The performance of an organisation's workforce, which is critical in today’s increasingly competitive market, is largely a consequence of leadership.
A key facet of leadership is effective performance management. While this is universally understood, the way most organisations manage performance is not only ineffective, it seldom delivers the desired results.
The rationale behind performance management (PM) is simply to enable an organisation to improve the performance and contribution of its workforce, in terms of the outputs they produce and critically, the outcomes they deliver. For this reason, performance management should be positioned as a deliberate intervention to ‘enable’ a workforce to deliver better outcomes, not a mechanism to be pulled out from time to time to remove a poor performer.
To leverage the idea of PM as a performance enabler, a number of things must be done. Firstly, the company must increase their people’s understanding of the organisation’s strategic objectives in order to ‘set the agenda’. Secondly, they must ensure everyone knows what their role or purpose in the organisation is to ensure they understand what they need to deliver to honour their purpose in the business. Thirdly they must improve the capability of their team to enable them to operate at the level required to deliver the identified outputs and finally, they must mandate everyone with the responsibility of delivering the outcomes as per their stated purpose (role); refer our Structural Integrity Framework™ for more details.
A way to drive this process at a practical level is by following our SET > ENABLE > EXPECT™ framework i.e. we must ‘set’ the strategic direction we intend to pursue including the activities required to achieve it. We must then equip our people with the skills and capability to ‘enable’ them to deliver it and finally, we must hold our people accountable to delivering what they are required (expected) to deliver. The problem I observe in most organisations is they tend to only ever do a bit of the first (set), almost none of the second (enable) and as a result, too much of the third (expect). The point is if we fail to either set the agenda or enable our people to excel, we cannot expect them to deliver the outcomes we are after and yet this is precisely what the majority of organisations do because they have failed to enable their people to do what they need to do; hence the reason the term ‘performance management’ has become a negative course of action focused on a particular few rather than a highly appropriate intervention that is relevant and beneficial to all.
Let’s examine the SET > ENABLE > EXPECT™ framework as a mechanism to improve Performance Management.
Part 1: ‘Setting the Agenda’
Setting the agenda is not just just a ‘ra ra’ session. It is a highly strategic process designed to educate our people about what we want to do, what we are trying to become, the role they need to play in terms of helping us get there and equally, how we as a team need to operate to achieve the outcomes we are after. These questions can only be leveraged if they are captured in the strategic plan and successfully cascaded down through the organisation so every person understands their role (purpose) and thus their strategic relevance in the organisation; refer our Strategic Performance Template™ for more details as to how we do this.
Part 2: ‘Enabling Performance’
When I say ‘enabling’ people to perform, I mean equipping people with the tools to deliver the outcomes they are required to deliver to honour their purpose in the business. Sadly very few companies take the idea of improving performance capability seriously. That is not to say companies are not interested in employing people with the relevant skills (and experience) and supporting them as required as most invariably do, it is about understanding the potential gains that could be realised if the company equipped its people with the goods to excel; not just perform at a level consistent with market expectations.
If a company wanted to better ‘enable’ their people to perform i.e. ‘manage’ their people’s performance more effectively, they would need to consider the principles of performance to leverage the intervention accordingly rather than thinking the discussion was solely about ensuring their people had the right skills and support to be able to do their job.
Early on in my research, I came to the realisation that a person’s psychological capacity dictates their performance ability; meaning who and what a person ‘is’ governs what they are capable of producing. What they are capable of producing of course dictates what they are capable of achieving. If we are serious about producing better results, we need to equip our people with the goods to deliver better quality outcomes; hence the reason I believe companies need to figure out ‘how’ to increase their team’s psychological capacity to perform in order to drive growth and commercial improvements; refer to our Psychological Capacity/Performance Ability™ framework for clarification.
In other words, who and what your team has become will dictate what they are capable of achieving. If you want them to achieve more, you need to equip them with the tools to deliver more; which by default requires you to ‘change’ them; by either changing who is on the team or by changing the way it performs.
Part 3: ‘Expecting Results’
To achieve optimum results, we need to build a culture that is focused on delivering quality outcomes, not one that is protective of an individual’s reputation or relevance. Most companies fail to build a culture that is focused on performance; rather they build a culture that fosters a propensity for people to need to ‘look out for themselves’. This does not mean we shouldn’t support our people, it means that first and foremost we should ‘enable’ our people to perform to their potential to ensure they are given the opportunity to secure their position within the company because of the value they are able to add. In other words, while most companies like to think they have a high performance culture, very few actually do. The reason they say they have is because they tend to look at their performance relative to industry standards and if their results sit in the top half of their sector, they tend to believe that it is indicative of a high performance culture rather than accepting industry benchmarks are rarely an appropriate indicator of what is ‘potentially’ possible.
I am of the view that if we are clear about the first part of our SET > ENABLE > EXPECT™ framework and thus committed to educating our people about what we are trying to do and then getting on with enabling them to do it, we will achieve the results we are after. If however we do insufficient work in the first two, we will find ourselves in the unenviable position of forever having to manage our people’s performance, rather than them becoming increasingly committed to improving the quality of their contribution because it is congruent with the company’s ethos and way of being. The fact of the matter is, if your managers are doing a lot of the third, it is indicative of the fact they are doing insufficient work in the former two.
If, from time to time, you need to get into a conversation about an individual or team’s performance when using an appropriate framework, it is remarkably easy to manage. That is, the question you would ask if you were using our framework for example is 1) were you unable to achieve the results you were required to deliver (which would have been previously agreed meaning there would be no argument or ambiguity about this) because you lacked the necessary Skills, Knowledge or Experience (refer the Steel Foundation of Performance Model 01™) in which case it is a training issue and can therefore be addressed, or were you adequately equipped but failed to take responsibility? In other words, was their failure due to a lack of capability or was it due to an inappropriate mind-set? If it was due to an inappropriate mind-set, we must identify whether it was due to a lack of confidence i.e. ‘capacity’ or an inappropriate ‘attitude’; in which case we as their leader have failed, by either paying insufficient attention in terms of assessing their suitability or ‘fit’ for the company when employing them or by failing to offer them the appropriate support to excel within the company once employed. By that I mean bad attitudes are either ‘inherent’ meaning they were present (although not necessarily presenting) when they joined the company or they ‘arose’ as a consequence of ineffective leadership.
In summary
The reason I am of the view the vast majority of companies are failing to leverage the potential of Performance Management to drive better commercial outcomes is because their managers tend to only ever manage their people’s ‘activities’ rather than engaging their people in a deeper and more relevant conversation about increasing their ‘capacity’ to add greater value. This is where the idea of ‘powerful conversations’ comes into effect i.e. a powerful conversation is a conversation about who and what a person is, not what they are trying to achieve. Focusing on what they are trying to achieve, whilst important in terms of providing context, is a ‘transactional’ conversation that may alter the nature of their activities, however it won’t cause a ‘transformational’ change in a person’s mind-set or subsequent behaviours (performance); refer to our November 2012 issue for more information regarding ‘How to facilitate powerful conversations’.
©1995-Present day. All rights reserved – Steel Performance Solutions
