Tweet

Master Your Game: Performance Management

Written by: Jacque Small

Article Overview: Having a performance plan and honing your coaching dialogue skills will help you with your performance management role. As a leader, managing the performance development of your team is critical to attaining the success you seek. A good performance development system, executed expertly, will assist your team to grow and develop to meet the goals and objectives that you will evaluate them against.

Master Your Game: Performance Management

Having a performance plan and honing your coaching dialogue skills will help you with your performance management role. As a leader, managing the performance development of your team is critical to attaining the success you seek. A good performance development system, executed expertly, will assist your team to grow and develop to meet the goals and objectives that you will evaluate them against.

Plan on a regular schedule for entering into a dialogue with each of your employees. These active working sessions should focus on your expectations of them, measure their performance against set goals, acknowledge success, and work through future challenges.


Managing the Scorecard

When considering an employee's performance, establish goals for each and have a measurement system in place. These scorekeeping systems are essential for tracking progress against set goals. One caution: they indicate where a person is or is not performing, but they do not assist the person to perform differently. As discussed in an earlier article, the performance development system still requires regular employee performance dialogue.
Unfortunately, many managers are uncomfortable with conversations that focus on behaviour, and avoid these conversations and evaluation sessions with their people. For employees who view performance evaluations as being linked to compensation, there is a disincentive to be open, honest and reveal vulnerabilities for fear of having this information restrain their next raise.

To succeed in assisting individuals to adapt, shift their thinking, and innovate a different set of outcomes, managers must practice coaching dialogues - the ability to use contextual listening and powerful questioning skills to elicit honest responses. With executive coaching and training to develop this skill, along with an effective performance development plan, managers will be well-equipped to engage in high quality developmental conversations.


A Simple Performance Development System

It is not about filling out complicated forms and ticking all the boxes, but having an appropriate conversation with each member of the group.
Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, authors of First Break All The Rules, provide some simple guidelines for a performance management system. Here's what they recommend:

• Plan a simple routine focused on what to say and how to say it to each employee. It is about making a personal connection with each one of your direct reports.
• Schedule frequent and regular meetings. Regular meetings provide a forum and an opportunity for confidence-building acknowledgement. It also provides just-in-time feedback relevant to the situation and becomes a reward in itself.
• Encourage participation. Have employees track their own performance and learnings, goals, successes and challenges. This is an opportunity for self-discovery, a chance for them to think about how they would like you to support them and what support they need. Developmental initiatives can then be targeted at the specific challenges.
• Simplify the performance development process. It can be a simple 30 minute meeting once a month with ten minutes focused on the past, and the rest focused on the future. After all, results will flow from focusing on how and what the person does in the future, not what they did in the past.



The System Works

Not only does this performance development process work for individuals, it also works for teams. I worked with an organization that has successfully shifted their weekly staff meetings to this process. In a 1 1/2 hour meeting, each person has three minutes to report on a success from the previous week, share their biggest challenge in the coming week, and inform other people about what might impact them. The balance of the meeting is spent finding creative solutions to the challenges this week and in the future. Meetings have shifted from being predictable and mundane to being highly engaging events where valuable dialogue and work is being conducted.
Performance development will increase the probability that the performance evaluation will result in a positive outcome for you, the leader, the individual and the organization. Together with the right coaching skills, performance evaluations can be positive, mutually-enhancing sessions for you and your employees.

Successful Development,

Jacque Small

Related Articles
  Master Your Game: Introduction
  Top 10 Tips For Managing Up in a Top Down World
  I Hate MBAs/Redux
  Organizational Readiness To Performance Management
  Developing Winners

Article Tags: goals and objectives, management role, performance development, performance management, performance plan



Related Forum Posts
HRPreneur - Hi everyone, I am new to the forum and I recently started my own Human Capital (HR) consulting firm called HRPreneur Inc. HRP focuses on making human capital a strategic differentiator for SME's. Below is a summary about HRP; Who We Are: HRP is a Human Capital consulting firm with 30 years of experience that becomes an extension of your company by providing a full array of services to help you create a highly engaged workforce focused on achieving strategic results in order to build a long lasting great company! Mission: HRP provides small and medium sized businesses a Strategic HR Business Partner to increase employee engagement, resulting in cost savings, increased productivity and results at an affordable rate! Vision: To inspire and warrant SME's reach their full competency! Cost Effectiveness: We provide over 30 years of experience at a fraction of the cost at a strategic executive HR business level You will save between 50% to 60% in costs per year on salary, bonus, benefits, training, office space alone We will provide you additional cost efficiencies through our services Services: • Strategic Human Resources Planning • Organizational Redesign • Change Management • Organizational Culture Development • Employee Engagement Programs • Leadership Assessment and Development • Compensation Design • Talent Acquisition • Assimilation and On-Boarding • Performance Management • Talent Management & Succession Planning • Human Resources Due Diligence • Human Resources Audit • Full Service HR Outsourcing
No B.S. Time Management - A great book I read on Time Management is No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy.
The Game Inventor's Guidebook - by Brian Tinsman, 2002 I checked this out of my local library today and its pretty interesting... didn't address what I wanted to know, which was how to actually design an online gaming system (indeed this doesn't cover online games at all), but for board games etc. it's pretty good. Here's the TOC: 1. How they diid it: Trivial Pursuit Magic, the Gathering Dungeons & Dragons Pokemon Trading Card Game Interview with an inventor Interview with a publisher 2. How the industry works 1. What's in it for you 2. How new games happen 3. Anatomy of a publisher 4. Markets for games 3. Games and companies you should know 1. Mass market games you should know 2. Mass market companies you should know 3. Hobby games you should know 4. Hobby companies you should know 5. American specialty games and companies you should know 6. European specialty games and companies you should know 4. Self publishing 1. What am I getting into 2. Before you print 3. After you print 5. Selling a game step by step 1. How to invent a game 2. Game design 3. Game development 4. Targeting publishers 5. Before you submit 6. Eight submission strategies 7. Contacting publishers 8. Protecting your property 9. What to do if they don't say yes 10. What to do if they do say yes! 11. The game industry's dirty little secret 6. Resources and examples Publishers and mnufacturers Distributors Brokers Game conventions and trade shows Industry publications Sample query letter Sample record of disclosure Sample licensing agreement Sample option agreement
MLM Master Distributor Needed - Hi, We are launching a brand new MLM company this month and we need to bring on a Master Distributor to launch the company. If you have built a large downline, we want to talk with you asap. This position will be at the forefront of the company, and we are considering giving this position overrides on all company sales. Note, this is a one-time offer to interview with us as our initial Master Distributor positions will no longer be available. If you believe you are capable of helping please contact me here: skipsanzeri@yahoo.com Please send along any detail about downlines you’ve built including size etc. Thanks Skip
Importing from Russia - Hi Master - should you not have some idea of what you want to import? This would make the search easier to find someone.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Substance Abusing Employee

How To Improve Your CTA (Call To Action)

The True Cost of Employee Turnover

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.