Is Your Performance Management Killing the Performance?
One of the questions I was asked more than often, is about Performance Management.
In Sept 2018, I spoke on this subject to an audience of about 1,25 EMBA students in Shanghai, with half of the students came from Europe, half from China, and they all carry a title as 'Country head' or 'Regional Director"...
At the beginning of my presentation, I asked everyone in the audience who genuinely loved their performance management program to stand up.
Guess how many of those 1,25 people did? Two!
So I asked the audience, WHY?
They said:
"Everyone hates it—employees and managers alike.
Nobody does it well—it’s a skill that seemingly fails to be acquired despite exhaustive training efforts.
It doesn’t do what it was designed to do—i.e., increase performance"
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does!... Too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.
Some flaws that exist in traditional Performance Management, such as
Honest dialogue is limited when performance is judged
Most performance review systems reinforce a paternalistic world, one built on distrust and the assumption that the boss knows more about our skills abilities, and commitment than we do. This dependency works agains empowerment.
2. Performance is ONLY managed when it is Poor, no one remembers the GOOG work
Humans are hard-wired to focus on the negative, so balanced feedback always leaves us concentrating on the bad parts. Performance reviews generally, emphasize the negative, rather than focusing on strengths.
3. Focus on individuals, but NO man (or woman) is an island
The system (how work gets done in your company) actually has more influence than the individual can ever hope to have on the performance of both the individual and the organization as a whole.
4. Human is NOT machine, fairness and standardization in rating doesn’t show the whole picture
Any performance management system that is designed without people at its heart is doomed to failure no matter how many times you try to reboot it.
5. Compare people against each other erodes the effort to create a collaborative culture
If we truly want creative, agile organizations in which people with divers skills and backgrounds and perspectives can collaborate and are willing to take risks, then we must dismantle the competitive constructs that erode those ideals.
6. Pay for the performance doesn’t always improve the performance
People are much more motivated by intrinsic rewards and that the work harder and better when they are doing things they find personally rewarding.
If you have been following traditional practices blindly, you may have already developed some bad habits unintendedly, for example:
Judge people by their performance measures
Define your business objectives with weasel words
Create too many or too little, or very likely unbalanced performance measures
Have ONE person or a few leaders to decide performance measures, or
Use standard process and measures for all departments, and
Treat symptoms of poor performance with extra resources, such as adding more headcounts, sending 'poor performed' employee to training courses, or simply fired them
If you have been paying bonuses, raising salaries with the intention to encourage high performance, do a self-check, does your performance management system serve the goals of:
Develop your people
Drive your company's overall performance,
Reward contribution
Enhance your company's fitness
As human beings, we are motivated to approach or avoid situations and people based on the reward or threat content of the perceived interaction. This motivation is biologically underpinned by the balance of neuro-chemical agents in the brain.
Superior performance results NOT from stress states but from optimal arousal inducing the flow state. Flow results from immersion and focused concentration and activates unique brain wave activity.
The new performance equation requires that we must develop and measure both capability and capacity. Elements that contribute to fostering a high-performance workplace includechallenge, focus, teams, support and autonomy.
Get in touch if getting your company more performance-oriented is on your mind. I'll be happy to send you a whitepaper about the steps that organizations go through to pursue high performance. It’s basically about how teams can get a higher and higher ROI on performance improvement efforts, and reach more strategic targets.
