Getting Results Starts with Understanding the Gaps

Performance management is complicated. It’s people. It’s process. It’s technology. It’s incentives. It’s data. It’s management skill. It’s conversation. It’s relationships. It’s all the organizational stuff mixed with all of the basic human stuff with a big topping of all of the business stuff. Yes, it includes goals and feedback and performance reviews and rewards and recognition and so on. But, you can implement all of those things and still not optimize your performance. You can do all the right things and still not get the outcomes you were looking for.

Here are 5 reasons why:

1.) We forget people are human and not just employees. If someone doesn’t feel seen as a human being at work, it’s going to be really hard for you to tap into their positive human emotions, motivations, and drivers that any great team member needs to bring to work to excel. If we treat them only as employees, then our relationships are transactional, so they will respond with transactional performance in kind. When we see our people are stressed, their eyes are watery, they look fatigued and we just plow through those human observations to get to their employee performance because we don’t have time for the rest, it proves they aren’t seen and we don’t care. We can expect them to perform accordingly.

2.) We forget people are employees and not just human. Counter to the issue above, some managers and team cultures are so kind and accommodating that we don’t accomplish much. We grind to accomplish basic goals, but we are nice about it and like each other until the business starts to falter. This is “ruinous empathy” to reference Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor. Make no mistake, being kind at the expense of helping people improve their performance is a way of sabotaging the careers of the people we say we care most about. People want to perform well. They typically know when they aren’t and the team around them certainly knows when they aren’t. And, if they don’t know, please keep reading #3 and #4 below.

3.) We manage the big things and forget about the little ones. This was my failure in my first management role. I like vision. I like latitude. I like creativity. My team liked those things too – especially for me – but not so much for themselves. People can get inspired by a big vision and direction but that can get undermined day-by-day by smaller failures and frustrations when people aren’t sure what to do or how to do it well. When our team members go home after a hard day’s work, can they say clearly if it was successful? Or, do they just know it was hard?

4.) We manage the little things and forget about the big ones. This is for my baseline micromanager friends out there who struggle for the opposite reasons I did in managing my first team. You know the details. You know what good looks like. You’ve probably done the job and done it well, which may be why you are now in a management role. So, you define and prescribe everything your team needs to do. But, there’s a big difference between clarifying roles, responsibilities, and training people how to execute versus micromanagement. In fact, I was leading a session last year when someone came up at a break and asked me the difference. He felt like all of the clarity and training and support I was suggesting could be seen as micromanagement. I offered for him to think about it this way: if you are clarifying and supporting so that people can go use their brains to execute, then you probably aren’t micromanaging. When you are clarifying and prescribing down to the detail and the microprocess for exactly how things are done and when, you’re asking people not to use their brains. You’re asking them simply to execute exactly what you prescribed and how you prescribed it. This is micromanagement.

5.) We only reward success. It’s natural that we reward success. We do it everywhere. It’s a part of our culture through schools and in communities and everywhere else. In companies, however, especially growing companies, we have a lot of stuff to figure out. We have customer engagements and products where success isn’t yet obvious, much less repeatable. We have processes that are in early versions and need to be iterated and improved upon. So, we need people to ask difficult questions, to make mistakes, to use their brains to make us better. We need people to take healthy risks. We need people to learn, but when the only thing we ever recognize is performance excellence, we risk disincentivizing this kind of risk and learning. If I want to be recognized as excellent in my performance, I probably won’t want to take on that stretch project that has a reasonable chance of failure. If I want to be recognized as excellent in a process, I may not ask that difficult question about the process or offer an idea on how it could be better. Excellence is important, but so is growth and learning, and the pathway to those sometimes isn’t excellent.

5 Performance Management Tips

1. Protect time in one-on-ones to check in on how people are doing not just what they are doing.
2. Clarify roles, responsibilities, and priorities and connect them to a bigger picture. And, do it often.
3. Show people how you think about a problem or challenge, not just how to solve it.
4. Recognize people for taking healthy risks even if they fail.
5. Define and evaluate performance not only in terms of role execution but in terms of team and culture contribution.

Employee Development, leadership development, Leadership Tips, Performance Management, Workplace Culture