A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the transformational power of performance ratings. Today I thought I’d cover another neglected aspect of performance management – the team. I’m going to cover three things in this post:
- Why teams are important for performance
- How performance management fails to tap into this
- Offer some options for building team performance
As ever, if you’d like to discuss more please share your thought or reach out. I’d be delighted to chat, or help you shape a great performance approach for your organisation.
Teamwork makes the dream work
We know the best teams are far more than the sum of their parts. We see it every day in music, sport, performance and beyond.
We organise people into teams at work. Old school controlling management thinks this is for administration and communication cascade. New school management knows it drives performance. Teams help each other out, back each other up, have shared identity and goals. They build identity and connection through sitting together, delivering work, sharing stories, giving feedback, drinking tea and more.
Modern research has shown that this social side supports team performance. It is almost a decade since Google identified psychological safety as a critical factor in creating high performing teams. Gallup identified peer-to-peer recognition as particularly valuable for engagement. Other research has identified that work friendships aid engagement, mutual accountability and performance. Team performance is a combination of social connection, mutual accountability and trust. And worth noting – this isn’t management control. It’s about the dancers on the stage, not the director watching from the wings.
Performance Management doesn’t make the dream work
Strangely, performance management is almost entirely silent on teamwork. Sure, many companies have a value like “we succeed together”, but that’s not built into systems of processes. Classic performance is resolutely individual:
- Goal setting is hierarchical, not horizontal. There’s no team contribution.
- Individual goals are opaque to team-mates, so harder to collaborate.
- Performance is reviewed individual not collectively.
- Feedback is typically manager to colleague, not peer-to-peer.
- Performance ratings even put people in competition with colleagues.
There’s a mismatch isn’t there? We know teamwork drives performance, but our approach to managing performance ignores teamwork! How to we address that gap?
5 Options for team performance
I’ll share five key areas that can build team elements into performance management. These five come from different work in different organisations – applying to your context is absolutely critical. Very happy to chat through if you’d like to reach out.
1. Team Goals.
Mckinsey recently published a report on the state of performance and included discussion of team and personal goals. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and it really needs to be ground in your context. There’s a degree of bravery here too – it’s not easy trying to change a paradigm! I’d see a few key decisions for team goal setting – determine the process for agreeing them, how they are recorded and measured, how are they reviewed, what is the relationship to individual goals. I’d recommend a goal framework that would involve some or all of: team goals, enterprise goals, individual goals and mandatory goals. Be explicit about the approach and the expectations, and make sure the process and systems support.
2. Team Reviews.
This is a natural follow on. We mandate 1-1 frequency, provide guidance and outline agendas. We provide forms to aid discussion and record outputs. We can do the same for team performance. Set the expected frequency, give guidance on agenda and approach to capture. A well designed team review is an exercise in strengthening team bonds as much as it is in reviewing performance and progress.
3. Peer to Peer Feedback.
Shifting the weight of feedback from evidence for year-end discussions to ongoing, positive feedback is utterly transformational. My favourite model is Thumbs-Up and Lightbulb, or “one thing I like and one to make it even better”. This approach strengthens relationships, builds on strengths and creates a cycle of incremental gains. Find a way to jumpstart peer-to-peer feedback, e.g. offering a challenge to see if we can give 100 pieces of feedback by date x. Once you’ve got it going, it can become self-sustaining.
4. Help Managers.
Lots of this is difficult for managers. Dealing with people 1-1 is less complex, if more time consuming than engaging the team. Moving from being directive to being facilitative is challenging. Finding the time and mental capacity to process changes in approach is tough. Most organisations have a kind of postcode lettery of manager capability – move team and your experience can be wildly different. In the absence of much managerial support, we learn from our managers, and that perpetuates the lottery. To help managers with this shift requires core tools, e.g. team meeting agendas and question sets. It requires upskilling in facilitating and chairing discussions.
5. Get managers out of the way.
The best driver of team performance I’ve ever seen was actually a learning programme that wasn’t targeting performance. It was a weekly 20-minute session facilitated in teams without the manager present. The remarkable thing was it drove 15%+ in every single measure of colleague survey (engagement, understanding strategy, intent to stay, advocacy etc). In this instance the role of the manager was to protect the time for the team and trust them to get on with it. The impact was remarkable. Finding ways for the manager to not intervene and really demonstrate trust is so powerful. On a personal level, I used to coach kids hockey, and the best advice I ever had was to coach the substitutes, not the players in the midst of a match. That encourages players to interact, problem solve and work together.
If the goal of performance management is to raise performance we need to think more widely than the individual lens. Thinking about teams and organisational performance, thinking longer-term, considering turnover and career progression are all elements of performance. Here I’ve focused on that team element. Focusing on this will help you make progress, but it needs to be part of a whole-system approach – that’s what really drives transformation.
Hope you’ve found it helpful. I’d love to hear your perspective!