In my experience, poor performance management practices typically stem not from poorly designed forms or systems, but rather the unwillingness and/or inability to do the things necessary to actively manage employee performance.
Often, Human Resources will recognize this underlying issue and work to address it by offering supervisory/management training to build skills in critical areas such as setting goals and communicating expectations, providing effective feedback, and addressing performance problems. This is a commendable first step, but it rarely solves the problem by itself. Why? Because it deals only with the "inability" to actively manage, not the "unwillingness" to do so. To move an organization toward better performance management practices, we also need to understand the reasons why supervisors and managers do not actively manage employee performance even when they have the skills and knowledge necessary to do so.
I find that the reasons tend to fall into one or both of the following categories:
1) Those at the top are not modeling good performance management practices. I recently attended an all-manager meeting at one of my clients where the CEO admonished the attendees for not getting their performance appraisals completed on time. After the meeting, the Human Resources Director confided to me that the CEO himself was typically 3 to 4 months behind in conducting performance appraisals for his reporting staff, if he did them at all. I had to wonder how he could say what he said with a straight face. Where top leaders treat performance management as an exercise in compliance, rather than a business improvement tool, it will be difficult (if not impossible) to get the rest of the organization to act any differently.
2) Managers are not held accountable for good performance management practices. One of the first questions I ask when I encounter an organization struggling with poor performance management is: "Are there any consequences for doing a poor job of performance management?" If there are no consequences, if managers are neither recognized for investing the time and energy in good performance management nor admonished for essentially ignoring the process, then we can't really be surprised by the logical outcome.
I will admit that working to address these reasons for poor performance management is a lot more difficult than sending people to training, as they necessarily involve changing either top management beliefs and behaviors (in #1) or changing organizational values, culture and/or reward systems (in #2). For many organizations, though, this is the only path to successful performance management.
Ann, the CEO achieved his position because of his ability in making hypocritical statements with a straight face, thus why he was able to do so in front of the group. :)
Posted by: Travis A. Sinquefield | August 15, 2007 at 02:13 PM
Travis:
Hopefully he has other (better?)qualifications as well!
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Posted by: Ann Bares | August 15, 2007 at 02:56 PM
This is an incredible post! Brava!
We don't model good supervisory behavior, nor does much of our training even teach new supervisors to identify and use good role models. And we don't hold supervisors accountable for supervisory work.
There's another factor, too. We get lousy supervision because we resolutely promote the wrong people. Since we don't recognize that management is a particular kind of work, we promote technicians to management. It's like selecting golf coaches based on the fact that a person is a great volleyball player.
We should be looking for people who can do management work, like helping people succeed, making decisions and confronting people about their performance and behavior. But we don't and so new managers are not only left to sink or swim, they're invited to take the whole team to the bottom with them.
Posted by: Wally Bock | August 15, 2007 at 06:57 PM