What’s The Secret Behind Conducting An Effective Performance Management? | Part 1

Leaders have a responsibility of constantly communicating the company vision and expectations to their team members. Clearly defining the role helps employees focus on personal as well as company goals and check from time to time if both align with each other. That’s why leaders focus on aligning individual effort with teamwork with the help of performance management. However, there’s a secret to implementing a fair and an effective performance management process. It begins with a clear strategy that defines the action plan, key measurements and review process, with instances of appreciation.

Leaders! Let the secret out

Define an action plan

As much as it is important to discuss with your team about the scope of work, improvement, and strategies to improve results, it’s also important to do it all through appreciation. It will show your team that you trust them and value their inputs. Also, if you are working on a project with your team you have to ensure that you are present with them throughout the work and effort and not just show up towards the end.

Planning and execution is the time when you get to interact and bond with your team. As a result, when it’s time for you to score them you’d closely know who has put in all the effort and deserves the appreciation.

Measure the impact

When you measure the impact of the work that you do you get to monitor a bunch of meaningful insights. Otherwise it’ll be like shooting in the dark.

• The steps or channels that bring maximum returns
• Areas with high potential but low returns
• Blockages or challenges faced during the project
• How to overcome these blockages if it results in better ROI

And with each step, look for people who are willing to take an initiative. Invest more time with such people because these are the ones who’d become future leaders. Therefore, it becomes even more important to encourage them to take ownership, make decisions, and appreciate them when they make an effort to do something different.

Otherwise, you’ll only be surrounded by people who will say yes to everything that you favour and no to everything you dislike. You don’t want to build a team of parrots. You want to build a team of future leaders.

Don’t worry, it’s scary for all successful leaders in the beginning

The greatest and most successful world leaders have all undergone resistance and apprehension. There were people and challenges that didn’t want them to succeed but they still did – Jobs, Jack Ma, Bill Gates, Bezos, Tata – higher the success, bigger the challenges. Which is why world leaders invest in their people through a comprehensive performance management program. It encourages data-driven approach and creates accountability for each team member.

Build an engaging performance management process

Performance management and feedback sessions must be more of a discussion than a monologue. Nobody wants to hear about what they did wrong over and over. That’s not the reason why people spend 10-12 hours each day at work. They invest more time to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them. With this they expect their leaders to help them grow. Therefore, while building a performance management process make sure that you are putting each individual team member at the centre of performance management.

Here’s how successful world leaders do it-

1. Keep the performance review open, honest, transparent, and constructive. Tell your team members what they did right, where they could have done better, and how to improve on future projects.
   
   
2. Involve each and every member in the performance review discussion so that every team member is able to see the 360-degree review on his/her performance.
   
   
3. Create a clear demarcation between high performance and low performance because your team needs to know from you whether their work is creating an impact or not.
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4. Leaders could also use performance appraisal to evaluate employee performance against established goals and expectations, identify areas of strength and weakness, and provide feedback to help employees improve their performance
   
   
5. While giving feedback, be a team coach and not just a boss. Whether your team improves or not or contributes in ways that are unique in the system depends on you. So, work on your speech and create an interactive sessions because it matters to your team.

Conclusion

Performance management can be stressful but it doesn’t mean that you have stress over it every time you conduct a performance review meeting. Just think about the benefits it will provide your team and the organisation. As a leader, you can build a culture where teams outperform and are fearless and it happens when you conduct fair performance reviews. Therefore, don’t worry about building a perfect performance management process because it’s about showing improvements in the next quarter.

Lastly, don’t invest too much time or effort on building it from scratch. It’s going to be clerical and inefficient. Therefore, trust automation and select the right people tool that will help you build a stronger team. It will keep track of individual performance, ratings, 1-on-1’s, etc and thus, automating the routine tasks and giving you more time to interact with your team.

Therefore, invest in your capabilities, practicing the continuous approach to both performance acceleration and performance measurement, and gauging the impact of employee engagement and turnover very closely. Utilizing performance management software can greatly aid in this process by providing the tools needed to track and analyze employee performance and engagement metrics effectively.

For more on people technology and automation, please visit peopleHum!

Read part 2 of this blog