Progressive Managers’ Network

The performance review process is not about writing good performance reviews.

It is about planning a trajectory for the employees work in the coming year - based on an analysis of their performance in the past year - it is about influencing the future.

Always ask the employee to provide you with their own self assessment 2-3 weeks before you have to deliver their review.  Ask the to give examples of their work that support their judgement.

Only look at their self-review after you have prepared your review of their performance for the past year . Identify where there is agreement and open your review meeting with a discussion of these areas. This gets the meeting off to a solid start and helps to make some quick progress. Leave areas where your assessments differ to later in the meeting.

Where your assessment differs from theirs - whether you have rated then more highly or less highly than they have rated themselves - then you should re-visit the DATA on which you have based your assessments and in the review be prepared to back up your assessment with your data.

Before you show your hand ask them to give specific examples of things that they did in the last year that have led them to their judgement.  If they produce data that you have overlooked and that seriously casts doubt on your data and your judgement then be prepared to revise your review.  THIS SHOULD HAPPEN VERY RARELY.  If it does happen you need to urgently review your own process for collecting data on employee performance throughout the year and using it to prepare your reviews.

You should have several pieces of data available to support your judgement - collected over the past year - especially where it is less favourable than their own.  You do have data to base your review on - don’t you?

After the review the employee should be clear on:

• Your overall assessment of their performance last year;
• What this has earned them (promotion, pay rise, recognition, more responsibility, no change, less responsibility, demotion, termination);
• Specific goals and objectives for the coming year.

The performance of your team members is a direct reflection of your performance as a manager.  If you have one or more people whose performance is not moving in the ‘right’ direction then you need to seriously re-think the way that you are managing them.

Don’t be tempted to provide ‘vanilla’ reviews in an attempt to hide your own management weaknesses.

You can only provide good performance reviews if you effectively manage individual performance throughout the year.

Giving employees positive feedback in the hopes of promoting better performance can sometimes backfire, suggests new research from the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the London Business School.

As I understand it they conducted an experiment where undergraduates were asked to act as managers in a recruitment process. Half the group were praised for their great decision making in the recruitment process. The other half werre praised for their creativity.

All were then told that the person they had recruited was not working out.

Those who had been praised for their decision making skills in the recruitment process invested more time and energy in trying to ’save’ the poor hire rather than just cutting their losses and getting rid. Hence it is proven that giving praise can backfire!

This seems like BAD science and even worse management on so many levels.

The guinea pigs were praised regardless of the behaviours and talents they demonstrated during the exercise. Only the most incompetent manager would praise people indiscriminatley without any regard to what they actually do!

First law of feedback is to make sure that it relates to specific behaviours and is not just plucked out of the air.

If you want to check out the ‘research’ then you can do so here,

A new manifesto has just been published on time management over at the Change This site.

In essence it recommends forgetting about tips, tricks and gizmos - instead building a really solid understanding of the 7 fundamental practices of time management;

1. Capturing - making sure that all calls on your time are captured in a system - not in your brain
2. Emptying - making sure that whatever you use to capture calls on your time (e-mail inboxes, in-trays, calendars etc) are regularly emptied - ie the calls on your time are put into a system
3. Tossing - getting rid of as much of the demands on your time as possible - being rigorous - but not ruthless in managing your time commitments - saying no!
4. Storing - putting useful information in a place where you can safely retrieve it as needed - this does not mean relying on your memory (’tickler’ files work well here!)
5. Acting Now! - doing whatever you can right now - especially if it will only take a few minutes - avoid procrastination. (Get a supply of those little sticky dots of paper and force yourself to put one on each piece of paper you have ‘in the system’ every time you pick it up - you will be amazed at how many get several dots - before you do ANYTHING with them!)
6. Scheduling - anything that you can’t do right now must have time scheduled for it - effective scheduling - knowing how long things should take and what contingencies might be appropriate is a fine art - well worth mastering
7. Listing - for jobs that need doing - but don’t merit a fixed appointment in the diary then use lists.  Have a list for things to do when you are:

• in the office
• at home
• in the car thing (listening to audio books for example),
• in town
• at a clients etc

Picking up the right list at the right time can really help your efficiency.
This manifesto looks like it has been massively influence by Dave Allen’s work on Getting Things Done and will act as a useful reminder to anyone who has been on the PMN Time Management programme.
You can read the full manifesto here.

The Healthcare Commission has published a report based on an annual survey of 155 000 NHS staff and some of the findings make interesting reading for the progressive manager.

• Only 26% thought their trust valued their work. This figure ranged between trusts from 58% to 11%.
• Survey responses indicate poor levels of communication between staff and senior management, with only 22% thinking it is effective.
• The survey shows that only 53% receive clear feedback on their work.
• Results from previous NHS surveys have shown that staff who had received an appraisal in the previous 12 months were more satisfied with their jobs and less likely to consider leaving.
• In spite of this fact only just over 60% of staff had been given an appraisal in the previous 12 months.
• Only 39% of staff were satisfied or very satisfied with the recognition they get for good work. Not feeling valued was the reason most often given by staff who said they were thinking about leaving their jobs.
• Communication between staff and senior managers is poor. Only 23% said senior managers involved staff in important decisions and only 22% considered communication between staff and senior management to be effective. Thirty-one per cent said senior managers encouraged staff to suggest new ideas and 17% said different parts of the trust communicate effectively with each other.

For the Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust only 47% of staff said that they had received an appraisal or performance development review in the last 12 months. Only 16% said that they had received an appraisal or performance development review in the last 12 months in which they had agreed clear objectives for their work, which they had found useful in helping them improve how they do their job, and which had left them feeling that their work is valued by their employer.

Things were marginally better in the Leeds Primary Care Trust. 22% of staff at the trust said that they had received an appraisal or performance development review in the last 12 months, in which they had agreed clear objectives for their work, which they had found useful in helping them improve how they do their job, and which had left them feeling that their work is valued by their employer. The trust’s score of 22% was below average for PCTs in England.

39% of staff at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust said that they had agreed a personal development plan as part of their appraisal or performance development review in the last 12 months. The trust’s score of 39% was in the lowest 20% of acute trusts in England. The trust’s 2007 score has not changed significantly since the 2006 survey, when 39% of staff also gave this response!

What puzzles me is how any organisation can survive these appalling statistics. And I think the NHS is probably no worse than many in the public, private and third sectors.

The quality of management in the UK is generally poor. I think this shows the massive potential for performance improvement that lies in simply getting the management basics right.

Anyone for Progressive Management?

“For a profit maximising company, the bottom line is how much money you make. But when you run a social business, it’s about impact.”

Mohammed Younis

For a publicly listed company there is a legal obligation on the Board of Directors to act in a way that will maximise the return on investment to shareholders i.e. profit.

For any shareholders who seek a long term return on their investment - rather than quarterly profit taking - then ‘impact’ (net ‘good done’ in the community as the result of the company’s actions) will be more or less synonymous with profit.  In a perfect world, companies that do bad things in the name of profit will only derive those profits in the short term.

Every company I have ever worked in (I have not worked in any PLCs but have worked in profit and non-profit distributing businesses) there has been a real concern both for social impact and for making a sound return on investment.

The sense of dynamic balance has been vital.  It is not profit making OR social impact but profit taking AND social impact that leads to sustained progress.

We can shun the tyranny of “OR” and embrace the genius of “AND” - there is a yin/yang dynamic; a Zen type ambiguity that can be used creatively.

In my experience it was the companies that traded profitably and used those profits transparently and accountably to ensure the sustainable development of the company and is employees that were able to do their best work in the long term.  In the ‘non profits’ too often the development of the business was entirely hi-jacked by the whims of funders and policy makers.

It is possible to find profitable ways to make the world a better place.

That is the ‘espoused’ theory in just about every business I have EVER worked in or consulted for. It says it on the web site and in the annual report so it must be true.

But the theory in practice is usually a very different one.

• People are a controllable cost
• People are interchangeable parts - just fulfilling job descriptions
• ‘Good people’ require little or no management time (”You want me to spend 30 minutes a week looking after our most important asset? Don’t you know I’ve got problems to sort out…Any way they know what they are doing and wnat me getting in the way…”)
• ‘Mediocre people’ require little or no management time (”They do a decent job - as long as I don’t expect them to take initiative, make things better or use their common sense”).
• ‘Bad people’ eat up hours of management time (”I have to be on their backs all the time - the problem is that you can’t sack anyone in this organisation…”)

This theory in action is a little bit like the moonwalking bear. Unless you look for it you won’t know its there.

Sorting out these problems requires a bit of structure, some commitment and a fair bit of courage.

Wally Bock has written a great post on the power of praise in management.  It includes sections on:

• What we know about praise
• What we know about how to give good praise, and
• Why don’t managers praise more?

If you find giving affirming feedback difficult - or just want to get better at it then have a look at his post.

Tom Peters encourages managers to obsess on R.O.I.R - the Return on Investment in Relationships.

ROIR through 121s comes in many forms:

1. increased staff retention
2. improved productivity
3. recognition and acknowledgement of progress
4. appreciation of those who are performing well
5. identification of under performance and early resolution
6. promotion of behaviours that reinforce strategic goals and values
7. increased tempo of coaching to develop potential and performance
8. deeper professional relationships
9. increased trust
10. increased influence
11. increased responsiveness
12. better support of team members in their work
13. conduit for ideas from the front line to be heard and acted upon
14. management support for every member of the team - every week
15. improved communication and focus on what matters
16. progress made and recognised on a weekly basis
17. increased sense of urgency in the team
18. encourage individuals to think through their contribution to team or organisational objectives
19. increased initiative and enterprise
20. planning remains flexible and dynamic
21. documentation makes performance reviews simpler and less contentious
22. barriers to high performance are removed
23. factors contributing to poor performance are identified and resolved
24. formal opportunities for delegation
25. feedback - both given and received
26. increased employee engagement
27. improved knowledge management and knowledge sharing
28. better talent management and development
29. increased creativity
30. more responsibility taken voluntarily by more people
31. reduced absenteeism
32. more diversity as 121s recognise that ‘one size fits one’

Most people are looking (consciously or not) for a number of things from their work. These include:

• self determination - the freedom to decide what they should do, when they should do it
• control over their own future
• to be able to plan, act and succeed
• to improve things - to make them better
• to expect success
• to enjoy responsibility - to enjoy it - to seek it
• to be active rather than passive - to have an orientation towards action - rather than reaction - to the instructions and orders of others
• to be a person rather than a human resource - a cog in a machine
• to be creative and autonomous
• to be acknowledged, recognised and valued by others.

In this situation managers can use 121s to establish dynamic relationships with team members that helps them to look for and find these things in the workplace. People develop, talent flourishes, relationships improve and performance excels. This group of people usually respond very well to the introduction of 121s as they offer a vehicle for accelerating progress.

However some people are not looking for any of this. They do not want freedom, or responsibility. They want instructions, structure and clarity. They want other people to do the thinking and the creativity. They want to be the foot soldiers - doing an honest days work for an honest days pay. They do not see work as a vehicle either for their own self development or creative expression. They are not looking for self-actualisation but security and control. This group can be very resistant to 121s, seeing them as an intrusion. They are likely to resist development in their roles and accept delegation and change grudgingly, if at all.

There are several things to consider here:

• the first type of response is ‘healthy’ - both for the organisation and the individual. In these circumstances it is likely that the organisation - and the people in it will thrive. The relationship between the individual and the organisation will be synergistic - what is good for the individual is likely to be good for the organisation and vice versa.
• the second type of response is not ‘healthy’. It is a defensive mechanism. It leads to staleness, frustration and at best mediocrity. It is characterised by a loss of synergy - the perception being that what is good for the organisation will not be good for the individual and vice versa.
• the type of response that we find in the workplace depends, in large part, on our management style. Some of it may be driven by personality or by experiences from the past or from outside the work context - but in most cases the response we get tells us much about our own management.

Go to the people

Live with them

Learn from them

Love them

Start with what they know

Build with what they have

But with the best leaders

When the work is done

The task accomplished

The people will say

“We have done this ourselves.”

Lao Tsu (700 BC)

“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”

Dostoyevsky

This is a great quote that reminds us that management, especially progressive management, is not so much about techniques and tools but about our basic stance in relation to those we manage.

Certainly in sports management the role of the manager is to help each individual to perform to the maximum of their potential. In business I think it is a minority of managers who see this as their job. Instead they see it as about keeping people working in boxes on organisation charts - sometimes supressing their development order to retain them.