Performance Management Programs for Executives

Our programs in Performance Management build the skills that managers and employees need in order to establish clear and motivating expectations, to coach and support one another in a team environment, and to provide honest and helpful feedback. With consistent adherence to the practices we teach, organizations can create the conditions where peak performance becomes possible, and where community becomes a reality.

Participants learn how to use these skills during formal planning, coaching, and evaluation discussions, and also how to use them during the informal 2 - 3 minute workplace discussions that drive high-performance teams.

Flexible Time-Frames

Our program is divided into four half-day workshop sessions. These workshops can be offered on a weekly or monthly basis or can be combined into a single two-day program. We also have a version of this program that can be offered in a one-day format.

Session 1. Objective Setting

To be effective, objectives need to be strategic, inspiring, & specific. The textbook example of an effective objective is President Kennedy’s: “We will land a man on the moon by the end of this decade.” If our managers and team members could make their objectives as effective as Kennedy’s, then we will be successful.

Think of all of the factors that made Kennedy’s “man on the moon” objective strategic for the US. It was a strategy for demonstrating the nation’s military proficiency and for demonstrating the achievements possible under democracy and free enterprise. It was a strategy for funding technology development, for creating the infrastructure of the information age, in a time of peace. It was a strategy for bringing people together around a great mission and inspiring heroes. These strategic purposes were discussed by the administration and determined in advance. We were not going to the moon out of idle curiosity or an obsession with astronomy. The objective was carefully chosen for the long-term strategic interests it could further.

We need managers and team members to be similarly careful in deciding which objectives to focus on. There is no doubt that the space race was inspiring. It carried the thrill and excitement of the Olympics, but was taken much more seriously. This kind of inspiration can come from many sources, but researchers who study achievement hear the same few reasons again and again. These commonly-heard expressions of inspiration are:

“I want to make the world a better place—I want to help people.”

“I want to be the best—to win—to show the world what I can do—to be on a winning team.”

“I want to become my best—to be the best I can be—I want to reach my full potential.”

The space race tapped into each of these motives. It gave a wide variety of people a way to tie their own motives into a single objective. There are ways that managers and teams can also tie objectives into these motives. Jobs don’t have to be uninspiring.

“A MAN on the MOON by the END OF THE DECADE,” is as specific and measurable an objective as you can get. It is the kind of objective that you can picture in your mind’s eye.

Objectives that are not this specific are also less strategic and less inspiring. It is easy to take your eye off them. They drop out of sight as short-term priorities take the spotlight. The most typical mistakes we see are goals that have one or two specific aspects, but that fall short of a complete picture. They may include a deadline but not a budget or a budget but unclear quality specs. The objective is never seen as a complete end result. Managers and team members need to be able to paint the complete picture of the end result.

Behavioral Objectives: This session builds two tools and several skills for making objectives strategic, inspiring, & specific. By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

· Identify their own most important 5 - 7 objectives.

· Identify the 5 - 7 most important objectives that each of their employees or team members has.

· Link these objectives to customers, strategic initiatives, development, and the job in a way that explains the “big picture” reasons for the objectives.

· Take mundane or uninspiring objectives and make them more motivating.

· Explain and write objectives in a way that is specific and measurable.

· Involve employees or team members in participative objective setting.

· Anticipate and manage changes to objectives as they occur.

Session 2. Development Planning & Performance Factors

Try this experiment as I describe it. Our colleagues had managers and team members write the names of their employees or team mates onto cards and then rank order them from “best” to “worst”. “Best to worst at what?” We didn’t really tell them. All we said was, “Best to worst performers.” All of the people we asked could rank their people. It took most of them well under a minute, and they judged their overall rankings to be 80% accurate. Take a second to rank your own employees or teammates. Next, we took the cards with the names on them, shuffled them, and asked other employees who knew the people to also rank them. We compared the rankings using statistics.

Believe it or not, the rankings were usually very similar, correlations in the mid 80’s. We were pretty excited. It looked as though these rankings held a lot of truth-value. Here is the crux of the experiment. We would ask people to look at two people in the middle of their list, and to explain why one was ranked higher than the other. Try this yourself.

Here is what we learned: Most people use words like, judgment, leadership, initiative, reliability, trustworthiness, etc. to explain their rankings. My guess is that you did too. It is only natural. These words are performance factors, not objectives. Performance factors describe patterns of performance, not the achievement of single objectives. And they are notoriously tough to be specific about. One manager explained a ranking by saying, “This person is more creative, attentive, more on-the-ball. Know what I mean?” And none of us knew what he meant. His employee is still probably wondering which “ball” to get on.

Performance factors are important because they are the basis for most management decisions (transfers, promotions, dismissals), and because they contain a lot of accurate information. If a single objective is like a single “time at bat” for an employee, then this baseball analogy would make a performance factor the employee’s overall “batting average.” And you baseball people know that coaches pay attention to batting averages, not single times at bat. Managers and team members need better ways to talk about the “batting averages” that organizations call performance factors.

Behavioral Objectives: This session builds one tool and several skills for discussing performance factors and for creating development plans. By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

· Discuss performance factors (such as judgment, leadership, and initiative) in a way that builds skills and motivation.

· Use performance factors to counsel difficult employees (prima donna, grouch, obnoxious, hard to work with).

· Create development plans that include specific timelines, resources, and outcomes.

· Build objectives and performance factors into planning discussions that are involving and motivating.

Session 3. Coaching and Counseling

Here is another experiment that our colleagues have done. We asked managers to identify three groups of supervisors: the top 5%, the top 20%, and the bottom 20%. We didn’t know which supervisor was in which level, but we followed each of them around for several days. We wanted to learn what separated the best from the rest. Managers in the bottom 20% were easy to recognize. They weren’t around much. They would hide in their offices, didn’t seem to know their people’s names, avoided eye contact, and were noticeably uncomfortable in social situations. We even had trouble finding some of these bottom 20 percenters.

The message was clear, “You can’t coach or counsel if you aren’t around and involved.” The top 5% and 20% were tougher to tell apart. All of these supervisors were very skilled and very committed. But, over time, patterns became clear. The good supervisors were either good at getting the job done or good at getting along with people. The best supervisors were good at both. One supervisor summarized it by saying, “In this job you need to be tenaciously sensitive and sensitively tenacious.” Another said, “You need the personality of Mr. Rogers and the focus of the Energizer Bunny.”

Skilled coaches need to be present, positive, & persistent. They need to see improvements, even when they are minor, and use recognition to build the basis for further improvements. They need to see problems, and explore them with concern and persistence until they are corrected. They also need to look beyond the immediate emergencies of the day to keep people directed toward long-term strategic objectives.

Behavioral Objectives: This session builds a coaching system that includes several skills for discussing both positive situations and problems. By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Build coaching time into each workday.
• Use positive reinforcement to encourage performance.
• Find ways to use recognition with the bottom 80%, not just the top 20%, of the workforce.
• Coach around problems without creating hostility or defensiveness.
• Separate problems that are due to motivation from problems that are due to ability.
• Overcome motivation problems.
• Involve people in participative problem solving.
• Find long-term as well as short-term solutions to problems.

Session 4. Formal Review and Feedback

Direct, honest, and constructive feedback is an integral part of performance management. But sometimes this feedback can hurt. The old adage is that, “Eighty percent of us think that we’re in the top twenty percent.” If this adage is true, and it has that ring, then a lot of solid performers will be very disappointed with their reviews.

Dr. J. Edwards Deming, the founder of the modern quality movement, thought that this risk of disappointment and de-motivation was so great that performance evaluations should be done away with entirely. Of course the current legal structure requires some kind of evaluation system, and even Dr. Deming recognized the importance of feedback.

But the problem remains. Should a manager give accurate feedback if it risks undermining the motivation and performance of a valuable employee? We think that accurate feedback is essential, so we spend two-thirds of this session showing managers how to handle the strong reactions that can spoil a constructive review discussion. The first third of the session is spent building the skills for giving direct and accurate feedback. We show how to minimize the negative reactions that are always potential. But no amount of preparation can prevent these reactions from ever occurring.

Instead of sugar-coating the problem, we focus on the kinds of reactions, ranging from defensiveness to hostility to tears to clamming up, that can signal a problem in a review. Then we focus on building the skills for bringing the employee back on board. We show how to build win/win solutions that keep the employee on the team. We want every review to end with the working relationship intact if not stronger.

Behavioral Objectives: This session builds skills for giving feedback and for preventing problems from arising during the formal review. It also builds skills on resolving the strong reactions that are inevitable in some reviews. By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Give direct and honest performance feedback.
• Prepare for and conduct a performance review.
• Give accurate and fair evaluations.
• Explain the reasons for evaluations in ways that help employees develop.
• Deal with strong reactions.
• Find win/win solutions to problems.

Together, these four workshop sessions give managers and team members the skills they need to manage performance. This program has been used in dozens of organizations with thousands of managers, supervisors, and employees.

If you're looking for consulting support on your organization's executive issues that is both "down-to-earth" and "leading-edge," contact us or give us a call at 925-264-4426. We'll schedule a no-cost, no-pressure meeting at a convenient time in your office. We look forward to hearing from you!