Performance Management
Performance Management How can it help you?
In many organisations, 20%-40% of your people produce 80% of the sales or production volume.
So how can you enable the others? Many organisations spend the effort working in their teams on the top 20%, but are there other places where significant results could also occur quickly at replicating expertise?
If you look at human potential within populations; statistically, if you take the middle 60% and change what they do to get the same results of the top 20%, the sales or production figures, when you get them right, move quickly in the right direction.
In this article Hunter Dean & HPS have looked at three crucial areas where you can enhance the results you get with regard to your performance management process:
1. Defining performance management
2. What makes up performance in specific roles?
3. Conveying the message
So how can you performance manage in a way that empowers your people? - Some Crucial Factors:
What are some factors you might consider, in regard to the performance management of your people?
1) Defining performance management
A definition of performance management is the ability to work with a team member or team, to set and achieve specific outcomes and monitor the critical objectives that are part of the role.
The performance management process includes setting up a way of measuring progress so that, over a short period of time, specific behaviours change
When it works well, both parties will have a say with regard to the things that need to happen in order that the set benchmark or standards are reached and your ability at internally replicating expertise is enhanced.
For example: A business unit head who has managers in different roles, with some not undertaking the required behaviours determined for generating success in the role, might produce a program specific people are required to follow.
It is essential those people are clearly briefed on the requirements and that they understand what is required from them going forward.
These things might include:
a) One on one appointments with specific team members
b) Sitting with their team to find our specifically why they are not performing at the levels of others in the business unit
c) What the definition of performance in specific roles has been and should be going forward at replicating expertise
d) The business unit head or manager being honest with themselves about whether they had conveyed this clearly and accurately to their team members, with specific reference to short but realistic timeframes and deliverables and therefore what they personally need to change
2) What makes up performance in specific roles?
Obese people think they know what they need to do to loose weight. The problem is, they may not know some crucial things needed to loose weight like.
What type of food to eat and when to eat that food
How different types of food and drink will affect them, like drinking coffee verses green tea or eating bread or steak verses salad, how their digestion will be effected
What exercise to do, how much, and when
How being relaxed when eating may effect them
What beliefs and attitudes do healthy people hold about health and fitness
"Similarly, when we look at job roles, often organisations are not aware of the "key" attributes of their performers.
How can you performance manage when you don't know what your best people believe about their abilities?" - Hunter Dean
For example if your best people believe:
They must make five new contacts a week and the others consider one to be okay
That writing $10,000,000 a month is success when the others consider $4,000,000 to be successful, how can you performance manage without knowing the belief sets of your best people
That producing 25 widgets a week is essential while the others believe only 15 will do, those producing 25 have a set of beliefs that differ significantly from the others
The key is in being able to map your top team member's beliefs then knowing how to help your team members set expectations to be achieved within days, not months, and how then to enable people to change their beliefs of what is possible.
Like an obese person wanting to loose weight, they must first understand specifically what they need to do, and then get truly educated on what the fittest and healthiest people believe, and actions they take. Something Hunter Dean and HPS can ensure you become expert in within you organisation.
3) Conveying the message
How confident are you as a leader that you can convey to the person or team, the message they need to hear in a way that empowers them to understand what they need to do going forward, why they need to do it, and how they will change their behaviour going forward?
Have you considered the following?
Are the messages you have conveyed in the past too ambiguous, or have they not been delivered until the time has come to invite a person to leave?
Have you set up with the people you are developing, a framework that links to your business strategy?
Are you aware of the beliefs of the best people in your teams, and do you have a strategy to go about changing the beliefs of the people who are underperforming?
Have you taken accountability as the business unit leader (and what does that mean) and what tangible actions have you taken in the past week to turn the required people around?
a) What process are you using to continuously reinforce the required changes in your peoples' behaviour and do you have a setup and specific development plan focused on getting success over the next 7 to 14 days not 6 - 12 months?
b) Once you are successful at changing a person or team's behaviour, how are you going to reinforce the behaviours and subsequent results so they become a part of the culture and 'process' with regard to how you do things in your business?
c) Do you have a simple skills matrix of your teams, so you know who is best at what, are your development plans simple and succinct but at the same time detailed with regard to what needs to happen quickly?
Continuous Improvement
By undertaking the above strategies you can enable change quickly in your team.
Some leaders may not believe people in their teams can change quickly, which may at times be the case, however, the more you understand your best people and the specific actions they take on a daily and weekly basis the better you become at creating change in everyone.
The ability to create a culture where collaboration and raising the bar is the norm, the faster and more successful you will be - Hunter Dean and as Bill Gates once said
"In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone. Bill Gates"
Even if lasting change has not occurred in your team recently, in our experience, the best leaders manage change fairly and fast, understanding exactly what it is that needs to change, and by when, and convey this to the people that need to hear it, openly and honestly.
We trust you've gained valuably from this article we have shared in the simple and concise attributes required to performance manage your teams successfully.
We continue to encourage our clients to learn, share, change, succeed, profit and win in your market.
It's a pleasure as we continue to work with more and more leading organisations seeing the significant results being achieved.
Some of these case studies have now been published on the web access via http://www.behaviourchange.com.au/articles/
Author : Hunter Dean
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