Performance Management is not just for employees

Managing Performance is not just about getting the best of your people. It is that too. But it is so much more.

The truly performance driven organizations will begin with an assessment of its own strengths and opportunities to improve in the light of where they want to go. Organizations are so caught up in the dynamism of 'running' their business that they miss out on the opportunities of stepping back to take a good hard look at what they can do better than their competitors. Those that do may be surprised at their image in the mirror. And begin their journey towards becoming leaner and fitter.

Articulating the direction is usually the first step,and keeping it in the close confines of the Strategy Cell is usually the last. Many organizations produce a scorecard or dashboard of measures which they think will help them get to their objectives and roll it down the lines. With rhetorics like "What gets measured gets done!" And without getting people on board about why they are measuring what they are measuring. An involved team always gets the best results. There are lessons organizations can learn from the soccer field.

The first step is to communicate the strategy to the people that will implement it.I have found a strategy map is a simple way to align the organization and understand the role each key function plays in its success. The next is to involve them in the exercise of finding the right measures.( the soccer game principle again -involve your team). This approach serves more than one objective. First, what we are measuring here is the progress towards the organizations objectives and its processes, not the individual, second when people are involved in the developing measure stage, they are less likely to be resistant. This is also the stage when enthusiasm wanes. Especially when there are seemingly intangible objectives. Even with tangible measures, the exercise of datamining to find if a 'current level' can be established can be a humongous task. There is also a tendency among the data gathering team to 'police' at this stage. Facilitation by a senior manager and change management techniques applied early will prevent these pitfalls early.

After the organizatons have a perfect scorecard and maybe even a perfect tool to report out the data the job is still not done.

The culture of managing by the metrics, by using them as the key review measures needs to be established. This is the second point of danger. Organizations may find that the measures are not telling them the true story and they have to get back to the drawing board again! Or there is too much discussion on the measures and less on improvements. I have found documenting the measure definitions and circulating them after they have been finalized a good way to get around this hurdle. But what can be a greater hurdle in these reviews is the leader's reluctance to review by the measures. Facilitation and continuous coaching is required before review meetings can get effective.

Once the performance management system begins to run like a well oiled machine for about a year, the key players ( Strategy Management Office of Scorecard Champions) need to step back to assess the effectiveness of the perfrmance management system itself. Are we measuring the right things? Has there been a midway change in direction which we are not measuring on our scorecard, are reviews happening as schdeuled and are they effective in initiating improvement initiatives. Are we saving more time by focusing on the right things?

Answers need to feed into the strategy development process.