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Transforming Performance Management – A Team Game?

FranLake101

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!

    Smarter Hybrid Working – it’s more than “three days in the office”

    FranLake101

    Intro

    Around a year ago I posted on LinkedIn about Virgin Money’s new ways of working.  Since then, the work has been profiled by Gartner, and referenced in this month’s Harvard Business Review.   I really expected to see a great wave of new working practices as organisations designed better ways of working.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened.

    Instead, I see a lot of hybrid models of “x days in the office”.  I don’t see a focus on performance, simply a compromise between flexibility and control.  Without that focus on performance, it is a bit messy.  Some conclude that hybrid work is “the worst of both worlds”. (Economist), and others that budget pressures might reduce flexible working practices (Management Today).  

    This binary, good or bad approach isn’t constructive.  Of course, there are challenges with hybrid working – we’re learning new approaches. We need to treat this as a series of experiment -test, learn, refine.   By doing this we can design smarter hybrid working, improving wellbeing, engagement, performance and productivity.  Over the next few weeks I’m going to try and share some thinking, starting with some high level principles and then getting into some of the details.  

    As ever, I’d love to get into conversation about this.  Please comment, and please reach out if you’d like to chat about what this could look like for your business.

    Elevating the goals of hybrid

    Some hybrid approaches are simply about adjusting policy and fitting in with the crowd.  It’s not a purposeful or strategic decision. We need to aim higher, and deliver on three goals:

    1. Higher Productivity – the organisational lens

    Office work is fairly wasteful, to the point where it inspired the 4-day week movement.  Equally, there are plenty of shortcomings in flexible working practice.  However, it is entirely possible to design for more productivity through better working practice, managing distractions, better meeting management.  

    2. Greater Engagement – the collective human lens 

    Corporate performance is driven by engagement and by culture.  We work together in the interest of our organisation.  A hybrid environment means engagement and culture are different, more local, and require more active intervention.  

    3. Better Wellbeing – the individual human lens

    Wellbeing is the fuel for performance.  If there’s no wellbeing, then (1) and (2) don’t happen.  We should be designing work to reduce stress and burnout, and to maximise the chance of our employees being able to work at their best.  Even if that includes, as Dan Pink advocates, an afternoon nap.  

    Design Principles for Smarter Hybrid

    To deliver on those goals, I’d suggest hybrid design needs to start with three principles:

    1.  We employ trustworthy, responsible and self-motivated adults

    Given the efforts of recruitment, management, and engagement this should be obvious.  However, it’s clear that many people don’t start from a position of trust.  The BBC reported on Productivity paranioa last month.  This month an interview with a leader in HBR asks “are you concerned that remote workers will shirk?”.  I’ve run sessions with Finance Directors who’ve been unclear how to make their people work remotely.  

    If you can start from this principle being true, then it creates a virtuous cycle.  If you demonstrate trust in your people and treat them as adults then you can have open conversations about their responsibility to deliver their work, support the team and the organisation succeed.  It shifts the dynamic from me to we.

    2.  Choice within a framework

    Hybrid working can’t be a free-for-all.  There needs to be some framework within which you give people as much choice as possible.  Be clear on your boundaries, and clear on why you’ve got them.  Let me illustrate by comparing two options:

    (a)  You must be in the office two days a week. You can choose which days.

    (b) You must be in on Tuesdays between 10 and 3, for team meetings and planning sessions.  

    (a) gives zero guarantee about meeting team-mates, and no purpose to being in the office.  (b) is more fixed in certain respects but uses time in a very purposeful ways supporting teamwork, direction and connection.   

    The critical point is to have rules for a reason – getting back to treating your people as self-motivated adults, you need to avoid “because I said so”.  Aim to give as much clarity, and offer as much freedom as possible.

    3. Good managers make good teams

    If you’re trusting your people, and you’re empowering within a framework, then the manager becomes even more critical.  They are the linchpin in getting teams aligned and working well.  This strengthens managers (the single greatest influence on engagement) (Gallup) and strengthens team psychological safety (one of the greatest drivers of performance) (Accenture).

    This is likely to be a point of failure though – it’s likely your managers are underskilled for doing this.  Agreeing and managing hybrid is a new skill, and they were probably underinvested in anyway (see great research from Jack  Wiley).  Manager standards are patchy in most organisations – my team analysed 700 managers, and found satisfaction with manager ranged from 1005 down to 17% (i.e. in some teams 1 in 6 people thought the manager was competent!).  

    If you want hybrid to work, managers need help.  They need the skills and practices to make this work.  That doesn’t need grand management development courses, but it definitely needs some support. 

    Let’s get real – is it possible?

    It is entirely possible to create smarter hybrid work.  I’ve done it. I’ve linked to some of the information about the approach we introduced at VM above.  I can share more if you’re interested – just let me know, but for now let me give a quick summary of “A Life More Virgin”.

    We shaped our approach to work on 4 critical elements.  The first two create the framework, allowing for empowerment and individual tailoring:

    1. personas set the group boundaries – 5 simple groups of roles based on the level of flexibility.
    2. teams agreed their rhythms – how, where and when they’d meet.
    3. stage – individuals considered work requirements based on work and life stage (e.g. new to work or employer, change in role, caring responsibilities).
    4. life – allowing people to tailor work to their situations, e.g. creating space for Friday prayers, spending time in the office because home was unsuitable etc.

    The approach was deployed across the business over 8 months, rolled out area by area.  In each function managers received three briefing sessions, they were supported in agreeing team rhythms with their team. Individuals were provided with the work-happy app to help them identify what mattered to them in work, and how to optimise this.

    Is it perfect?  Of course not.  However, it is a start and gives everyone something to build on.  It’s now followed with ongoing work to tweak and improve work.

    What next?

    I really hope this has whet the appetite and stimulated some thought.  In the next few weeks I’ll dive into some of the challenges.  I’m roughly thinking of covering:

    • Leadership – the opportunities and challenges for senior leaders.
    • HR – the conflicting pressures and demands on the people function.
    • Managers – the criticality of managers, and how to help them.
    • Recruitment and onboarding – “new starters can’t learn the ropes”.

    I’ll also aim to address some of the challenges and barriers that I hear most frequently:

    • Learning and career development – “how can I learn from experienced colleagues”, “how can I build a career with no visibility?”
    • Culture, inclusion and engagement – “remote workers aren’t connected”.
    • Performance and productivity – “how do I know my people are working”.

    Do let me know if you’ve got a pet subject you’d like me to cover, and as ever give me a yell if I can help you shape brilliant work for your organisation.