by Lynda Silsbee
Yesterday’s Advisor featured an article by Lynda Silsbee, CPT, SPHR, on creating organizational alignment. Today, Silsbee focuses on the role of leadership and how proper performance management can give your company culture a boost.
 |
Contrary to conventional wisdom, cultures can be transformed. Senior leadership teams can and do evolve new mindsets. Individuals, teams, and entire organizations adapt, grow, and prepare for future challenges based on how they’re guided through the many challenges of the workplace. Senior leadership teams can learn to change what they do and how they do it. But organizational culture change isn’t for the faint of heart or the quick-change artist. Serious change demands serious people. Are you up for it? Here are some of the mission-critical performance management functions that go into transforming an ordinary culture into a performance-oriented one:
Goal setting: “The What.” Organizations must provide a functional setting in which to set specific goals to drive success. Naturally, this means being able to check and double-check that proposed goals connect to the key organizational objectives.
It also means being able to integrate division or department objectives with companywide goals. In addition, HR needs to ensure that goals are put in writing, aligned with “SMART” criteria (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-Bound), prioritized, and regularly evaluated.
Expectation setting: “The How.” Clearly, goals are important. But so are expectations, which relate less to what needs to be done and more to how to do it. Management must act as a clarifying force in helping employees understand precisely how they can achieve their goals as well as why doing so is important. Leaders should also be able to point to specifics such as:
- Who should play what role in a given procedure or project;
- Which behavioral expectations and performance standards apply;
- Where pertinent resources can be found;
- Why that procedure or project is important; and
- How management and employees will communicate about goal progress, changes, and obstacles.
In short, management can create common understanding of expected results and prevent the confusion that often impedes progress toward goal achievement.
Continuous feedback and coaching. Every organization needs effective systems in place for letting employees know whether they’re making progress and meeting stated goals and expectations. Some ideas to consider include:
- Simple scorecards to denote “wins” and “losses” toward a goal;
- Budgets and profit-and-loss statements for financially related activities;
- Customer feedback loops for customer-facing employees; and
- Production data.
Verbal feedback and an open, two-way dialogue are also critical factors. Managers need to provide their employees with relevant, direct, specific, and nonpunitive information. Course correction is important when a worker drifts too far from a stated goal. But praise, in reasonable amounts, is equally important to maintaining momentum.
Development. Every organization must evolve or face losing ground to more forward-thinking competitors. While monitoring and encouraging organizational and individual goals, leadership needs to develop and execute an ongoing process for developing employees in their respective areas of strength and interest. Activities such as succession planning, internal advancement, and career planning fall under the “development” heading.
Appraisal. Like teachers, upper management needs to regularly issue report cards on how the organization is doing in meeting its goals. To do so, compare values and strategic objectives to behaviors and results. Are the two sides still in alignment?
If not, how can they be realigned? Appraisals can be set up along a regular review cycle (like semesters in school) and, above all, they should include no surprises. At any level, step in immediately when problems arise—don’t wait until an appraisal takes place.
Recognition and reward. Everyone needs encouragement, and leadership can play a huge role here as well. Recognizing significant goal progress or accomplishment of a goal inspires employees to keep striving for success. This recognition can take many forms, including:
- Success stories communicated via memos, e-mail, or bulletin board postings;
- Awards (e.g., statues, plaques) delivered at organizational events;
- Written praise delivered on company stationery or via e-mail;
- Oral praise delivered in either a private setting or in a department or company meeting;
- Promotions or new or desired work assignments; and
- Raises, financial incentives, or bonuses.
Recognizing and rewarding accomplishments is a good way to reinforce that management is always aware of what goals have been set and precisely how well employees are doing in their efforts to accomplish those objectives.
Communication. Communication is important in knitting together your high-performance culture. For example, the use of storytelling to reinforce values, beliefs, and key lessons is a hallmark of successful organizations. Senior leaders are visible, provide “state of the organization” information at regular intervals, and don’t protect employees from bad news.
In addition, managers openly share their expectations and provide feedback and/or create feedback loops to clarify where people stand. Communication is one of those things that people seem to never have enough of. High-performance cultures manage to strike a balance of both quality and quantity of information.