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It’s that time of year again. Business plans and budgets are signed off, employee reviews are due and the annual objective-setting extravaganza is looming.
In the ideal world, this all happens seamlessly. As a manager, you have a clear line of sight to the organsation’s vision and goals; your manager discusses their objectives with you - along with the targets and measures in place; you have a pleasant, inspiring and meaningful conversation that crystallises for you exactly what you need to do, how you need to do it and exactly what you will have done at the end of the year to contribute to the success of the business. You can’t wait to go and have a similar conversation with your team to set them all on the way to success, leaving you to concentrate on your bit.
Sound familiar? If not, you are not alone. Here is a selection of some of the things I hear from people at all levels of organisations:
- ‘My manager hands me his objectives and tells me to go and write my own’
- ‘I haven’t seen the business plan - I’m not sure if there is one for my department’
- ‘My department uses a scorecard/dashboard to report results - but I haven’t seen it’
- ‘I’m still waiting for my manager to send me his objectives before I set mine and my team’s’ (this was heard half way through the performance year)
- ‘There’s no point in setting objectives, things cahnge so fast they never bear any relation to reality by the end of the year’
- ‘Sometimes it’s easier to set the objectives retrospectively-at least that way they show the reality of how the year turned out’
- ‘It’s just another meaningless HR exercise that I have to do’
- ‘Why do I need objectives - I know what my job is’
So why do people need objectives if they know what their job is?
Recent research by the Corporate Leadership Council demonstrated that employees perfrom better (their research shows 20% improvement) if you can answer the following questions for them:
- What do you want me to do?
- How do I fit into and contribute to the success of the organisation?
- How am I performing?
- How can I progress my career in the organisation?
- What other factors surround my job?
Their research also found that the employee’s manager is the key to engaging and gaining commitment from the employee. Yet all too frequently, performance management - all elements of it- is seen as irksome and something that needs to be done on top of the day job if and when there is time. NEWSFLASH - if you are a manager, this IS the day job. The good news is that, the better you are at this bit of your role, the more time you have to be working more strategically at the stuff you should be doing and less time is spent having to micro-manage or react to problems that occur as a result of people not having or taking responsibility for their work.
So, how do you do it?
- Communicate the business plans and targets
As a senior manager, you should know what these are - how can you and your team perform without them? What can happen is that objective-setting season can start before final versions of the plan and budgets are signed off. However, in most organisations, the plan is an updated iteration of the year before with key projects and deliverables amended to reflect the previous year’s successes. If you haven’t seen the plan, ask for it. If it’s not ready for onward communication, discuss with your manager what reasonable assumptions can be made - they can always be updated later.
- Set objectives
Effective objectives are set during a two way conversation that both aligns and engages your team member - ask questions to establish what will be meaningful for them whilst getting you the commitment you need.
Make sure the objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable (linked with your scorecard), Achievable, Relevant and Timebound). And ensure that your employees know HOW to achieve them - what company values and behaviours do they need to demonstrate to achieve them?
Set short-term objectives that allow for some quick wins and that act as milestones for longer term objectives. Taht way they stay fresh and current and prevent ‘end-of-year-itis’ where you see frantic activity in the week before the annual review as people try and get stuff done that may no longer be relevant.
- Review progress
Most organisations plan for half yearly reviews. This should be the bare minimum and ideally objectives need to be reviewed on an ongoing basis to ensure employees haven’t been taken down any blind alleys or are working on projects that don’t align to company success; and to re-engage and re-focus them on the role they play in creating success.
- Re-visit objectives
‘No plan survives its collision with reality’ (Susan Scott, ‘Fierce Conversations’). There is no point getting to the end of the year and trying to review someone’s performance if the objectives you are reviewing bear no resemblance to reality. Priorities change - external and internal events have an impact on the business being able to deliver what it set out to do at the beginning of the year. Objectives can be changed and amended in line with these changes- but not because the individual concerned has not delivered.
Ongoing communication, engagement and performance management
Too often, team members turn up to reviews with a set of objectives nobody remembers setting. The copies they bring are dog-eared, creased, crumpled and coffee-stained from where they have been dragged out of the bottom of a drawer from under a year’s worth of paperwork. Too often, managers turn up with versions that are out of date and have never even been signed off.
If you want to get the best out of your people, you need to speak to them on a regular basis. What does ‘regular’ mean? Well, not once every six months! We are talking at least once a month for a quality conversation. What does ‘quality’ mean? Well, not ‘walk with me on the way to my next meeting’. And not a 10 minute chat in an open team space over the top of a desk divider, but in a quiet area with phones and Blackberrys switched off (no-one is that indispensable) so that you can update your employee on any changes that might have happened or might be looming that will impact on their progress and any blockers that might be getting in the way ; so that you can discuss together ways in which those blockers might be removed; so that you can recognise progress and successes and identify next steps; so that you can nip in the bud any performance issues and agree on measures to address them.
Still not convinced? Let’s go back to that 20% performance improvement. This is a pretty conservative figure and it can seem as though there’s a lot of effort that needs to go in to get 20% more. However, think again. If each person in your team was really performing 20% better than they do now, what would it look like?
- 20% of projects coming in 20% quicker and at 20% less cost?
- 20% less of your time spent answering questions and resolving day to day problems?
- 20% better attendance from each person?
- 20% fewer customer complaints?
- 20% more potential clients turned into sales?
And what about you?!
