performance

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!

    Our Performance – transforming performance and culture at Virgin Money and CYBG

    FranLake101

    I’ve recently shared the case against classic performance management, and why it is time to change.  Now I want to share an example of a better way – during my time at CYBG and then Virgin Money we transformed our performance practice, and along with it the culture and performance of our people.  This is that story.

    I’ll talk about how we started, the philosophy, the design, how we introduced it and how we sustained it.  This is going to be headline stuff – please do reach out to me on francis@greenjuniper.co.uk if you’d like to discuss more about what it could look like for you.

    Before we dive in, let me share three key things:

    1. It’s made a massive difference:
    • Managers who follow this approach have 30% more colleague engagement.
    • Sustained success – five years of implementation and refinement.
    • Cultural impact – It started the cultural journey that helped CYBG acquire Virgin Money, even referred to in the deal prospectus: “[Virgin Money] will continue to build on CYBGs innovative approach to performance, with a focus on team rather than individual contributions.”  That’s the only time I’m aware of PM contributing to a corporate merger!
    • Wellbeing – we were normalising conversations about wellbeing two years pre-pandemic.
    • Future of Work ready – it underpins Virgin Money’s approach to work – A Life More Virgin.
    1. It’s an approach with a team ethos, created with a team effort:

    This was a team effort including our CPO and LT, our project team, my brilliant OD team and wider HR, and our partners at Positive Group, Uncountable and Clear Review.  Most importantly, managers and colleagues across the group breathed life into the approach.

    1. I’m a wholehearted advocate:

    Since 2017 I talked to dozens of companies, spoken at CIPD annual conference and recorded interviews with Clear Review.  The success of this approach is one of the main reasons I set up Green Juniper as I left Virgin Money – I want more people and companies to enjoy better, more rewarding and more successful work.

    Our Starting Point and Philosophy

    CYBG (Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank) was created by IPO from National Australia Group in early 2016.  The shift being a subsidiary to a newly independent bank in a tough market meant new demands for our people, the need to shift performance and transform culture.  Kate as our CPO prioritised building a cutting-edge performance practice, and that’s where the team and I came in.  

    We started with a raft of external research including insight into psychology and neuroscience from the Positive Group, understanding intrinsic motivation through work such as Dan Pink’s Drive, and external scanning into all the pioneers of new performance – Adobe, consultancy houses and similar.

    We looked hard at our context, org design and operations – processes, capability, structure of the business.  We thought about how people adapt and sustain change – including tipping point, nudge theory, product adoption curves and how to start a movement (remember Lessons From a Dancing Guy?).

    We pulled all of this into our core philosophy:

    1. Performance must support and drive strategy and culture
    2. We want a one-team ethos, grounded in positive psychology
    3. This is about maximising performance, not controlling it.
    4. Treat wellbeing as the fuel for performance
    5. Reward allocation as downstream decisions

    Our Design:

    The philosophy led to our design which has a quarterly flow, with 5 key elements:

    Team goals – aligning to strategy

    No-one succeeds on their own.  Companies organise people into teams to deliver work.  The best performing teams have common goals, influence over their work and direction.

    This led us to move from individual scorecards to team goals.  Every quarter teams come together with their manager to review and refresh goals.  They’ll have around 8 goals, with each one aligned to one strategic goal for the business.  

    The approach strengthens team collaboration, gives voice to team members, increases ownership, clear prioritisation and organisational alignment.

    Personal goals – learning and improving

    Teams get better when team members get better.  We wanted to create an environment where people focused on increasing their contribution to the team.

    We did this by asking every colleague to set two personal improvement goals each quarter.  This replaced the annual development plan.  Each goal was tagged against one of our values, supporting culture.

    The limited number of short-term goals creates focus and encourages immediate action.  It’s grounded in the idea of marginal gains – If each goal aims for 0.5% improvement in performance, then that’s 4%+ per year.  

    Feedback – the fuel for improving performance

    We took the view that you can’t improve if you don’t learn.  You can’t learn if you don’t get feedback, and you’re not helping the team if you don’t give feedback.

    Feedback often has a bad rep, with a lot of focus on what’s wrong.  It can also be very poorly timed.  We set out to transform this, making feedback feel like a gift.  To do this, we wanted lots of regular, positive, helpful feedback.  We asked people to share feedback through Clear Review, sharing one thing they liked (a thumbs up), and one suggestion to make it even better (a lightbulb).  We also asked people to tag the value that it related to.  

    This approach is important – it places the onus on the giver of feedback to think harder about our culture, and about what to do to improve.  It gives much more regular praise to colleagues, priming them to be open to improvement.   It doesn’t replace difficult conversations or verbal feedback, but starts to build an environment where positive, helpful feedback is the norm. 

    Check-ins – the performance pitstop

    In 2017 a lot of continuous performance approaches had no regular requirements at all.  Our view was that there was always a need to pause, check-in and go again.  We created quarterly check-in, with a specific flow. I think of them as a pit-stop – pull over, refuel, refresh, go again.

    The flow started by confirming the colleague was on track (removing threat).  It then moved to discuss wellbeing (the fuel for performance).  Those two points set the ground for the rest of the conversation – discussing feedback, progress against personal goals, contribution to team goals, and setting new personal goals.

    The approach was grounded in positive psychology and focused on maintaining progress.

    Viewpoints – creating evidence-based performance

    We didn’t want to major on process and form filling, so managers had to answer just a few key questions after each check-in round:

    1. Is colleague performance on or off-track?
    2. How fast is the colleague improving?  (achievement of personal goals)
    3. Was there a wellbeing conversation?
    4. Has the colleague received a good mix of feedback?

    We combined this data with all the data coming out of the system – around 250k data points per quarter.  We could mine that data to target interventions – e.g., managers who needed help, teams who were struggling with feedback or on setting goals.  This meant we were always helping to incrementally improve (in line with the philosophy).

    Pay and Bonus – breaking the link

    I’m not going to major on this, but recognise it is a tough hurdle for many people, if PM is basically about reward allocation.  However, with our philosophy we took the view that OP should be about performance, and financial reward was secondary.  We had to stick with a philosophy concentrating on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation.

    This meant that pay awards were determined by position against market, and everyone who was on track over the year would be the same bonus percentage as their peers.  The stance was – we’re one team, we win together.

    Launching the Approach

    I’m biased, but I do think the design we implemented is the smartest approach to performance I’ve seen.  However, what makes it work is the engagement and the embedding.  

    It’s critical to realise that people are well and truly stuck in the rut of classic PM, sometimes over decades.  Transforming it requires changing individual and collective beliefs and behaviours, often starting from a point of low engagement and low trust.

    We set about on a multi-prong approach to engage people, including:

    • Making the scale of change clear – whenever we presented, our first slide was a bulldozer.
    • Inspiring examples – given our timing we used imagery from 2016 Olympics like Hannah Cockcroft sprinting to gold, or the GB hockey team huddling and resetting goals.
    • Human examples – we used Couch to 5K and Scottish Slimmers to show how we can all benefit from incremental gains.  
    • We created organisational stories – three of our LT members ran the London marathon and we used it as an example of relative performance, improvement, personal goals.
    • We found stories that others could own and share – one of our LT members illustrated personal goals with Roger Federer perfecting a new shot every off season.
    • I’d listen to and talk with teams, and we’d work out how to make the approach fit for their context.  This wasn’t once and done – I spent time with our commercial banking team every quarter for the first year, hearing their successes and challenges and refining the approach together.
    • We recognised HR was critical, and it was just as tough for them.  The changes disrupted reward, policy, wellbeing, learning, case management, change management and others.
    • When we came to training, we focused on behaviour, not the system – if you want to change behaviour, train behaviour.  If you want to have less process, train less process!  Our friends at Uncountable did this by taking our people through experiential training that was like a Mission Impossible – Apprentice – Crystal Maze mash-up in a Premier Inn.  

    Embedding the approach

    Sustaining is tough.  We know that some people get it right, and some don’t.  Teams change with turnover and organisational change.  Peaks and troughs of work shift priorities.  Sometimes we assume that people will all adopt new processes, but in practice it is much more like a product adoption curve.

    With that in mind, we set about creating a movement.

    • Wherever there was good practice we celebrated and amplified it – we had senior leaders who were the role models for feedback, banking area managers who’d got great practice, and our Commercial Banking team nailed the spirit of team goals.
    • We used the data to spot good practice and identify those who needed help.  We weren’t punitive though – if we could see an area just hadn’t got it nailed, we’d offer help – how to generate more feedback, have better goals, improve practice.  We simply made it clear that high performing teams did this, and low performing teams didn’t.  Which did they want to be?
    • This also meant reprioritising within HR – what data we provided to HRBPs, how we sustained quarterly activity, how we tackled areas that serially didn’t do a good job.

    And what about success?

    Earlier this year, members of my former team shared some brilliant data with me.  They cross-referenced five simple practices in our performance with data from the engagement survey.  

    There was a direct correlation between performance practice and colleague sentiment.  That included engagement, understanding organisational strategy, advocacy of the company’s products, stretching performance and satisfaction with line management.  

    What emerged was that managers who did none of the five scored 50% on the above measures.  Managers who did all five scored 80%.  To get a sense of the performance difference this creates I picture a hockey or football match, where one team has five players who are motivated, know their positions and the team tactics, and the other has eight.  We all know which team will win every single time.

    What next?

    One of the most common barriers I hear is along the lines of “our organisation isn’t ready for this” or “our managers aren’t good enough”.  Let me assure you – when we started, we weren’t “ready”.  However, taking the long-term view, making a start, and continuing to improve was transformational.  You never complete a journey you don’t start!

    I’m passionate about this because I know it works.  It makes work better for people and people better at work.  A big part of the Virgin ethos is creating great colleague experience, and that’s why we shared with so widely.  We also know that context is everything – what we did won’t fit other organisations.  Both of those beliefs remain true now I’m running my own business.  It is absolutely possible to create a positive culture and high-performing organisation.  Elements I’ve described above will work, but it’s got to be tailored to you.  If you’d like to make a start on transforming your performance and culture, please reach out, either via LinkedIn or to francis@greenjuniper.co.uk .  Wherever you’re starting from, I’d love to help!