Jan Hills considers a new approach driven by employees, rather than managers
I was with the HR director of a large partnership last week – he was late for the meeting and arrived pretty flustered and stressed. “It’s that time of year,” he said. At first I was a bit puzzled; I’ve clearly been out of corporate life for too long! But what he meant was that it was annual review time, or the performance management cycle, call it what you will.
Most managers I've worked with hated this time of year and their teams hated it more. I remember having a conversion with my CEO that we should aim to completely change performance management. My view was that the end of year conversations should be no more than a confirmation of what everyone already knew. All the discussion, data collection and adjustment should be happening on the job, not during one month of the year.
He was so enthused that he agreed to give it a go. The process would be driven by the employee not the boss, and certainly not HR. So this is what we implemented:
Employees set their goals and agreed them with their supervisor. We made the data available to staff to monitor their own progress. Employees could request a conversation at any time with their boss to discuss progress, alterations to goals due to business changes, and any support or help they needed.
We created a ‘success profile’ of the behaviours and mindset needed for success. We shared it with people and turned it into a six-question 180 review which people asked their key internal clients or stakeholders to complete for them at least once a year. They used this data to adjust their behaviour and how they were meeting their goals.
Managers were asked to monitor the hard data, and they got a quarterly report of who was on or off track. Information was shared about the evolution of strategy, with coaching and support. The hardest part was persuading bosses to focus on the best people to help them be better, rather than the worst performers. Getting more out of the best gave a greater return on investment.
People loved this process and our other key metrics improved too. Unfortunately, it only lasted 18 months. The firm was acquired and the new owners instituted their traditional system. I still occasionally meet my former leadership team colleagues and they still talk about the performance management system that worked.
It seems that we stumbled onto something – and neuroscience can tell us why it worked. Most traditional performance management creates a threat response. It reduces creativity, rational thinking and narrows the individual’s view. Hardly conditions for someone to take on new information and turn it into new behaviours. To make matters worse, feedback impacts the employee’s own sense of certainty on how to be successful, their reputation, and what they thought their options were. It can make them ask “have I got to do it the boss’s way?”, which most staff feel is unfair.
Giving employees options and control, coaching rather than judging, and focusing on what is going right rather than what is going wrong is brain-savvy. But how do you move from where you are today to something that works? Well, a good start is to engage those bosses and appeal to their CORE elements. Oh and of course, the promise of improved performance should convince the CEO.