Your Monday Quote (Performance Management edition)

“You can dream, create, design, and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it takes people to make your dream a reality.”
- Walt Disney

“Your people make all the difference. The only thing your competitors can’t copy is your culture and your people.”
- Mel Kleiman, President, Humetrics

Lesson:  Performance management can create competitive advantage. It's your people, stupid.

Performance Management demystified

Sometimes it is helpful to see things visually. This chart should help.

A problem of our times: Oversharing at the office

This has probably happened at least once to anyone who's ever worked in an office. Whether it is talking about weekend exploits (or lack thereof), their love life (or lack thereof) or some unknown hobby that should have remained unspoken, people get comfortable around their co-workers and sometimes share more than those co-workers would like to know (e.g. I once had a co-worker who we learned over lunch one day, was into illegal, night-time drag racing. True story. I guess he liked to live his life a quarter-mile at a time.). Not everyone can keep their personal business as secret as Don Draper.

Say it with me one time, too much information.

The Wall Street Journal weights in on this topic: 'Oversharing' Invades the Office

Patti Sweeney and a dozen of her coworkers recently went out to lunch to celebrate the completion of a project. Over burgers and salads, they chitchatted about their work, their families and their hobbies.

One colleague mentioned that he was training for a 20-mile bike race, adding that he had just purchased a new helmet and Lycra shorts. To the group's mortification, Ms. Sweeney says, he then described shaving his entire body to reduce aerodynamic drag.

"Why, why, why do we need to go there?" says Ms. Sweeney, a 36-year-old financial analyst for a communications company who lives in Bartlett, Ill. "This is information about a coworker, not someone I really consider a friend, and now it's forever burned in my brain."

It's official: The TMI phenomenon—as in "too much information"—has invaded the workplace. You can thank reality TV and social-networking Web sites for creating a culture where people are encouraged to share every sordid—or boring—detail of their lives. They have desensitized us to the idea that some things are meant to be private.

But we have to take responsibility, too, for mistaking our coworkers for friends. It's understandable, as the line between office and home has blurred in recent years. We work more now, so we spend more time with our colleagues and clients, sometimes more than we spend with our families or friends, and we socialize with them outside of work. 

Click here to read the rest of the article. 

Some more reasons why we do performance management

• Effective performance management increases goal visibility and boosts shared accountability
• Setting relevant and achievable goals is the cornerstone of both individual and company success
• Research has proven that if managers connect with their employees and offer them clarity of direction and feedback, employees remain engaged and more fulfilled in their work.
• Employee satisfaction and retention – people want to know how they are doing and what they can do to improve
• Develop and keep your talent
• To prepare / justify future changes or promotions – supports Succession Planning
• To increase productivity by properly prioritizing work – ensures employees are working on the right things
• Ensures performance conversations happen (not just project status updates!)
• Effective performance management is a hallmark of successful companies. You want the company to be successful, right?

 

Things Found

Written in my pocket notepad from April 2009:

Often it is the small measures that help to convey scope.

Subtly profound... or not.

Why we do performance management

1. What is performance management?

It may be easier to think of the program as part of a three-phase cycle:  Planning, Performing, and Reviewing.

• Planning:  Determining strategies and setting expectations through goal setting
• Performing:  Doing the work that needs to be done
• Reviewing:  Feedback and coaching on the “what” is being done and “how” it is being achieved

2. Why we do performance management

In the current business climate your organization is likely facing some tough challenges but also has some tremendous opportunities. Your Company must be sure that it chooses its strategies carefully and ensures that all processes and people are aligned and focused on achieving results. To do this, it needs all employees pulling together - to do that requires effective performance management. However, even the best performance management system will fail if managers focus only on the mechanics of performance management. It is not about the mechanics – it’s about on-going and honest dialogue.

Effective performance management increases goal visibility and boosts shared accountability. Setting relevant and achievable goals is the cornerstone of both individual and company success. Research has proven that if managers connect with their employees and offer them clarity of direction and feedback, employees remain engaged and more fulfilled in their work.

Performance Management

Firstly, we need to come up with a new name for Performance Management. It has such negative connotations. All you have to say is "performance management" and people start grumbling and complaining about process and not having enough time. I think if you even said "we're abolishing performance management practices at our company" people would still grumble at first simply because of the 'P' and 'M' words. That said, the last thing we need around performance management is more talking about semantics - just get down to it I say!

We're in the midst of goal setting at work right now. As always there's plenty of resistance. I get why no one likes reviews, but why hate goal setting? Essentially, Goal Setting is about (a) What are you going to do? (what is the outcome?) and (b) When will you do it? It shouldn’t be scary.

British Teenager Fired From Job Via Facebook, After Cookie-Related Ineptitude

I posted this link the other day on Twitter but thought it was worth sharing in more detail here as well. From Fast Company:



Things you need to know before we get started: in England, cookies are called biscuits. Also in England, the word "cookies" does not also mean cookies, because this story revolves around a cafe called Cookies that does not sell cookies. This may all sound like a fun bit of wordplay leading up to a punchline, but it's not--that's just how they roll in England. It's a mysterious island nation, I know.

As the Daily Mail reports, Chelsea Taylor, a 16-year-old clerk at the Cookies Cafe in Leigh, was sent, improbably enough, on an errand to retrieve cookies for the staff of Cookies. She was given a "tenner" (in proper American English, God's own language, that's a "Hamilton") for the purchase of said sweets, only to lose it sometime during the journey. She returned to the Cookies Cafe both cookie-less and penniless.

Young Chelsea Taylor's boss at the Cookies Cafe was not pleased with this turn of events. How, she wondered, did she manage to open and run a cafe named after a snack she could not manage to procure? Heads would roll for this one! And it was our poor heroine who got the axe--and not in a very pleasant way.

Yes, Chelsea was fired via Facebook. The message is conciliatory, apologetic, and polite, yet its mere medium suggests a lack of personal involvement and a distancing that borders on the insulting. The shortened words, the text-message abbreviations ("u" for "you"), and the aversion to tell Chelsea in person all combine to form an epic brush-off--and Chelsea is not pleased.

"Even if she had sent me a text message or something it would have been better than on Facebook. She didn't have the guts to tell me face-to-face," said Taylor. Her mother called the action "appalling," "heartless," and "dreadful," and (rightfully) identified the typos and abbreviations as "disrespectful."

Is it okay to fire someone via Facebook? Would it actually have been more appropriate to use proper grammatical conventions? Those norms are still being formed. All we know is, don't go to the Cookies Cafe expecting cookies. They don't have any.

A story about motivation

From the Harvard Business Review:

When we consider whether to do something, we subconsciously ask ourselves a simple question: "Am I the kind of person who...?" And money changes the question. When the lawyers were offered $30 an hour their question was "Am I the kind of person who works for $30 an hour?" The answer was clearly no. But when they were asked to do it as a favor? Their new question was "Am I the kind of person who helps people in need?" And then their answer was yes.

People tend to think of themselves as stories. When you interact with someone, you're playing a role in her story. And whatever you do, or whatever she does, or whatever you want her to do, needs to fit into that story in some satisfying way. 

When you want something from someone, ask yourself what story that person is trying to tell about himself, and then make sure that your role and actions are enhancing that story in the right way.

Read the full article here, it is well worth your time. 

I think the Nestle Social Media Manager was having a bad day

And it undoubtedly got much, much worse after a lapse in judgment about how to deal with customers.

Here's a suggestion:  Going to war with your customers is never sound business practice and insulting them in this manner just seems petty and vindictive. What was there to gain? When you start in with social media - like Nestle did with their Facebook page - you lose some control over the conversation and you need to be prepared how to deal with that. 

Innovation that Matters

I found this article on the evolving nature of innovation by Nicholas M. Donofrio quite interesting. Here are some key highlights.... 

Innovation that Matters

The very nature of innovation is changing. Today, the innovation that matters is not the latest result of Moore's Law, or doubling RAM, or tripling pixels. Those things still matter, but they matter much, much less.

The innovation that matters now—the innovation that we're all waiting for, even if we don't know it—is the one that unlocks the hidden value that exists at the intersection of deep knowledge of a problem and intimate knowledge of a market, combined with your knowledge, your technology, and your capability … whoever you are, whatever you can do, whatever you bring to the table.

Yet too many people still think of innovation solely in terms of a wholly new product or technological breakthrough. But this is limiting, and it is false. Innovations can arise from fresh thinking in any number of areas: from product to service to process to business model. Michael Dell built a Fortune 500 company by changing the way computers are built and sold—but not changing anything about the device itself.

The good news for innovators and potential innovators is that, given the incredible complexity and diversity of the world today, opportunities for innovation abound. As confused as you think the world is, it's great for innovators. There are so many problems—some known and some yet to come to light—that opportunities for innovation will never run out. But we have to take a new approach: start from the problem, not the solution. That is, we can no longer say to ourselves "The end product is 5 GHz" (or whatever). Rather, we must ask ourselves "What needs to change?" and then—and only then—start thinking about how to change it. The question of what specific invention or product or innovation to pursue comes after that.

To read the full article click here.

How to change when change is hard

There's a bit of "be the ball, Danny" to this piece, but it does contain some useful nuggets about how to effect change instead of just talking / theorizing about it.

From Fast Company - an exclusive book excerpt by the best-selling authors of Made to Stick.

Switch:  How to change things when change is hard. 

Find a bright spot and clone it.

That's the first step to fixing everything from addiction to corporate malaise to malnutrition. A problem may look hopelessly complex. But there's a game plan that can yield movement on even the toughest issues. And it starts with locating a bright spot -- a ray of hope.

 Click here to read the article.