Well Led Teams

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 – why it is tough for senior leaders

    FranLake101

    A couple of weeks ago I posted some thoughts about what smarter hybrid could look like.  I want to build on that by looking at some of the barriers and opportunities ahead of us.  

    I’m going to start with the challenges for senior leaders.   We often hear statements like “all of this needs to start with leaders”, “leaders need to role model this”, “culture starts at the top”, or the more toxic “a fish rots from its head”.  In writing this I’m trying to avoid ranting about how wrong I think these are (I’ve hit the delete key an awful lot in typing this paragraph).  Instead, I want to concentrate on the landscape for leaders, set out the forces that make it hard for them to engage in new ways of working.  By understanding this, we can start to change that landscape.  

    The prize of smarter hybrid

    As a quick reminder, there is a big prize – smarter hybrid delivers higher organisational productivity, stronger culture and happier and healthier individuals.  

    Tweaking where, when and how we work can drive 10-15% performance gain just by managing meetings and distractions.   Building psychological safety can increase productivity by 50% (Accenture).  Gartner research demonstrates remote working can support stronger culture.  The PrOPEL Hub of nine UK Business Schools have demonstrated productivity benefits of better working practice and the CIPD Good Work Survey has identified that hybrid working correlates with better job quality.

    The challenges for leaders

    The challenges below won’t apply to all leaders, but you’re likely to find examples across your top two layers of the organisation.  And if you’ve got leaders that don’t think any of these apply to them, it might be worth exploring the zone of delusion…

    1.  Head space

    The demands on leaders are huge.  There are challenges including inflation, recession, industrial relations, political uncertainty, supply chain disruption, digitisation, changing customer behaviour.  These are all disrupting established ways of running a business and are accentuated with new challenges such as covid (personal and work impact), net zero and new ways of working.  

    These create chronic stress, which reduces imagination and the ability to solve problems.  (Dr Wendy Suzuki).  New challenges feel like a threat, triggering the “fight or flight” response (Harvard).  Leaders can be drawn to simplistic solutions to kick problems down the road (hence why 3-day-a-week hybrid is appealing).

    2.  More economics than psychology

    Chartered accountancy, MBA and consultancy are proven routes to leadership.  In past talent roles I tracked this data to identify good leadership candidates – it is a great basis for understanding the drivers of business success, shapes how leaders solve problems, gives confidence to investors and other stakeholders.  

    However, they don’t really focus on how to get humans to perform better.  I looked at the ACCA syllabus, some MBA curricula – even now, there’s little connecting psychology and managing people with better productivity and performance.

    3. Poor data

    In a world where leaders are data driven, people data is often infrequent, low quality, not adaptable or simply answering the wrong questions.  

    As a quick example:  Western European engagement is at 72% (Culture Amp).  Organisations measure it once or twice a year.  Targets in business plans and bonus schemes will compare to the norm, and success based on benchmarking.   All of this even though 1 in 4 people are not engaged, with consequent cultural, performance and turnover issues (how can we be surprised by quiet quitting and the great resignation?)

    For other people data, it is often focused on what is easily measured rather than what aids performance. There is more focus on reducing absence than reducing distractions, despite the latter offering 10x the productivity gain (my calculations, based on data from UCI).

    4. “When I were a lad…”

    We are all influenced by our experiences.  Senior leaders started their careers between the late eighties and early noughties. They built careers in an environment which was office-based, hierarchical, long-hours, more focused on fitting in than welcoming diversity.  If you couldn’t put the hours in, you were lightweight.  Working remotely or flexing start times?  Part-timer.  

    That is broadly a senior leaders frame of reference for career success.  They’ve not got the experience of completely virtual teams that might be found in tech, and they’re unlikely to have engaged with a new employer through primarily digital means.  In contrast – all new workers from 2020 join the workforce with experience of remote work. 

    5.  The system of work

    The system of work is largely designed for face-to-face, full-time work.  The Outlook calendar based on Monday to Friday 9-5, management by observation and floorwalking, structuring employment around Full Time Equivalents, learning in classrooms, brainstorming around a whiteboard, watercooler conversations, meeting around a table all push people to the office environment.  Even video conference facilities are typically a meeting room table with chairs facing each other, and a screen at the end of the table.

    This creates a series of defaults, and all can provide barriers to new approaches to work.

    6. Omniscience

    Put all of this together and it starts to get tough.  Leaders don’t have the capacity, frame of reference or insight to solve these problems.  However, they’ve also grown with the expectation that leaders solve problems.   There is a sort of expectation of omniscience.  

    So, when presented with everything we’ve described above, a solution of “three days in the office and two at home” starts to feel very appealing – it feels like a neat solution, even if it is ill-fitting for pretty much every employee.

    But wait, we can do better…

    Despite these forces of inertia, the opportunity for smarter hybrid is huge, so how to help leaders with these challenges?

    I’d suggest four things:

    1.  Engage them in the challenge – leaders will know that certain trends have massively been accelerated by covid, including digitisation and changing customer behaviour.  They might not have thought the same about work, but flexible working, remote working, focus on wellbeing, focus on equity were all emerging pre-covid and have massively accelerated. Emphasise that those companies grasping the changed reality are benefiting with talent attraction, productivity, and reputation.

    2. Frame the problem – move from a set of barriers to a set of questions to work through.   E.g. How do we deal with performance paranoia (microsoft)?  How do we mitigate the risks of burnout (BBC)?  How broadly do we want to attract talent?  How do we build culture?  How are we equitable when some roles are more flexible than others?  How do we onboard and build careers?  Ask leaders to share their problems and dilemmas and build a hopper of issues to solve.  

    3. Shape an approach – frame this as a series of sprints of experiments.  Tackle different issues in different areas.  As a company, set your ambition to refine ways of working, and ask for colleagues to participate.  Set this in the context of your purpose, values or culture – i.e. what kind of company do you aim to be?   Involving colleagues creates ownership, taps into their creativity, strengthens alignment, and also buys time to work through issues.

    4. Focus on line managers – more than ever, good line managers are critical.  They’re critical to alignment, engagement, management of work, building culture.  In addition to any previous priorities, they have to invest more in wellbeing and in managing ways of working.   Invest any discretionary capacity in helping this group to manage their people well.  

    This isn’t exhaustive by any means – after all, it is a set of challenges to work through.  Next time I’ll try and share why I think it is tough for HR.  Leaders and HR are critical stakeholders in creating some momentum.  After that, I’ll try and cover more on the business case, how hybrid can support inclusion and belonging and then get into specific challenges.  

    As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts, reflections and experience. If you’d like to discuss, give me a yell. And please do reach out if you’re wrestling with some of these challenges.