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The Root of the Issue: Dealing with Poor Performance

Last week, we looked at the meaning of Performance Management.  Many people perceive it as purely ‘dealing with poor performance’.  It isn’t.  Performance management focuses on creating good performance, but it must not shy away from dealing with situations where you or I under-perform in some way.

The solution must always start with the root of the problem: if you as a manager can work with me, as an under-performing staff member, to identify what is causing my poor performance, we have the basis to fix it in the most effective manner.

The Reasons for Poor Performance

CausesofUnderPerformance

In her Performance Management Pocketbook, Pam Jones gives six examples of common causes for poor performance:

  1. Personal ability
    Can I do the task you are measuring me on?
  2. Manager ability
    Have you, in some way, let me down?
  3. Process gap
    Are our internal systems at fault?
  4. Environmental forces
    Has our organisation put barriers in my way?
  5. Personal circumstances
    Has my private life got in the way?
  6. Motivation
    How confident and enthusiastic am I?

One of the most crucial skills a manager can have is that of diagnosing the cause of any under-performance.

Diagnosis

So here is my list of the six techniques you need to hone, to allow you to discern the reasons for my under-performance.

  1. Observation
    Being able to observe keenly what I am doing and how I interact with other people, equipment and processes
  2. Understanding
    Being able to understand the links between what people do and the results they get, within the processes for which you are responsible
  3. Questioning
    Being able to ask insightful questions that lead me and you to a deeper understanding
  4. Listening
    Being able to hear the answers I give and discern what I am trying to communicate
  5. Challenge
    Being able to challenge effectively my interpretation of events, to get at underlying truths
  6. Respect
    Being able to do all of this while demonstrating your respect for me, the organisation, and yourself, in equal measure.

Management Pocketbooks to help you acquire those techniques

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What is Performance Management?

‘Performance Management’ can sound scary to anyone who is new to organisational life.  Indeed, ‘I’m going to manage your performance’ can come across – even from the nicest of managers or supervisors – as just a little bit threatening.  But it shouldn’t be.

In fact; quite the opposite.  When you understand what performance management is, whether you are a staff member or a manager/supervisor, you will also understand just how valuable it is.  As Pam Jones describes it in The Performance Management Pocketbook:

‘Performance management is about getting results.
It is concerned with getting the best from people
and helping them to achieve their potential.’

What could be more benign than that?  Of course, these are excellent words, but how does it all happen?

Get out your Toolbox

Toolbox

I rather agree with Pam that the basis of any performance management approach is the skills of the manager.  I also really like her toolbox analogy, so nicely drawn in the book by Phil Hailstone.  Pam identifies and describes a lot of tools:

Delegating *
Coaching *
Feedback *
Dealing with poor performance
Motivating *
Empowering *
Team-building *
Performance reviews

This is such a core set of managerial skills that it is no surprise to find most of them (starred) addressed by their own Management Pocketbook.  What Pam does is bring them all together into a consistent framework.

Let’s take a look in a little more detail at the remaining two.  This week, at Performance Reviews, and next week, we’ll focus on dealing with poor performance.

Performance Reviews

To be at their most effective, performance reviews need to be a part of everyday management, rather than set piece events once a month or – heavens forfend – once a year.

However, you will need milestone performance reviews at key career points and stages in the business cycle, like annually or semi-annually.  The formal reviews, at these key points, need to be carried out with greater preparation and formality, but the process remains the same, for anything from a quick five-minute ‘catch-up’ review to a formally documented annual review.

Pam’s Performance Review Process is Simple,
yet Comprehensive.

Performance Review

  1. Preparation
    Do your research.  Observe performance carefully, gather data and evidence, review against performance objectives from the last review.  Schedule the review meeting and set aside enough time, in a suitable place.
  2. The Interview
    … or, less formally, the meeting, or even the chat.  Discuss performance  since the last meeting and agree performance requirements and support process to follow.  Pam sets out a lot of good tips – especially around objective-setting and the use of balanced scorecards to get  a good mix of objectives.
  3. Ongoing Review
    This is where Pam builds in a lot of the skills I listed above, like feedback, motivation and coaching.  It is the step where Performance Management can get a bad name, if, as a manager, all I do is tell you you need to do better at step 2, then abandon you without the right support and ongoing review.  Then, all I am doing, is setting you up to fail when the next cycle reaches the interview.

So, here’s the deal

Pretty simple, yes: but not necessarily easy.  Good performance management requires a partnership and hard work from both parties.  But the rewards are great.

Some Management Pocketbooks to help you with your Performance Management

The Performance Management Pocketbook, by Pam Jones

The Performance Management Pocketbook is supported by:

More Pocketblogs about Performance Management.

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Predicting Behaviour

Kurt LewinKurt Lewin is a favourite thinker of Pocketblog’s.  He was an audacious theoretician and a pioneering social psychologist.

He generated many original  and important ideas, but none was as ambitious as what has come to be known as Lewin’s Equation.

Lewin’s equation describes behaviour and was seen, when it was published in 1936, as highly controversial.

.

Lewin’s Equation

It is well-known that whenever a writer includes an equation in her or his text, readers melt away, but HOLD ON: this one is easy!

Here it is:

B = f(P,E)

Now, I know that this looks scary to anyone who hated maths at GCSE, CSE or O level.  So let me explain.  In words, what it says is that behaviour is a function of a person and of the environment in which they find themselves.

Of course, the devil in the detail.  Even if the equation is correct, it does not tell us what measure of the person to take, what aspects of the environment are salient, nor how they combine to affect behaviour.

It doesn’t sound that contentious, but what Lewin was saying was revolutionary in its time.  It is why, in 1936, this was not a trite statement of the obvious.  What Lewin said that was new, is that we behave differently according to the environment we find ourselves in.

Before Lewin

Before this, ideas of behaviour assumed that who we are and our formative experiences would inevitably condition our behaviour.  If this were true, then if I can know enough about you – perhaps having seen how you behaved in the past – then I can predict your behaviour.

Now, Lewin has told us that this is, in principle, not possible.  Because every situation is different and the new environment that you find yourself in will change your behaviour.

People are not predictable

Not only that, but the big shift in social science and in economic theory in the last couple of decades has been a steady recognition that neither is our behaviour rational.

Much economic modelling assumes markets are operated by rational agents.  But our behaviour is anything but rational – making our responses to market forces not only unpredictable, but crazy.  Couple that with the speed at which transactions happen, and we have the conditions for rapid and enormous swings in markets.

Environment is everything

Increasingly, the factor that we have greatest control over is not the people, but the environment.  If you want to influence behaviour, rather than try and influence people, change the environment.

It is time for greater emphasis on environmental factors in human performance.  Advertisers, marketers and store designers have known this for years.  They have studied the science of light, colour, smell and sound in a quest to influence our buying behaviours.

Yet the success of a business is linked not just to customers’ behaviours, but to those of staff.

So here is the deal

How much are you doing to influence the behaviour of your team members, by optimising their environment?  I am going to risk compounding my equation  error, by loading one more equation into the Pocketblog environment:

E = g(N,F,A)

In words, the environment is a function of Neutral background factors, plus Frustrating factors that constrain performance, plus Advancing factors that promote performance.  Who knows what the function is, or how much each term contributes to it.  But you can always play around with your environment to find how to adjust the balance of factors.  It’s time to try.

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Feedback Welcome

Welcome to the Management Pocketblog.

This is a blog dedicated to all things management and we want it to reflect the values and style of the management pocketbooks series.  You can read more about the blog at the ‘New Readers’ tab.

What Feedback do you give?

9781906610128 The newly published Feedback Pocketbook opens with a shocking statistic:  33% of British employees consider they rarely or never get feedback on their performance.  If you have an equivalent statistic for any other country, please do let us know in the comments section, below.

So let’s assume that this represents around a third of British managers, failing to offer feedback – at least in a form that it is recognised.  Are you one of them?

Wasted opportunity

Feedback helps us develop and is arguably the most valuable performance-enhancing tool that managers have.  So if you are not giving great feedback, you are losing a noticeable slice of potential performance.  It doesn’t take a big performance loss, when multiplied across all  of a manager’s team, to account for the difference between a profitable and failing business, or a successful or collapsing service.

How big could that difference be?

Bandura and Cervone

In the early 1980s, Albert Bandura and Daniel Cervone conducted experiments with students at Stanford University, on a cycling ergo meter.  They measured the performance of eighty cyclists and then split them into four groups, balanced for gender and ability:

  1. Group A
    were set goals for performance improvement
  2. Group B
    were given no goals, but feedback on their performance
  3. Group C
    got both performance goals and feedback
  4. Group D
    were a control group and got neither goals nor feedback

At the end of a training period, Bandura and Cervone found that the twenty cyclists who had received both clear performance goals and feedback had improved their performance to a higher degree (by a factor of more than 2) than any other group.  Not surprisingly, the control group (D) showed least improvement.  Surprisingly, however, the control group only improved a little less than groups A and B.

Bandura&Cervone

Goal Setting and Feedback are both vital to great performance

So here’s the deal

Our goal

… is to engage in a dialogue with Management Pocketbook readers and anyone else interested in management.  Over the next six months, we’d like to get to at least 100 readers a week, and we want to get comments on most of our posts.

Your feedback

… is more than welcome.  Let us know what you think of our blogs and our books, and contribute your ideas to supplement ours.  Give us information and ideas, and tell us what you want.

Subscribe to this blog, so you don’t miss any of our posts – we look forward to the conversation.

Reference:
Self-Evaluative and Self-Efficacy Mechanisms Governing the Motivational Effects of Goal Systems,
Albert Bandura and Daniel Cervone,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983,
Vol 45, No. 5, 1017-1028

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