Are You Nurturing Universal Accountability?

If you’re familiar with Reviewsnap you know we’ve enthusiastically championed performance appraisals for nearly 20 years. In our view, performance appraisals are essential to the steady growth and development of your workforce. Handled correctly, appraisals also instill accountability in your people—accountability for reaching specific goals and targets, for developing their knowledge and skill sets, and for proactively advancing their careers.

Accountability.

It’s a core precept of good performance management. It also happens to be one of the distinguishing features of high-performance teams, as highlighted by a May 30 post on the Harvard Business Review blog, “The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable.” The author of the post, Joseph Grenny, pulled no punches when offering this succinct observation regarding the teams he’s studied:

·      In the weakest teams, there is no accountability.

·      In mediocre teams, bosses are the source of accountability.

·      In high performance teams, peers manage the vast majority of performance problems with one another.

Although Grenny refers to accountability in relation to performance problems, the best teams not only hold themselves accountable for resolving their differences but their team members also take personal responsibility for improving innovation, responsiveness, customer service and other key performance indicators valued by their companies.

As Grenny points out, the results these teams deliver include greater innovation, trust and productivity. One of the author’s clients, a successful financial services company with superior peer accountability, enjoyed “an unparalleled return on capital, breathtaking sales growth, and the highest customer renewal rate in the industry.”

In his post, Grenny also offers five insightful tips for creating a culture of universal accountability. Two of these tips are setting expectations and calling out positive examples of behaviors you value—two of the most important things your mangers can do when holding performance appraisals with their direct reports.

This brings us to a rather obvious question: if the best teams hold themselves accountable, why do you have to bother with performance reviews and building cultures of accountability? The answer is equally obvious: even if your best teams hold themselves accountable instinctively, your organization should publicly support this quality and make it an official performance objective. Managers should talk about accountability in team meetings and during reviews. It’s the only way to engender accountability in all of your teams, not just your best teams. And that’s the real goal—superior accountability throughout the organization, from top to bottom.

Obviously, your managers will have to go on acting as the source of accountability for many of your teams, at least for a while. But with patience and dedicated guidance, they’ll gradually sow the seeds of greater accountability. In time, they’ll be able to step away from acting as “accountability cops” and do more of what you want them to do—namely, to manage their functions strategically.

It’s Time To Solve the Performance Management Puzzle

Performance management ain’t easy. At least not for most of us.

As Deloitte’s 2013 Human Capital Trends report noted, “… 58 percent of HR leaders gave their performance management process a ‘C’ grade or worse.” In fact, the report itself contains an entire section called, “The Performance Management Puzzle.

Puzzle—as in riddle. Enigma. Challenge. Problem.

It’s a fair comparison. After all, the performance management process encompasses a complex chain of moving parts including organizational goals and targets, individual goals and targets, manager/employee relationships, team relationships, evaluation tools, perceptions, judgment and communication, among others. Just thinking about all of these components and how to piece them together effectively is enough to make your head hurt.

As daunting as it might seem, we all need to solve the performance management puzzle—and the sooner the better because the future of our companies depends upon it. That’s no exaggeration. It’s the simple truth. Organizational performance is a direct result people performance. So the time to solve this particular puzzle is now.

But (you knew there’d be a “but” in here somewhere, didn’t you?) we need to proceed judiciously. The performance management puzzle can’t be “solved” all at once. The only way to raise that “C grade or worse” to something more respectable is to address one piece of the puzzle at a time:

·      The tools, systems and software we use.

·      The processes we have in place.

·      The comprehensiveness of our reviews—and our reviewers.

·      The training we provide to managers and supervisors.

·      The uniform and fair application of measurements and standards.

·      The effectiveness of our communication.

And so on.

As the Deloitte report noted, “the pressure for performance will likely increase as business decisions become more complex and challenging.” In other words, the need to improve performance management is only going to grow more urgent. So we’d better start bumping up our grades in quick fashion.

In our next post, we’ll push the puzzle metaphor just a little further and touch on some of the new realities of piecing together a strong performance management solution.

Don’t Be One of Those Managers!

A common mistake is to deliver a performance review and then kick back and wait until the next review period before providing substantive feedback. It’s important that you avoid being one of those managers.

A more effective approach is to follow up after the review and then on an ongoing basis.  One of the

important elements of performance management is ongoing communication and feedback to and from employees.

Follow up is important because it allows for reinforcement of important points made during the review and it allows the employee to provide input in terms of either how he or she is working to modify work behavior to improve performance or meet goals or how he or she may be struggling to improve performance. As a manager, you want to hear from the employee and you want to be able to coach as needed including reinforcement of key points made through the review process.

If the employee has shown improvement or continues to do well, you’ll want to recognize and convey that to the employee. This reinforcement of positives often breeds more positive work behavior.  If the employee is continuing to struggle or is exhibiting negative behavior after the review, the follow up session should be used to address the need to be positive and focus on working to improve performance. 

We know that effective communication with employees before during and after formal performance reviews enhances overall performance. The key is to develop an ongoing communication platform with your employees so that you and they become comfortable sharing positive outcomes, concerns, and ideas with one another. When feedback, formal or informal, is done infrequently a communication void can develop and open two-way feedback tends to lag as a result.

After the next review you perform, follow up with the employee within several weeks to discuss how things are going. Without rehashing the review, reinforce the two or three most important points from the review if you aren’t seeing positive changes in work behavior and let the employee talk openly about any frustrations or any steps taken since the review to address deficiencies or progress toward goal achievement. Coach as appropriate and then make a point of talking to the employee periodically to do a check on progress.