Reducing the OUCH! in Performance Management
- tom12973
- Mar 11, 2016
- 4 min read
There’s a lot to be said here and tried here and I would guess that a lot of the things put forth in this post you may already do, or have considered doing. I hope so. Since a lot of what OUCH! is about is recognizing that we put a lot of effort into trying to make sense of the formal things we do in organizations when our actual experience says they make very little sense at all! That effort IS our actual experience of being in an organization.
This means part of this post is not about things that are new but legitimizing things we do now but more or less think we shouldn’t or have been told we shouldn’t.
As an example of this, some time ago I was working with an experienced middle manager who had just been to a fairly extensive course to help him be a better ‘coach’ in his role. A significant part of this course focused on performance coaching and how to conduct a good performance coaching session as part of the formal performance management system in the organization.
He was a good manager. He hated the performance management system (not sure if there is a significant correlation here or not!) so he was struggling to see the relevance of what he had just learned at the course, which he had enjoyed overall. He simply asked me ‘What do you think of performance management systems?’ After some discussion about where this question might be coming from and all that we got to the heart of the matter.
The performance management system was not going to go away so he had to do something with it even though he knew it was more about checking boxes than performance. What we landed on that he could work with and made sense to him are listed below:
The actual outputs of the performance management system were most important to the compensation system and the career/succession process. These things were important so for him to position his work in the performance management system as contributing to these two other things made that work much less onerous.
There should be very little difference between the interactions he had daily about performance and the interaction he had in the formal system. What this meant to him was that what he was doing anyway, day to day about performance, was of primary importance and the actual formal meeting was nothing more than a confirmation of this. This consistency also dramatically shortened the formal ‘meeting’.
He could be open with his direct reports about what the real importance of the performance management system was (compensation, career/succession) so they could see the relevance of it as well. For him, he said this was quite freeing since he didn’t feel like he, or his direct reports had to play some role that made no sense to them.
In his case (and in many others) the goal setting part of performance and the performance evaluation part were supposed to occur at the same time (if there was such a thing as ‘worst’ practices this would be one!) so he split them up and did the performance evaluation part a couple of weeks before the formal meeting schedule and then just filled in the necessary boxes like the meetings had occurred at the same time. Again, the importance of no difference in this type of meeting and what happened day to day was critical.
At one point in our conversation he asked me ‘Do you think it’s ok to be doing this?’ That question is at the heart of OUCH! He was concerned if it was ok to make a system we all know is deeply flawed, work better. What would happen if he was ‘caught’?
My response to him was ‘Well you know better than I do what will happen to you if you’re caught so you have to determine that risk, but my guess is that this is pretty much what you do anyway.’ He thought about that for a bit and said ‘Yeah, pretty much, but this makes it more obvious’. I said to him ‘Well in this case I think more obvious is likely better, don’t you?’ He agreed.
Over 20 years ago I had the task of designing the performance management system for the organization I was working in. In parallel I was also working with Dr. Edmund J. Freedberg around the concept of Self Management (more on this in later posts).
When people came into the training for the performance management system the first thing they saw were two really big signs:
NO SURPRISES!
YOU DRIVE THIS SYSTEM!
For this post it’s the NO SURPRISES that is relevant. The manager in the story above was different than many of the managers I experience in that he did, consciously and intentionally interact daily about performance with the people he worked with. It was not a shift for him to have NO SURPRISES in his day to day interactions and his formal one(s).
Before we had such a thing as a performance management system this was the norm. Now, the norm is that we are unconscious and unintentional about our day to day interactions about performance. We forget that we are interacting about performance all the time and then are surprised, shocked, angry, scared, confused when what we say about performance in the formal meeting is met with those very same responses!
So if your performance management system is not going away any time soon, and is one of the vast majority that has been described in the last few posts then perhaps a few of the points above can help. But the one key mantra you should repeat to yourself every day is:
NO SURPRISES!
It will make your day to day interactions about performance much more obvious whether that be good, bad or ugly!) and will make the formal performance management system work much better for you.
The next post will focus on performance management system design and the one after that on getting rid of it completely.
Comment and discussion points for this post:
How conscious are you of your interactions about performance?
How have you secretly ‘tweaked’ the performance management system to make it work better for you?
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