Appraisal Time Cometh….

Do you need some training to help you with the appraisal process?

Put On a Happy Face

Holding Difficult Conversations at Work

Much of my work is about providing managers with safe and effective ways to have conversations that they would instinctively prefer to avoid.  Conversations about behaviours and approaches that don’t contribute towards excellent performance.

If they do choose to address the issue most managers have to force themselves to say things, to use words and phrases that are not (yet), a part of their everyday management vocabulary.

There is a great post here by Steve Roesler that offers some useful and practical insights into getting these difficult conversations right.

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PMN BOGOF

Just a gentle reminder that we have some ‘buy one get one free‘ offers coming up on PMN workshops.  This means that when you book a place at one of the BOGOF workshops you get another place free.

I have also developed 2 new workshops which have proven very successful.  The first is on effective partnership working – giving you the skills and knowledge you need to make the most of your partnerships at work. Whether you have to work in a local strategic partnership (LSP), a sub-regional partnership or a purely private partnership this workshop will give you the tools you need to become much more effective.  Dates for this workshop will be published shortly.

The second is on Managing Underperformers and looks in detail at practical and effective ways to  make sure that underperformers don’t drag down the performance of the team.

BOGOF workshops:

April

22nd (pm) Stop Hate UK/Unity Business Centre – Brilliant 121s – BOGOF

May

20th (pm) Stop Hate UK/Unity Business Centre –  Giving and Getting Great Feedback – BOGOF

You can see the full schedule of PMN workshops here, and book places here.  If you have done these sessions and found them useful then please do recommend them to others.

Many thanks.

Mike

18 tips for Better Partnership Working

I have just completed a 2 day workshop with a great group of partnership managers.  Here is what I learned!

1. Get really clear and comfortable about your self interest. Your personal  reaction to the opportunities and possibilities offered in your role.
2. Communicate this powerfully in language that the recipient will understand and value.
3. Develop your professional self interest – the overlap between your individual/personal and professional/organisational response to what REALLY matters.
4. Build your power to influence what really matters through investing in person to person relationships. Invest in a series of 121s. Share what really matters to you. Be clear on how they will perceive you.
5. Use the allies/opponents/adversaries/fencesitters/bedfellows model to help you structure this.
6. Become power hungry (why wouldn’t you want power to make what you believe in happen? Don’t leave power for the bad guys of this world to grab!)
7. Building a powerful coalition around your ideas inside the business is as important as building one externally.
8. Know your reputation – find ways to find what people REALLY think of you and your agenda – but are too polite to say!
9. Don’t be busy fools. Work on the most powerful relationships. That is the relationships that give you the most power – this has little or nothing to do with the ‘authority’ power of the other party. Think leverage. Think goals.
10. Think ‘enlightened self interest‘  and here.
11. Ring fence thinking time – 2 lots of 90 minutes a week – to develop your agenda – rather than respond to the needs and agendas of others. This will increase your sense of control and reduce your levels of stress – as well as making you much more effective and creative. GUARANTEED.
12. Agree on the ends.   Be different, challenging, creative and risky when it comes to the means. You don’t always have to play by the rules. Think Mandela.
13. If you play by the rules of bureaucracy it will find ways of stifling change.
14. Don’t let years of socialisation in being helpful and humble result in you being a selfless partner. Nobody wants to partner with Uriah Heep – but they may just take everything you have.
15. Resist the safety of bureaucracy – maintenance, safety, dependency (external locus of control).
16. Pursue the entrepreneurial way – greatness, courage and autonomy (internal locus of control).
17. Don’t waste too much time and energy on the difficult people. Invest it in those who share your self interest – life is just better that way.
18. Always take your own chalk and be cautious in your selection of cues….(this is not a mystical metaphor – just a statement of fact).

Anything I have missed?

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung

More Resources for Learning and Coaching

You might want to add this site to your brainstorming resources when you are coaching your team members.

It is 100 free websites where you/they can learn about all things business.

Measuring Management

Managers spend much of their time measuring – market share, year on year sales, voids, arrears, return on investment, customer satisfaction, orders fulfilled, calls handled per hour, orders placed, orders fulfilled (again), total invoiced, hours billed, attendance, productivity per employee etc

Why the obsession with measuring stuff?

Because it gives us the data to recognise what has changed, what needs to change, and when we make the change – whether it has had the impact we planned.

But none of these metrics are about US – the manager.  They are all about the performance of the system and the people that we manage.  And this often lets us of the hook for making real change in the way we manage.

What if we measured some more personal aspects of our management efforts?

• how much time we spend listening in 121 conversation with team members
• how many times we give REAL feedback – affirmative and adjusting – each day/week
• how often we make sarcastic or cynical comments
• how many times we interrupt others mid-sentence
• how often we check our blackberry in meetings
• how often we talk about values and vision
• the amount of time we spend in meetings that are inefficient or worse
• how many coaching contracts we put in place with our team members
• what percentage of coaching contracts achieved their goals
• how many significant tasks we genuinely delegated (rather than then allocated) because they provide great development opportunities
• percentage of working time allocated to pursuing key objectives
• how often we acknowledge our own development opportunities and make planned conscious change in our behaviours

I am convinced that if we started to measure our own personal performance in relation to some of these more personal aspects of management, most of us would we would pretty quickly get some powerful data on what we needed to change.  Measurement would also pretty quickly confront us with the fact that our perceptions of our performance are markedly different from reality.

As we make planned changes based on measurements of our own personal behaviours we will soon see a very positive impact in some of the more traditional areas where measurement prevails.  The act of measurement itself would also increase the likelihood of planned changes being implemented and seen through.  That after all is perhaps the main reason why we measure.

To make sure that important things get done.

The Joy Of HP Technical Support

Why do so many IT companies get the basics of customer service wrong?

I have been buying HP gear for a long time.  I have always found it to be expensive (well not cheap) but reliable and robust.

Recently an HP desktop PC refused to start up.  I rang technical support as the machine was still under warranty.  I had to pay for the privilege.

They told me that the warranty had lapsed – even though I had bought the machine less than a year ago.  They explained that they look at date of manufacture not date of purchase, but if I faxed them prove of purchase they would honour the warranty.

You try finding a fax machine when you need one!

They then accepted my warranty claim and sent me a series of troubleshooting things to try:

– unplug the power cable

– open the access panel

– Clearing the CMOS (Remove the silver colored CMOS Battery for 10 seconds and reseat the battery or hold the yellow button next to the memory modules for 10 seconds)

– Without connecting the power cable press and hold the power button for 10 seconds

– Power on the system and check if it boots to bios by pressing F10 on startup

Did all that and got no joy so rang them again.  I received the following e-mail:

Disconnect HDD and OPTICAL Drives

Strip the system to PSU, System Board, Memory and Processor

Remove the Memory and check for Beep Codes (Note the no. of beeps)

Reseat / Swap Memory / Try 1 Memory Module at a time Reseat Processor

Reseat Power Connector on the System Board

Now excuse me – but I am a businessman who bought an HP PC to run a business (perhaps this was my first mistake?).  I am not a PC engineer.

I don’t know how to do the things they have asked me to do.

I don’t have time to do the things they have asked me to do.

I just want to run my business.

Am I being unreasonable in asking them to repair my machine?

The thing that finally hacked me off was this:
In case we dont hear from you in next two days, we will conclude that you are not having any further issues with that system, and will close the case.

UNBELIEVABLE!

If they don’t hear from me they will assume that all is well!

Any suggestions about what I should do next?

Ten Steps to Better Management

Step 1: Clarify, negotiate, and commit to your role as manager.

• Many management jobs will have changed priorities in response to the current economy.
• Check with your manager that you are doing what is best for the organisation.
• Check with your conscience that you are doing what is best for you and your team.
• Check that you are prepared to do the work that will help others to be outstanding.

Step 2: Understand the results you are expected to produce.

• If you are to be recognised as an outstanding manager you need to know what excellence looks like.
• At the moment you might be expected to drive costs down while producing more value.
• Watch out for mediocrity. Expect excellence. Don’t let the current climate be an excuse to cut corners.

Step 3: Know your business.

• Know what excellence looks like. Recognise the behaviours and habits that lead to it.
• Recognise behaviours and habits that undermine it.
• Understand the metrics that are relevant to your part of the business. Use them to get better.
• Understand what your organisation needs from you – now.

Step 4: Build a great team.

• Recruit, develop and retain people who will take responsibility and work independently – within parameters agreed with you!
• To make sure you retain your best staff in difficult times talk to them – give them control – give them the chance to shape the organisation and their future in it.
• Build a team that you can lead – not a flock that you have to herd.

Step 5: Ensure your team knows what excellence looks like.

• Feedback, feedback, feedback.
• Coach, coach, coach
• Delegate, delegate, delegate
• If you are not sure what constitutes excellence in your business – FIND OUT QUICKLY!

Step 6: Plan – with flexibility.

• Review and revise plans on a weekly basis.
• Expect progress on a weekly basis.
• 121s are ideal for this.

Step 7: Get out of their way.

• Help them to do great work.
• Listen to them.
• Understand what stops them from being great.
• Get barriers out of their way.

Step 8: Be engaging.

• Be positive and constructive.
• Smile a lot.
• Be energetic and hopeful.

Step 9: Proactively manage progress.

• While change IS inevitable – progress is not.
• Make sure that everyone knows what constitutes progress and has their own plan to make it.

Step 10: Leave a legacy: develop people and the organisation’s capacity to produce results.

• better meetings
• more focus
• more knowledge and skills
• more professionalism
• better execution
• higher standards

This post was inspired by Lisa Haneberg over at Management Craft.

Performance Management, Performance Reviews and Appraisals

I was asked by a manager yesterday to help to clarify the difference between performance management and appraisal.  I don’t think I did a great job  so I thought I would try again!

Performance management is a system with four parts:

1. Specify the desired level of performance for the thing you are trying to manage (people, programs, products or services)
2. Measuring performance – collecting and recording reliable data, both quantitative and qualitative
3. Using data to compare actual performance to what is desired – recognising gaps between what is desired and what highlighting –  variances
4. Communicating performance information – to those that are most able to use it to make progress

Performance management can happen at a number of different levels:

1. The performance of strategies and plans at the organisational level
2. The performance of products, services and programs
3. The performance of teams, department or units
4. The performance of individual employees

A key task for a manager is to decide at which level an investment in performance management is most likely to pay off.  In my experience an investment in the performance management of individual employees drives improvements at the team, product/service and organisational levels.

Performance Reviews and Appraisals are a small but important part of good performance management at the level of the individual employee and the team or business unit.  When aggregated they can also provide powerful contributions to performance management at the organisational level.

However these ‘one-off’ annual interventions need to be supplemented by more frequent processes for measurement, monitoring and change to keep up with the dynamic context in which organisations operate.  These interventions would include:

• 121s and quarterly reviews,
• feedback,
• coaching and
• delegation.

Collectively these provide a manager with a powerful framework for the performance management of individuals and teams.  Few managers that I meet consistnelty use these intervnetions with rigour, conviction and compassion. As a consequence they are at best ‘mediocre’.  Without them the likelihood of real progress being made is small.  Putting these simple interventions into practice can transform mediocrity into excellence.

Measurement is central to performance management, but it is a double edged sword that has to handled skillfully.

“People revert to metrics out of fear, not out of vision.”

(Patrick Lencioni)

Measurement is often about the minimum requirements and rarely helps to articulate a grand design.  It tends to lead to reductionist thinking and may have little to do with the ‘high ground’ of excellence.

“Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.”

( Ackoff & Addison)

Most managers spend to little time considering what they expect from an excellent employee.

• What would excellence look like?
• How would I recognise it?
• How would I ensure that excellence was contagious?

Even if managers do have a conception of excellence they rarely build in the time to collect the data and establish the working relationships necessary to achieve it.  Typically this means observing people at work, giving feedback, coaching and so on.  What Tom Peters referred to as ‘Managing By Wandering Around’.

Instead managers retreat to the easy, low ground of using what they can easily measure as a proxy for performance.  They become mole whackers.  Things that are difficult to measure are neglected, while things that are easy to measure become important.

Performance management is just a tool. It can be used to

• move your agenda forward – what is your agenda? What does progress look like?
• provide powerful messages about what matters – it doesn’t have to be precise, just influential – what are you trying to influence?