A problem here is that the authors portray "potential" as a quality of the employee - when it is actually the perception of the employer. That is, it is not whether the employee has the capacity for improvement, but whether the supervisor knows how to effect this improvement. I'll concede that some people are incorrigible - but in most cases, it is not that the employee cannot be improved but that the supervisor is incapable of facilitating improvement.)

The problem is that solid performers do not generally exist in the wild. Their employers recognize their accomplishments and potential and, if they are wise, they do everything in their power to ensure such employees are satisfied and will not leave them because they are an asset to the firm, and a danger if they go to work for a competitor.

Coaching

Coaching is "the heart of performance management" -the performance assessment merely tells the employee what he is doing wrong, but gives him little to no indication of the specific changes he needs to make in order to do better, which is the ultimate goal of performance management.

It has been said that a manager must empower his employees to succeed - and to do so he must provide him with the tools and knowledge to meet the challenges of his work. "Tools" are a function of accounting and procurement, in which the manager should advocate, but knowledge is a matter of coaching and direction, for which the manager is solely responsible.

Coaching is more than mere assessment and criticism, but involves providing feedback to motivates people to do the right things. Coaching activities fall into four categories:

  1. Tutoring - Teaching employees new skills
  2. Counseling - Providing insight based on experience
  3. Mentoring - Providing a better understanding of their role
  4. Confronting - Identifying and improving on sub-standard performance

Traditional managers fail at all four of these tasks: they communicate their expectations and demands, and punish workers for failing to meet them, but do not provide the coaching that their people need to succeed.

Coaching Process

An employee cannot be made to change his behavior - he can be given orders and closely supervised to ensure compliance, but that only goes so far and requires a great deal of effort. However, an employee can be coached, and most employees respond well provided the coaching is competent.

Consider coaching to be a series of conversations, which are aimed to effect changes in behavior. The effect is not instantaneous, but takes time. The authors describe a number of things that are not quite a process nor a series of steps, but are essential elements of the coaching process:

(EN: This seems like a pretty good list, but calls to mind that the roles of coach and manager might be better off divorced. A manager has too much authority over a subordinate to gain willing cooperation - the employee doesn't feel like he can have input and will comply with what the manager wants. A manager also has an ulterior motive, as he uses his subordinates to achieve goals that make him look good to his own superiors and may not have their best interests at heart.)

Career Planning

The authors suggest that "most large organizations have formal succession planning or talent management programs" in which the HR department charts out the course of a life-long career for employees. Unfortunately, these old-school programs are tailored to the needs of the organization (resource management) rather than those of the employees. In the present day few employees expect to remain with one firm for life, and will not accept a career path that lays plans for them and eliminates their options.

In the present day, employees are more self-directed in choosing their careers, and consider opportunities outside the firm to be as good as or even better than those inside the firm. (EN: I wouldn't ascribe that to employees, though. Companies are terrible about taking people for granted and treat them rather poorly - but are aggressive in obtaining external talent. Particularly with the Internet and sites like LinkedIn, employees are constantly getting offers from other firms, and many of these recruiters are more attractive and more aggressive than the internal HR department.)

Because employees are self-directed, companies can no longer tell their workers what their next career move will be and when it will happen - but instead they have to ask about the employee's career plans and attempt to match it to internal opportunities.

The authors suggest that a good question to ask is "Where do you see yourself in five years?" as a means of getting the conversation started, and identifying the skills the employee will need and help them plan to develop them. This might mean the employee will progress and leave your team sooner than you would like, but that is inevitable. They would leave for another company anyway - so what you are really doing is serving your company by ensuring the employee will change jobs internally rather than externally.

(EN: Here, again, is where a direct manager is often a hindrance - it's in their personal interest to keep their best people in their current places and discourage development. It also puts employees in a position to be dishonest, to speak of five-year plans that they think their manager will approve of, rather than disclosing truths such as a desire to change professions or industries.)

Provide Ongoing Feedback

Setting goals and appraising performance are critical, but the heavy lifting of performance management is in providing ongoing feedback to ensure that employees remain engaged and motivated in pursuing their goals. However, feedback should not be approached in a casual manner - good feedback can improve performance and morale, but bad feedback can damage those things.

And so, some random tips:

The authors offer a stray note on the setting - which follows the general rule of praising employees publicly and criticizing them in private. However, in the present culture some employees are uncomfortable with public praise, as they are perceived as the "straight-A student" or "teacher's pet" by other employees who are not doing as well, and this can be harmful to the social environment of the workplace.

The Formal Performance Review

After downplaying the importance of formal performance reviews, the authors return to that topic. It is a vestige of old-school corporate culture that still remains, and is likely to remain simply because of the way businesses are run: reports are reviewed and decisions are made on an annual basis.

(EN: In spite of all the effort to enable companies to do business in real time, most of them still use the old annual timetable, with quarterly and monthly decisions being tactical in nature. There's still a hope that companies may change, but little sign that this will happen anytime soon. It may yet be three or four generations before real-time takes root in a meaningful way, though I expect many will continue to pay lip-service to the notion.)

The annual performance review is a process of comparing employee performance to a model or checklist, which ironically enough is still done using paper forms. The performance review is also short-sighted - the manager might consider the previous year's review, but seldom goes back further, and often the reviews are done by different managers over time.

Ideally, the findings of the performance review will not come as a surprise to the employee - it should be a summary of feedback that they have been hearing from their manager all along. Ideally, the employee will also have input into his own review, rather than being expected to humbly accept the judgment of his superiors.

Prepare for the Performance Review Meeting

The performance review is not a casual conversation and should not be conducted in an off-the-cuff manner. The manager should have a focused, and possibly formal, agenda for the meeting that ensures that he is able to conduct a thorough debriefing of the employee.

Because being assessed is stressful, having a formal agenda can be comforting to employees. It also helps if the employee has a sense of what's coming - to review the evaluation form as a preparation to having the conversation, rather than being ambushed.

Since it is annual, the performance review is relatively high-level, focusing on patterns of behavior and "lessons learned" rather than upon individual incidents in the recent past. The employee should have a sense of the progress they have made that year, as well as a sense of the progress that was not made and needs more attention in future.

Some firms ask employees to do their own self-assessment as part of the review. This enables the employee to provide details his manager may not know, as well as to state his opening position in the negotiation over his score. Of particular importance is that the self-assessment enables to manager to identify hotspots where they are in disagreement. If an employee and manager agree, the conversation is simple - but where they disagree, the conversation is delicate.

More random tips follow:

Conduct the Performance Review Meeting

The performance review meeting should be a discussion rather than a lecture: the manager and employee should both have input.

For the same reason, the review should not be "scored" until after that meeting is held. If the form is scored in advance, it is a signal to the employee that his input does not matter and will not be considered.

The authors suggest that "it often helps to let the employee know how difficult it is" for you to assess them. (EN: That seems very passive-aggressive to me.)

As noted before, it helps to have a formal agenda with a series of steps that are definite and predictable, as this ensures the discussion covers all the topics and the employee knows what to expect. The agenda is fairly straightforward:

  1. An opening statement
  2. A review of each "point"
  3. A summary statement
  4. The final "rating" of the performance
  5. Consideration of the future

Each item on the agenda begins with the manager speaking, then giving the employee an opportunity to respond, then open discussion as necessary to come to a consensus.

Questions to Ask During a Review

The authors suggest that "questioning is a great technique" to get the employee involved: rather than stating your opinion, ask the employee for his, and then respond. (EN: This is also passive-aggressive, and is particularly problematic when the manager repeatedly disagrees with the employee's answer and "corrects" him.)

There's a perfunctory discussion of open questions (that cause a person to speak at length) and closed ones (which elicit a short answer), as well as the suggested use of hypothetical questions to maneuver the employee into saying things you want him to say. (EN: I'm skipping this because other sources discuss it more thoroughly, and because some of what the authors have to say encourages overt manipulation, which is frustrating and insulting to employees.)

Reinforce - Reward, Recognize, and Sustain Desired Behaviors

If your feedback to and performance evaluations of employees are merely a litany of things they do poorly, then you are doing less than half the job.

Passive management requires very little effort except in dealing with irregularities that have a negative impact on performance - but this does nothing to improve performance, merely deals with some of the negative factors. Unfortunately, a manager cannot see or fix all the problems, so the performance of his team slowly degrades.

To be successful in improving performance, a manager must also encourage workers to form habits that have a positive impact on performance. This is harder to do, which is why many do not try. At the very least, a manager should make an effort to remark upon the things that employees are doing well.

The author provides a list of some of the possible rewards and reinforcements: verbal praise, recognition at meetings, treating them to lunch, providing gift certificates, small gifts, extra paid time-off, and the like. (EN: good, but rewards should be done with greater care and concern to make sure that they are appreciated by the employee and effective in sustaining the desired behaviors - which can be a very delicate matter.)

Problems With Performance Management

Performance management can be dysfunctional because of problems that arise because of poor execution, but there are a few problems that occur because of the way the program is implemented and administered.

Conflicting Interests of a Manager

Anyone who manages people is in a delicate position, as they must constantly consider the interests of both the firm and its employees - or at least, they should do so, but are often partial.

The company expects employees to act in ways that contribute to its profitability, but employees are an expense to the firm. An employee whose hard work generates more profit for the firm expects to be rewarded for his extra efforts, but the company wishes to keep salaries as low as possible - so positive feedback and good reviews are often withheld to serve the interests of the firm, and to bolster the manager's reputation for being thrifty. (EN: And this generally works until the company realizes that good people are constantly leaving. Unfortunately, this usually results in a quick-fix solution to attempt to deal with the retention issue, rather than considering a change in the way managers are encouraged to behave.)

On the other hand, a manager may feel his company judges his own performance by that of his people, and he may "collude unconsciously" with employees to cover up negative reviews so that it looks like he is doing a great job of managing his people. But negative information is necessary to effect positive changes - without constructive criticism, employees are not able to develop themselves.

There is also the issue of scapegoating: the manager blames the failures of his department on the employees rather than accepting personal responsibility, or attempting to appear proactive in dealing with a problem that was beyond his control, or protects his "pets" by shifting the blame to other employees whom he likes less.

Ultimately, these problems arise because the manager's interest in his own agenda, reputation, and career lead him to act in ways that are detrimental to his employees and his firm.

The author provides a few tips:

Bad Standards and Unreasonable Expectations

Performance management can become problematic when the standards by which an employee are out of synch with the directives he receives everyday, or when the expectations are unreasonable given the resources and authority he has to do his work. In these cases, succeeding by the metrics is impossible, and the employee will invariably be discouraged.

Poor performance on the job is also reflective of the training and coaching a manager provides: an employee cannot succeed if he never really learned to perform his job correctly in the first place, when the requirements are poorly articulated, and he is not supported with coaching to behaviors that will enable him to rectify his performance.

Some random tips follow:

JIM.SHAMLIN.COM
DISCLAIMERS · CONTACT