Master Your Game
This Issue: Performance Management
Dear Reader,
Summary
Having a performance plan and honing your coaching
dialogue skills will help you with your performance
management role. As a leader, managing the
performance development of your team is critical to
attaining the success you seek. A good performance
development system, executed expertly, will assist
your team to grow and develop to meet the goals
and objectives that you will evaluate them against.
Plan on a regular schedule for entering into a
dialogue with each of your employees. These active
working sessions should focus on your expectations
of them, measure their performance against set
goals, acknowledge success, and work through
future challenges.
Managing the Scorecard
When considering an employee's performance,
establish goals for each and have a measurement
system in place. These scorekeeping systems are
essential for tracking progress against set goals. One
caution: they indicate where a person is or is not
performing, but they do not assist the person to
perform differently. As discussed in an earlier article, the performance
development system still requires regular employee
performance dialogue.
Unfortunately, many managers are uncomfortable
with conversations that focus on behaviour, and
avoid these conversations and evaluation sessions
with their people. For employees who view
performance evaluations as being linked to
compensation, there is a disincentive to be open,
honest and reveal vulnerabilities for fear of having
this information restrain their next raise.
To succeed in assisting individuals to adapt, shift
their thinking, and innovate a different set of
outcomes, managers must practice coaching
dialogues - the ability to use contextual listening and
powerful questioning skills to elicit honest responses.
With executive coaching and training to develop this
skill, along with an effective performance
development plan, managers will be well-equipped to
engage in high quality developmental conversations.
A Simple Performance Development System
It is not about filling out complicated forms
and ticking all the boxes, but having an appropriate
conversation with each member of the
group.
Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, authors of First
Break All The Rules, provide some simple guidelines
for a performance management system. Here's what
they recommend:
- Plan a simple routine focused on what to say and
how to say it to each employee. It is about making a
personal connection with each one of your direct
reports.
- Schedule frequent and regular meetings. Regular
meetings provide a forum and an opportunity for
confidence-building acknowledgement. It also
provides just-in-time feedback relevant to the
situation and becomes a reward in itself.
- Encourage participation. Have employees track
their own performance and learnings, goals,
successes and challenges. This is an opportunity for
self-discovery, a chance for them to think about how
they would like you to support them and what
support they need. Developmental initiatives can
then be targeted at the specific challenges.
- Simplify the performance development process. It
can be a simple 30 minute meeting once a month
with ten minutes focused on the past, and the rest
focused on the future. After all, results will flow from
focusing on how and what the person does in the
future, not what they did in the past.
The System Works
Not only does this performance development process
work for individuals, it also works for teams. I worked
with an organization that has successfully shifted
their weekly staff meetings to this process. In a 1
1/2 hour meeting, each person has three minutes to
report on a success from the previous week, share
their biggest challenge in the coming week, and
inform other people about what might impact them.
The balance of the meeting is spent finding creative
solutions to the challenges this week and in the
future. Meetings have shifted from being predictable
and mundane to being highly engaging events where
valuable dialogue and work is being conducted.
Performance development will increase the probability
that the performance evaluation will result in a
positive outcome for you, the leader, the individual
and the organization. Together with the right
coaching skills, performance evaluations can be
positive, mutually-enhancing sessions for you and
your employees.
Successful Development,
Jacque Small
Catalyst
Business
Coaching is a corporate development organization. It
works with people who want to achieve a greater
sense of success for both themselves and others in
the organization. It supports people to define and
achieve both personal and business targets. Jacque
Small, principal and owner of Catalyst, founded the
company in 2000.
