Surface Ripples: Managing People, Not Performance

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Managing People, Not Performance

The great and the good of appraising tend to state that focus should be on results, not people. This ignores the fact that it’s people who produce the results. Different people are motivated by different things. When you manage performance, you manage people’s actions and behaviour.

I was once asked to run a workshop on “Performance Management”. The first question I asked was “What results do you want?” Silence. This is a typical problem that one finds time and time again: if an organisation doesn’t know what result it wants, how can it:

· Communicate it to those who will make it happen?

· Define the “success factors” or “metrics”?

· Identify resources needed?

· Break it into manageable tasks?

· Set limits (if any) on what can/can’t be done?

Because no one could define the end result expected, they couldn’t then communicate it. So far, not promising. I then had to infer what they wanted, develop a Training Plan and send it off. Do you see what’s happening here? The appraisee doesn’t know what the end result is, guesses what’s needed, and may end up going off on the wrong track. At the end of the year (or workshop in this case), the appraisee will be told, “Well, you did OK, but what we really wanted was…”

After deciding what the organisation is about and what it needs to achieve, the next step is communicating this. The army’s “leadership by objectives” process follows a simple, yet effective framework:

· The commander gives orders in a way that ensures subordinates understand his intentions, their missions and the context of those missions;

· Subordinates are told what they are to achieve and the reason for it;

· Subordinates are given the resources needed;

· The commander uses minimum control measures;

· Subordinates decide how best to achieve their mission.

What happens in business is interference from interdepartmental rivalry, budgetary control, “policy” and the legal minefields of employment law, advertising standards, diversity awareness, consumer rights, human rights and any other legislation that can be brought to bear. Result: misinterpretation, massaging, morphing, micro-management, mis-measuring and manipulation. The gaps between targets and achievable results become wider in the eyes of those whose job it is to achieve them. This ends up with lack of commitment resulting in under-performance. The flip side is that appraisees then risk mis-selling products to meet targets.

So, a robust appraisal or review system needs to ensure that:

· The organisation knows what its objectives are;

· It communicates them;

· Employees understand and accept them;

· Those employees understand how they will each contribute to achieving those objectives;

· They have the resources to attain the objectives;

· Petty rules don’t get in the way, except to ensure compliance with ethical or professional standards.

The system exists to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from the organisation’s existence, that results are achieved and that employees can grow. It is not there to “justify HR’s job” or to line the pockets of shareholders and senior management alone. Since the global economic crisis started, shareholders have become much more vocal in their condemnation of poor CEO performance and in vetoing pay bonuses that weren’t justified by results.

Reviewing employees is not a once-a-year affair. There are still organisations where only one review is held every year, by which time it’s too late to improve any performance issues that need to be improved. Assuming that objectives have been set, understood and accepted, both appraisee and appraiser then have to be able to track progress. Modern technology often means that some measurements can be delivered faster to those who need them, enabling them to take corrective action as needed.

To achieve objectives, people and organisations need to behave in a certain way. Depending on the job, the level of staff concerned and other factors, one needs a way of defining, measuring and weighting those behaviours. For example, a junior programmer in an IT department usually doesn’t need the same degree of interpersonal skills as, say, a Customer Service Representative. Rating the programmer on interpersonal skills doesn’t serve the organisation and yet this can happened. I once asked my HR department if they had ever reviewed which behaviours should be weighted higher or lower depending on the department and job undertaken. The answer was an embarrassed silence (and this in a large, quoted company).

Performance is about people; people are different; a “one size fits all” approach is doomed to failure.

Labels: Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork

Surface Ripples

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Managing People, Not Performance

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