What is Performance Management and how do I do this effectively?
Toby Barker
Business Consultant at 3P Consultants Experience in helping businesses with their data and building strategies to grow. Specialising in Healthcare sector.
In the course of my career as a Manager, I have had thousands of Performance Management meetings.?Some have gone really well, some a lot less so, but they have all had one thing in common.?
What was this?
It is really quite simple.?We had the conversation about Performance Management.
From my experience, people tend to shy away from having Performance Management conversations when they think they are hard.
But, it is actually harder not to have them.?It makes you stressed, can make you anxious and you know you’re going to have to do it anyway.?The performance and behaviours don’t change and you see this starting to affect other people.
Members of the team that you are managing start to think ‘I’m busting a gut to achieve my objectives, but they (the colleague) aren’t and nobody cares, because the Management are not doing anything about it!’?See the problem?
With this in mind, I wanted to share my top tips for having an effective Performance Management conversation :
1)?????Revisit the objectives that your employee has been set at the beginning of the performance cycle.?If you are familiar with these, then it allows you to better gauge where the strengths and development areas are.
2)?????Understand the data – if performance is data driven (such as number of meetings/ sales/ calls etc), then make sure that you understand the data that you are presented with.?You don’t want to be bamboozled by your employee presenting you with data you haven’t seen. ??
The thing with data is that anybody can find a league table or metric where they are the best in the world.?I once had an employee show me that they were the person in the office that made the most calls on a certain day (a day when the top performers were off for childcare duties!)
3)?????Set out a time and a place for the meeting – the worst performance management meetings are those that take place on an ad hoc basis.?By scheduling it into the diary, you are showing the employee that it is a big deal and that they should take it seriously.
4)?????Prepare – you need to make sure that you are really well prepared and that you know what you want to say and what your objectives for the meeting are.?If you have a clear idea in your head, then you will find the meeting less stressful, especially if it is an employee that is underperforming.?
Some people find it useful to write a script as it makes them less anxious.?I am generally a big fan of scripts as long as you practice them.?If you have spoken it out loud, you know what it is going to sound like and you can make any tweaks to feel comfortable with it.?If you don’t want to practice it, then don’t write a script.?A non-practiced script will often feel wooden and impersonal, as all the right words will be included, but it won’t sound like you!
5)?????Prepare the room – this is an area that is always undervalued.?Consider where you are going to sit and where you want the employee to sit.?If you sit opposite each other, it can often feel too confrontational.?You have to be sure that you are creating the right mood in the room, especially if it is going to be a hard conversation.
6)?????Let them speak – if you want to understand the reasons why their performance is the way that it is, then you need to ask the probing questions and let them speak.?The meeting needs to be as interactive as possible, it shouldn’t feel like they have been summoned and certainly not to be told off (if it is that type of conversation).
This also allows you to understand their perception of their performance.?If it is close to what you think, then the conversation will be easy.?If there is a massive difference, then you will need to make sure that you both come to the same level.?There is no harder conversation than when the employee is not receptive.
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7)?????Be really clear in your communication – you don’t want to leave any ambiguity at all about what you are saying.?You need for the message to be clear and understood, whatever it happens to be.?Be direct.?A good way to check understanding is to ask them to repeat this back to you in their own words.
Unfortunately, people will only hear what they want to hear.?It’s why it is so important to make sure you have been clear with your expectations.
8)?????Show empathy – but not too much!?If you let your emotions sway you, then are just kicking the can down the road. Employees will come up with some fantastic, sad and unbelievable reasons for why they haven’t achieved the level of performance required.?Your job is to see through this and make sure you can help them navigate the pathway back to good performance.
We are all human and can be swayed and if there are genuine reasons, then you will need to make allowances.?But remember, this is you in your role as a Manager talking to them in their role of employee and it is most definitely NOT personal.
9)?????Leave the meeting with a clear action plan – irrespective of the type of conversation, you need to have a clear action plan.?If you have put in place a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), then the actions need to be really SMART as this is going to be the plan to reach normal performance.
If you leave the meeting with no actions, then you will not see the change in behaviour that you were hoping for.
10)??Follow up – schedule some catch ups and observations before the next formal review.?Your goal is to make your employee productive to the required level and they will need some support.?If you leave them to it, then invariably they will fail.?The previous behaviours will still be present and this means that there will be no tangible change.
If you follow these tips, then you will feel more comfortable in the meeting and know how to go about getting the best from your Performance Management Meetings.
I share this with the Mangers at Xcel Health to ensure that we can all support our staff to achieve the stretching targets that we set ourselves.
If an employee isn’t performing, then it always comes down to one of 3 things, and I have always been a fan of using the Cohen-Brown Success Triangle.
1)?????Clarity – does the employee know and understand what is actually expected of them?
2)?????Capable – do they have the skills and knowledge to do the job that is expected of them?
3)?????Motivated – does the employee have the right level of motivation to do the job that is expected of them?
Once you have ascertained where the problems lie, then your tack for Performance Management should be so much easier!