Performance Leadership

Performance Management, a word that managers and team members seem to dread.

But let’s face facts enabling performance in business is critical.

Reading an article back last year, the advice was leaders should, on average spend 40-50% of their time recruiting. Yet we rarely spend time thinking about:

·?????How engaged is our team?

·?????How well defined are their deliverable objectives?

·?????How well defined are their development objectives?

·?????How well is our managers equipped to deal with performance?

What is Performance Management?

“Managing a poor performer”

That’s a genuine response I got when running a performance management session a few years ago.

However, you’d be mistaken to believe performance management is all about poor performance.

The CIPD define performance management as “an attempt to maximise the value created by employees working in the enterprise and ensuring alignment to employee’s contribute to the business objectives”.

I redefine performance management, to be more performance leadership. By flipping this process to be proactive instead of reactive, you can really shift the organisations performance up a gear. Impacting organisational productivity and results.

But what does that look like in real life?

Performance Leadership, put simply is enabling, measuring, and promoting positive performance of individuals.

Where do you start?

?1-???Managers, this process ultimately is about making everyone in the organisation accountable.

Unless the managers have the tools to pass on that accountability, align objectives and give regular feedback, you may as well not bother about the performance of the team that you have literally spent hours recruiting.

So your first point should always start with developing your manager’s understanding of performance, their ability to give feedback and support.

There is also the necessity to ensure that the manager is confident and knows how to hold their people to account when things don’t go well. As ignoring poor performance sets dangerous long term precedents. ?

2-???Your team. They need to be able to set their goals and objectives, in collaboration with their manager. It’s important that these are aligned to your mission and that they don’t just focus on the “what” they will do, but also the “how” they will get it done. So, you can make sure their behaviour in work is in line with your culture and values. Some important reference points that your team can use to set their goals:

·?????Their Job Descriptions

·?????Your Culture Book

·?????Direct feedback from their manager

·?????Indirect feedback from peers and others

The objectives (the results they will deliver) and their goals (things inspired too, or development objectives) should be easy to measure and realistic to achieve.

3 – Cycles. Now you have a manager who is confident in the role of leading others, a team who are engaged and motivate to achieve their goals and smash their objectives. The next thing to think about the cycles of conversations that your managers have with their teams.

You need an informal structure that allows free flowing honest conversations between your managers and their teams. With the team being very much in the driving seat. If the manager is driving the momentum, then they aren’t making their team accountable for their objectives and goals!

It is important to put some structure to your cycle so your whole team can use this as a blueprint to form a habit.

By creating a Performance Leadership Habit you’ll have a simple process that enables performance conversation to just happen! This is challenging to get started but well worth the investment. Companies who do achieve a Performance Leadership habit can expect to see:

• Increased sustainable performance
• Higher levels of engagement
• Performance blockers being removed faster, making processes simpler
• Performance based issues, quickly resolved
• Positive cultural advances (trust, resilience and energy)
• Less formality!

So, in summary the three steps to getting your Performance Management Process super-charged:

1)???Train your managers

2)???Ensure your team have set objectives

3)???Establish a simple, clear, and informal structure to your performance conversation cycle

Recently lead people partner, Rosie Smith and I completed a piece of work with a Rocko client when these principles of performance leadership were embedded into our clients’ progression framework. Supporting their team to:

A)???Know what they need to do to grow their performance

B)???Understand their next steps in the career path or how they can develop in their role

Performance Leadership continues to be fundamental to Talent Development, it’s the key to make sure you have these simple three steps in place before furthering your People and Culture Strategy.

Of course, in this 900 word blog I’ve not included all of the context, process and warning such as feedback models, protected characteristics, recruitment tactics… I could go on.

View these as the three first steps to establishing a habit of talking about performance. Create the habit, with all your team involved. I promise you’ll see the results in your people, your culture, and the results they produce.