Performance Management

I honestly think that employees dread hearing "It's time for your annual review" more than anything else except "You're fired." I also think that managers and supervisors dread saying those words.

What gets everyone so apprehensive? Because we try to formalize the processes to make it "easier" and more convenient, yet we tend to ignore how utterly personal the subject matter is.

Performance management is not about having an uncomfortable conversation once a year, or filling out a form to put in the personnel file to have documentation if the lawyer asks for it later. Performance management is a large, detailed tapestry that takes time, energy and detail to get right. The ultimate goal of performance management is to maximize the potential of employees, strengthen the team, and in doing so maximize the performance of the company. Everyone wins if it's done right.

As managers and supervisors, we should have regular daily conversations with our people. We should get to know them; we should build trusting relationships. These daily conversations are the bare bones threads of the tapestry. Each conversation is a thread. The more threads there are, the stronger the tapestry. Everything else, the finesse, the details, builds upon this foundation. If the substrate is crap, the outcome is a failure.

Why is performance management important? Two common sense reasons:

• maximize the company's return on investment (the company exists to make money);
  
• maximize the employee's return on investment (the employee works to earn money).

Every single employee should be able to answer a few critical questions at any point during his or her employment:

• what does my employer think I do well?
• what does my employer think I need to improve upon?
• what do I need to do to be a success in my position?

Job descriptions, by design, are usually very generalized. Competency scorecards are more detailed and give employees a roadmap for the journey. KPIs (key performance indicators) can show trends when people are struggling or when they're not challenged. None of these tools are substitutes for regular, consistent, respectful conversation. Start having honest talks today. Keep doing it. Don't avoid the hard topics just because they're uncomfortable. For those of you who have to fill out the corporate annual review forms, doing so will be easy if you've already discussed the difficult stuff. Treat people the way you'd want to be treated: respectfully. Put everything on the line, every day. Don't you owe it to yourself, your employees, and your company?