Untangling Performance Management for Results
(Edited from a published article by Milan M., consultant.)
To be competitive these days, organizations have to make sure all employees learn and contribute at their utmost. Performance management reviews and appraisals should be geared to this result. But too often they operate on yesterday's assumptions.
Here are some outdated paradigms to be discarded:
- Performance management should be designed, as the name suggests, to support managers
- If you believe this, your management is probably a roadblock to performance. The most useful performance management process supports work relationships between employees and supervisors.
- Both parties need to address the question of how best to serve the company's mission, values, goals and customers--together. Results are powered by partnerships.
- Performance assessment is a management skill
- Supervisors are not necessarily the only ones qualified to assess their staff's performance. In fact, they may have a very limited or biased view. A more complete picture results if employees and supervisors seek feedback from a variety of customers, colleagues, team leaders and others inside and outside the firm.
- To do this, they must decide who should collect this information, and how. Ideally, performance management involves 360-degree feedback. Supervisors can then benefit from employees' observations about how the unit is being managed.
- Teams should also periodically review their own performance as a group and the behavior dynamics of leaders and participants within the team.
- Performance discussions have to include judgment: pronouncements and evaluations from a "higher (trusted) authority."
- Judgment produces compliant employees-- people who expect to be told what to do-not thinking and innovative ones.
- Employees dread performance reviews because most of them are conducted in a parent-child, fault-finding context.
- When sessions are used to support the organization's status quo, they veer toward the "gotcha" and sometimes get stuck there.
- How much better to simply ask, "What did we learn from this? What can both of us do to improve outcomes next time?"
- The supervisor is responsible for obtaining input from the person accountable for the result.
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- Empowered employees can't assume a passive role in performance management, providing self-assessments and other information only on request.
- Employees must take the initiative, soliciting feedback from their supervisors and others.
- And they should do it continuously, as a function of the work that's going on, not just for a formal performance event.
- They should seek on-the-job learning opportunities and request help when a goal isn't being achieved rather than attempt to remain silent about inadequacies.
- No risk taking and no learning means no improvement. No improvement means an employee abdicating a responsibility
- Supervisors should be trained in performance management, then prepare their employees for the process.
- If performance management is to be a productive partnership, with empowered employees taking responsibility and both parties committed to leveraging their intellectual knowledge, and ideas, supervisors and employees need to be trained together.
- Simultaneous training ensures that everyone operates with the same information and expectations. Customers of the process, particularly internal ones, can be included. Stakeholders can even help design the performance management process.
High performance organizations are not served by the remnants of, top-down ways of managing performance. When employees and supervisors know how to:
- take accountability for results,
- set stretch objectives together, and
- challenge practices in a spirit of positive alliance,
- learning and business performance rise simultaneously.
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