Performance management systems that don't perform
OnPoint Consulting just announced the results of a survey of 115 HR professionals and 441 line managers about what the company calls "performance management." More than half of the people surveyed thought that their performance management system didn't perform.
OnPoint's survey asked about the official performance management system in a company. That's the formal appraisal process that goes on in most places on an annual basis and involves standardized forms and lots of game playing.
That system is only the official tip of the iceberg when it comes to performance. The real issue is how individual bosses, throughout the company, deal with the people who work for them.
In the face-to-face world of being a boss, it's not just about performance management. It's about managing performance and behavior. Performance is the measurable result of work. Behavior is what people say and do.
This is what bosses at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite should do every day. It's their job.
One of the most important things that bosses do to improve performance is provide frequent and usable feedback. In a study done almost twenty years ago, researchers found that feedback of any kind improves performance by 50 percent.
Some feedback helps people grow and develop. Some corrects things that the boss thinks should change.
This is one of the most important things that bosses do, but many don't do it well at all. Some are not suited for the job. Those people don't have the personality and aptitude to confront the people who work for them on a daily basis about behavior and performance issues.
But there are lots of qualified people in supervisory positions who should be able to give effective feedback, but don't. The most common reason is that they don't know how.
Only about half of the companies that OnPoint surveyed provide any training on "setting goals, coaching and feedback." Less than half of the companies surveyed provided any training in development planning.
OnPoint makes several good recommendations about how to fix all this, but because they only address the official process, they don't go far enough. Here's one of their key recommendations.
". . . either require, or encourage, quarterly or periodic review meetings not including the annual performance evaluation."
Quarterly? Periodic? That's idiotic. You don't wait to praise a good behavior or correct a different one and hope to be effective. You want to talk to people about what they're doing as close to the action as possible.
That means you don't do this by blocking out key review dates on the calendar. You check in frequently with the people who work for you. And you take every contact as an opportunity to coach, counsel, encourage and correct.
That day-to-day counseling is the important work. Do it right and those formal reviews will go well. Neglect it and every formal review becomes a contest.
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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.
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Wally, it seems that, consistently, once a principle becomes a program--and then institutionalized--it turns into another checklist. Performance Management falls into that category.
The whole notion of feedback was a simple proposition: the more you talk about how things are going (pro and con), the more people are inclined to examine their work and choose to make changes (or not!). And the statistic that you quoted (50% improvement) would seem to be enticing?
What happened?
Instead of doing it, creating critical mass, and making it a performance criterion in and of itself, it was made into a training program. That might be ok, except there were "rules" for giving and receiving feedback and role-playing to get it right. That led to:
a. People who had been perfectly capable conversationalists thinking "I don't/can't talk like that."
b. A give-and-take using language reminiscent of talk therapy.
c. Performance Management Systems that when followed--as you stated--made the feedback "mandatory" 2, 3, or 4 times a year. Human nature prevailed: I'll do it when it's mandatory but the rest of the time, I really don't have to.
Certainly there are many managers who are so self-aware and who understand the power of feedback that they do make it a part of their daily worklife.
The question I always have in the back of my mind is: "If managers are supposed to manage and build people's performance, what are they getting paid for if they aren't talking about performance as a matter of course?"
This is one of those fundamentals. Have we gotten so wrapped up in the glamour and philosophies of celebrity leadership that we've abandoned managing the corporation?
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Wally,
Great post and so true. All too often I see the carrot-and-stick thing go so wrong in PM systems - "Eat this stick or we'll beat you to death with this carrot!"
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