A guide to managing performance for leaders
Managing Performance
One of the toughest elements of leadership is managing your people's performance. Everyone has to meet a minimum acceptable standard, of course, but beyond that you also want to be able to lead your best people to perform at their peak.
Every situation is different, but there are some common themes running through all of this. I think the best way to deal with these would be in a Q&A format where I can guide you through a bunch of questions that explore the main aspects of the performance management cycle
How long should I give someone before I make the decision that they aren't going to be able to perform at the level I need them to?
Challenge / Coach / Confront cycle
For everyone that you have on your team, particularly those who are your direct reports, it's really important to set clear direction and expectations. That's the foundation of doing anything with performance management.
Remember, your people want to know & deserve three things:
- What are your expectations of me?
- How am I performing against those expectations?
- And, what does my future hold?
So, unless you set really clear direction and expectations upfront, people just don't know what you expect from them, and they can be blindsided when you give them some negative feedback because they didn't even know that's what you're after. Of course, once you set those expectations, you have to monitor progress, looking at the outcomes and results.
Obviously, this is done in one-on-one mode. When you're talking to people one-on-one (which you need to hold regularly), you’ll be talking about their progress to plan. Are they delivering the outcomes and the value that you've agreed?
You give people heaps of latitude and rope at the start. You can always ratchet up if you see them not hitting the mark. So start with complete trust, and work backwards from there, if necessary
So you start by giving them complete trust and autonomy, and then observe how they perform with a high degree of freedom. How would you know when you need to be more direct or to get closer to their work?
This is a really good question. This was my Achilles' heel when I was a young leader. I gave people way too much latitude. And that's okay, except that I didn't inspect their results closely enough or at regular enough intervals. So I trusted them to do their jobs, and when I had the right people this worked brilliantly. There was no problem at all. But when someone wasn't quite up to scratch, I was too slow to hear the alarm bells, and I got blindsided a couple of times.
That's when I learned how to inspect outputs more diligently.
Managing performance without dipping down
When you see someone not producing the routine outcomes that you'd expect for their role, level, and experience, start with 100% trust and autonomy and watch them closely.
See if the results you expect are being produced. And if not, bring them back into the huddle. Ask all the questions that help to clarify where they are.
You want to ask questions like, "Okay, what do you think I need from you? What are you trying to achieve? What outputs do you think are important?"
If this doesn't work, and the results still aren't being produced to the right standard, go back a little further in the chain.
"Okay. We're still not getting the outcomes we need. Let's look specifically at what you are doing or not doing that's preventing you from being successful."
So, you start with only the outcomes and outputs, the value that you're trying to see created, and then you give more and more direction until eventually you may have to step back into what they're doing: their activities.
Are they actually doing the things that are likely to achieve the outcomes they've signed up to?
But often when I push down to get greater visibility of what they're doing, I get accused of micromanaging, or have been in the past.
How do you handle that one? Because people don’t like that transparency and that openness about what they're doing.
"I shouldn't need to be getting into this level of detail. And if you were getting the required results, I wouldn't be asking these questions in the first place. But when you aren't producing the outcomes we need, my job is to try to help you to figure out why not.
This is a temporary arrangement while I help you to get back on track. But make no mistake, my expectation is that you'll be able to perform to the standard I'm setting independently, without the need for me to intervene the way I am right now."
When do you decide to ramp it up and go into formal performance management?
This is where they rationalize, make excuses, and ultimately do nothing. Formal performance management processes are a complete pain in the ass. They're time-consuming, they're full of conflict, and they're process-heavy. You want to avoid them to the greatest extent possible.
Which is why, when we look at it through the lens of the Challenge / Coach / Confront framework, it's way better to bring someone up to the required level of performance without using a formal process.
This tells us that doing everything you possibly can on a day-to-day basis to help your people to perform is where it's at. You’re much better off front-loading this effort than saving it all for the formal performance management cycle. Because once you're in there, it is invariably painful. There's no escaping it.
Knowing when to go formal
This might be a little bit controversial, but I don't ever go into formal performance management until I'm 95% sure that they're not going to make it. For me, it's an exit strategy for the individual. When do I give them a chance?
This happens before the performance management process becomes formal. It happens in the informal course of leading your people every day before there's even a hint of a formal process.
Before I contemplated moving to formal performance management, I would have already worked with this person so closely and carefully, coaching them, helping them resolve problems, and evaluating their progress, that I would know, almost without a shadow of a doubt, whether or not they could do the job.
That's why, in my experience, it would be totally left field for someone to resist all my attempts to help, but then suddenly come to life when formal performance management commences.
Of course, having said that, there's the very rare individual who doesn't seem to pay attention until they sense that their job is on the line, which is unfortunate. The commencement of formal performance management gives them that 3,000V shock with a defibrillator and, all of a sudden, they start to listen.
This is where leaders hesitate, buy why?
Well, generally it's just good old-fashioned conflict aversion. They don't want to be in an adversarial situation that may have an outcome that affects another person's life, which is fair enough. I get that. We all have those feelings. But avoidance doesn't serve the other person very well. Weak leaders will often use the restructure/redundancy option, so they don't have to go through the formal performance management process.
If they haven't competently used the Challenge / Coach / Confront framework, they'll feel guilty about letting someone go. "Maybe I could have done more." So a bag of redundancy money normally assuages their guilt.
Leaders sometimes just tend to rationalize why the person should still have a place on the team. You know, the stuff like,
"Well, Warren’s a really good guy... He gets on with everyone... He's got some great knowledge of the business after his 25 years here... He knows where the bodies are buried… Everyone likes him... and besides, he runs the footy tipping competition. He's okay. And let's face it, not everyone's going to be a star."
That's how you end up with tourists on your team. Your good people become disgruntled, because you're not dealing with issues of underperformance, and mediocrity sets in. There's no other possible outcome here. And you can bullshit yourself until the cows come home, but it doesn't change the objective reality of how this affects your team.
The cost of not managing performance
Make no mistake, without the ability to differentiate between people based on the individual performance, and without the ability to put consequences in place for people's choices about how they do perform and behave, you will reap poor performance.
No matter what you tell yourself, and no matter what the leaders above you say, you know that this is true. Look, if you're happy in this type of organization, hey, your choice to make. Just know that the culture will constrain you and your people.
Trying to buck the culture and bring true performance management is really tricky… culturally, which is not to say you shouldn't do it. But what it does mean is, you really need to have support from above if you decide that you're going to set out on that path.