Category Archives: performance management

Now what?

Posted on July 18, 2018 by | Leave a comment

You’ve hired good people, set goals, helped them identify development opportunities, scheduled and held performance reviews, managed workloads, and overall avoided the “bad manager” actions Dee Anne described. What else do you need to do to build organizational talent and help your people succeed? Give them feedback on how they are doing!

In his white paper, The Hard Truth About Effective Performance Management, Marc Effron highlights the evidence that on-going coaching and feedback is a requirement for effective performance management. To truly help people improve their performance, coaching must be focused and delivered regularly. To help busy managers coach effectively Effron recommends a process called 2 + 2 Coaching. It has four steps:

  1. Have a dedicated coaching conversation once a quarter.
  2. Schedule it for 15 minutes.
  3. Provide two comments to the employee on their progress towards their goals.
  4. Provide two comments to the employee on what they could do more or less of in the future to be more effective.

Clear and direct feedback has been shown to be a crucial element for high performance and goal attainment. Clearly you will be working with your people to solve problems, develop ideas, complete projects and other on-going tasks. However, carving out time for dedicated coaching and feedback on goals will help you effectively develop and build organizational talent and increase the performance of your people and your team.

Todd Thorsgaard

 

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Posted in build organizational talent, coaching, goals, performance management

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Are you a bad manager?

Posted on July 13, 2018 by | Leave a comment

A recent newsletter from the Association for Talent Development included an article called “9 Bad Manager Mistakes That Make Good People Quit.” They cited a statistic from Gallup that you’ve probably heard before – 70% of an employee’s motivation is directly tied to actions by his or her manager.

People don’t quit organizations, they quit managers. So how can you be the sort of manager that doesn’t send good employees job hunting?  Here are some tips from the article, which was reprinted in Huffington Post.

  1. Manage workloads – I’ve heard many employees say that they appreciate the work/life balance provided in their job at Minnesota State. That not only supports motivation, but it’s effective management. Overworked people are not as productive and are significantly less engaged.
  2. Recognizing contributions – Everyone likes to be acknowledged for their good work, and high performers often value it even more. Figure out what type of recognition your employees need, and then provide it on a regular basis.
  3. Provide development opportunities – Our environment is about learning and growing. Not only do our employees want to provide that for students, but they also want a chance to keep their own skills current and develop new ones.
  4. Honor commitments – Highly engaged employees usually report that they work for a manager who is reliable and trustworthy.
  5. Engage creativity – Encourage people to use their talents to improve the work they do. It will engage their creative problem-solving skills and tap into their passions.
  6. Care about your employees – Effective mangers know how to balance professionalism with being human. They understand that people have lives outside of work – they help celebrate successes and are supportive of difficult issues.

Dee Anne Bonebright

 

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Posted in higher education, Leadership, performance management

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GOOOOOOOOAL!!

Posted on July 11, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Every four years I am captivated by the amazing performances of the World Cup soccer players. Add the famous GOOOOOOAL call by announcer Andres Cantor and it is “must see TV!”

Big goals also lead to high performance in the world of work. In Marc Effron’s soon to be released book, 8 Steps to High Performance:Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest), he highlights the science behind goal setting:

  • Specific goals improve performance.
  • Bigger goals are more motivating than smaller goals.
  • Fewer goals lead to higher performance.

Based on this research he describes a four step process to set goals with your people to help them perform at the highest level.

  1. Align – individual goals need to directly contribute to what is most important to your institution’s success.
  2. Promise – limit individual goals to those important few that an individual is emotionally committed to and willing to “promise” to complete.
  3. Increase – individual goals need to focus on concrete improvement in performance.
  4. Frame – write the goals so they are clear, easy to understand and succinct.

Not everyone gets to score a goal in the World Cup but you can help all your people be star performers in their own way.

Todd Thorsgaard

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Posted in build organizational talent, goals, Motivation, performance management

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Help your staff grow

Posted on July 9, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks I’ve been conducting annual performance reviews with my staff. In preparation for our conversations, I ask my staff to not only document their accomplishments and performance goals, but to think about their professional development goals as well. Helping my staff grow and learn is highly satisfying. And according to career development expert and author Beverley Kaye, it is essential to retaining high performing individuals.

In her book, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go, Kaye offers up simple strategies that leaders can use help their staff grow in their careers, including:

  • Have short, frequent conversations with your staff about their career development
  • Listen attentively. Let your employees do 90% of the talking in your personal sessions.
  • Be curious and encourage curiosity. You do not need to have all the answers.
  • Provide constructive feedback regularly.
  • Discuss career development as a “rock-climbing wall” where employees can move up, down or sideways – or hang on and stay put

Kaye also recommends employing hindsight, foresight, and insight conversations:

  • During hindsight conversations, encourage people to look within themselves and examine where they’ve been in the past
  • During foresight conversations, ask staff to look outside of themselves and consider their future paths
  • Use insight conversations to combine hindsight and foresight

While professional development conversations between supervisors and their direct reports shouldn’t be limited to once a year, I find annual  performance reviews a helpful time to focus on professional development conversations. It gives my staff an opportunity to discuss how they are wanting to grow their careers and it gives me a chance to encourage them and provide additional ideas for development that might include stretch assignments, new work projects, professional certifications, continuing education, and service opportunities.

How do you help your employees grow?

Anita Rios

 

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Posted in build organizational talent, Developing Capacity, Engagement, goals, Leadership, performance management

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It’s performance review time – how do you feel?

Posted on July 6, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Annual performance reviews can be a useful tool in building organizational talent. On the other hand, if it’s not done well it can be like going to the dentist or getting an immunization – necessary to maintain health but not particularly fun.

From the employee’s point of view it’s a chance to focus on what we’ve done well this year and where we’d like to go in the future. I was having a bad day on Monday morning, and receiving my review from Anita actually made it much better. It’s very engaging to hear what your supervisor appreciates about you and to think about possibilities for development.

From the manager’s point of view performance reviews are a chance to reinforce things that are going well and develop goals for the next year. It’s much easier to hold people accountable for their performance if you’ve both agreed on what successful performance looks like. In my review, Anita and I created a set of goals that I will be able to report on in our ongoing conversations.

As an HR professional, I see the value in having the annual review meeting. I’m also well aware that they are going out of favor in many organizations, with the focus shifting to more frequent ongoing conversations. Since many of us at Minnesota State are starting a new cycle, here are some tips to make next year’s reviews effective.

  1. No surprises – the annual review should be a summary of conversations that you’ve had throughout the year. It’s a chance to focus on what’s gone well and what should happen in the future.
  2. It’s not about the form – whatever the process is at your institution, focus on having a meaningful conversation, not on filling out the form and selecting ratings.
  3. Don’t rely on memory – If your employee does something extraordinary in the next month, it will be nearly impossible to remember that a year from now. Keeping notes will make the process easier and more accurately reflect the full year.
  4. Take it seriously – I’ve heard way too many stories about people who don’t get a review at all, or who are asked to fill out their own form, which the supervisor then signs without comment. That’s demoralizing for the employee and can come back to bite the manager. It’s really difficult to manage a performance problem if the employee has a track record of reviews that exceed expectations.

Making the annual review the capstone to a year of effective performance management will help it feel more like getting ready for a 4th of July party than a medical appointment.

Dee Anne Bonebright

 

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Want high performance? Build a learning culture!

Posted on July 2, 2018 by | Leave a comment

According to David Mallon of Bersin & Associates, if you want a high performance organization, it’s imperative that you build a learning culture. In his research of successful, high performing organizations, he’s found that “a culture of learning and a culture of high performance are significantly linked.”  Intuitively, it makes sense that the smarter your organization is the better it can perform.

So, what is a learning culture, you might ask?  Bersin & Associates define it as a  “collective set of organizational values, conventions, processes and practices that continuously impels organizations and individuals to build knowledge, competence and performance.” And while a learning culture supports training and leadership development, it isn’t limited to formal development programs.

In Bersin’s comprehensive report, Mallon identifies 40 best practices and seven strategies that organizations can use to create a learning culture. Here is a sample:

  1. Assign staff to do jobs that surpass their skills and knowledge – Ask people to stretch. Use difficult assignments to encourage employees to push themselves to develop new skills and improve their old ones.
  2. Let people participate in selecting their assignments – Employees work hardest when their jobs and tasks interest them. Google takes advantage of this by permitting its engineers to devote a fifth of their time to personal projects.
  3. Recognize workers who learn new information and abilities – Provide rewards that show you care about each person’s learning.
  4. Value mistakes and failures – Employees learn best from their mistakes. Capitalize on errors as learning opportunities. And give people time to reflect on them.
  5. Emphasize learning as an important activity – Demonstrate its value in tangible ways; for example, make managers responsible for their staff’s professional development, not just their output. Actions always speak louder than words.
  6. Take a personal interest in the organizational capabilities of teams and individuals – Mentor the people you supervise.

During the next month, we’ll be exploring these ideas and more as we dive deeply into our next leadership competency of Building Organizational Talent. What strategies have you used to build a learning culture?

Anita Rios

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Posted in build organizational talent, building teams, Evaluation, goals, hiring, leadership challenges, organizational culture, performance management

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Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Posted on October 6, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Whatever your role, knowing how to be a transformational leader and how to be a transactional leader is important. While you may spend more time doing one or the other, it’s important to understand and use both skill sets.

A distinction is often made between “leadership” and “management.” In my mind, this is similar to being “transformational” and being “transactional.” For example, this 2011 article in an international management journal described some of the differences.

  • Leadership thinking focuses on people and looks outward; management thinking focuses on things and looks inward
  • Leadership goal-setting creates a vision; management goal-setting executes plans
  • Leadership creates change; management implements change
  • Leadership trusts and develops people; management directs and coordinates people
  • Leadership sees the forest; management sees the trees

As management expert John Kotter points out in this conversation, organizations need both superb leadership and superb management. In your leadership role, sometimes you have to be a transformational leader who can create a vision and inspire people to follow it.  Other times, you may need to be a transactional leader who can provide specific feedback to help people get the day-to-day work done.

Dee Anne Bonebright

 

 

 

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Posted in higher education, Leadership, leading authentically, mission and vision, performance management

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The dreaded review!

Posted on July 29, 2016 by | Leave a comment

h-WOMAN-TALKING-OFFICE-628x314A leader at one of our schools remarked that when done right, performance reviews can be energizing and uplifting but when done wrong they are demoralizing. It appears that the latter is what is happening in most organizations. David Ulrich, the Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the University of Michigan and the “Godfather of HR” just published an article in the  latest issue of Talent Quarterly titled “Resolving the Performance Management Paradox.” He cites that 90% of HR professionals are unhappy with their review system, only 14% of CEOs believe that the review system is working and only 8% of HR executives believe that performance management makes a contribution to the success of the organization. Yet, he also cites a long history of studies that clearly indicate that accountability makes a difference. In fact one study identified that just the presence of a performance review system is the greatest predictor of success for hospitals. What can a leader do?

Ulrich recommends that regardless of the process or forms used, leaders embrace conversations:  conversations focused on what he calls “positive accountability,” conversations emphasizing learning and improvement opportunities rather than evaluating what went wrong, and conversations primarily focused on the future rather than the past. He suggests that leaders look for opportunities to engage in “real time” conversations that are ongoing and revolve around work events (projects, semester start or finish, work cycle periods, annual milestones, etc.) Leaders should focus on asking questions to discover how employees can sustain success and prepare for the future and help their people look forward to apply what they have learned and address new opportunities or challenges that arise.

A simple conversational model for leaders to use with their performance review process includes the following three steps:

  • Know Yourself – ask about and discuss each person’s strengths, weaknesses, passions and interests.
  • Action for Growth – ideas and concrete action to leverage individual strengths and interests to support success and on-going development.
  • My Value – dialogue focused on the value that each employee provides to the work unit, institution, students, stakeholders or overall organization.

By focusing less on the process and more on the conversation we can make performance reviews a more uplifting experience.

Todd Thorsgaard

 

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Posted in Accountability, build organizational talent, communication, higher education, Motivation, performance management, talent management

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High diving requires a deep pool

Posted on July 6, 2016 by | Leave a comment

CNI nw_mf_danny_cox_0719.jpgIn one month high divers from around the world will be competing at the summer Olympics in Rio. If I was one of those divers I would hope that the leaders in Rio have done the work needed to build deep pools, even though these Olympics are facing budget, political, economic, environmental and workplace challenges.

Our organizations also need deep pools of talent to be successful when facing a future of changing demographics, fluid governmental demands, volatile customer expectations and a diminishing workforce. Creating individual development plans (IDPs) and continually developing your own people helps leaders fill their talent pools and keep their people engaged with the organization.

Paula Asinof, a leadership consultant, provides tips on how to use IDPs to fill your talent pool in her article, IDPs: Talent Development’s Superglue, in the January 2016 TD magazine.

  1. Start with a gap analysis and ask each employee:
    • where are your talents now?
    • what talents need to be developed or do you want to develop?
  2. Craft only one to three goals based on the answers (see previous post on SIMple Goals)
  3. Utilize a wide range of development opportunities:
    • on-the-job experience
    • coaching/mentoring
    • development-focused work assignmnets
    • training
    • education
    • interim assignments
    • temporary assignmnets
  4. Focus on outcomes and provide regular check-ins

Overall the IDPs you develop with your people need to be simple, clear and realistic. It isn’t the Olympics but a deep talent pool can help you win during challenging times.

Todd Thorsgaard

 

 

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Posted in Developing Capacity, performance management, talent management

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Too many words!

Posted on April 13, 2016 by | Leave a comment

too many words quoteA colleague of mine shares a funny but helpful story on ineffective feedback. She was a co-owner of a small business and the co-owners decided they needed to terminate one of their employees after a long and unsuccessful progressive discipline attempt. Her business partner was a nice guy but had trouble delivering tough messages. Since he had hired the employee he wanted to deliver the news. He met with the terminated employee for an hour and later reported to my colleague that it was a tough meeting but it went well and he had asked the fired employee to pack up his office at the end of the day and wished him luck.

Much to her surprise the next day the “fired” employee was at his desk working away. Her co-owner had been so unclear, so indirect and so muddled that the employee had no clue that he had been terminated! Not effective feedback at all.

As this article in the New York Times reminds us, the purpose of feedback is to help people do better, not feel better. Both positive and negative feedback need to be straightforward. Being direct and clear is key to effective feedback and will improve leadership communication. The What and Why model I learned a number of years ago can help leaders overcome the tendency to over-complicate feedback and keep it focused. Effective feedback only needs to include – and must include:

  • What specifically the person did, said, or didn’t do. The behavior or action that you want to reinforce or needs to be changed. Stated directly, specifically and clearly. No extra explanations or editorializing – “just the facts!”
  • Why it matters. A short but direct statement that describes the impact or consequences of the action or behavior. Either positive or negative. Again, no editorializing or explanations at this time.

Nothing more and nothing less.

Todd Thorsgaard

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