Today's strategic performance systems are agile, accelerated and adaptable. If companies want talent to be focused on their business, their performance systems can’t hold them back. Today's talent works differently than the traditional way performance has been managed. Ron Katz discusses this in “Optimize Your Workforce.” Katz says, “Organizational hierarchies are becoming obstacles to success. Project teams are created, restructured and reassembled on an ongoing basis. Take down the formality of annual or biannual reviews and talk to your employees frequently.”
Professor Jeffry Pffeffer at Standford’s Graduate School of Business, in Too Much Management Can Block Innovation, advises that performance goals and reviews often hold people back, “Link Practices such as emphasizing individual accountability, encouraging internal competition, practicing goal setting, and emphasizing budgets may be counterproductive.” Also check out the related book, with many great contributors, worth a re-read, Leading Innovation and Organizing for Results.
Especially when strategic business and performance goals are set at the top of the house, Nilofer Merchant describes the air sandwich” that exists between senior leadership and the doer’s/implementers. Check out her book, The New How , and the webcast “From Chief of Answers to Leader of Co-creators" re-casts beginning Jan 11-13, or on demand for Professional HCI members.
One of the best performance planning tools I used in my career included goals in three areas- maintenance, improvement and innovation. It seems especially important that talent be encouraged to come up with innovation goals to further the type of engagement that leads to breakthrough’s. That reminds me of two great webcasts on innovation you may want to check out in HCI's archives.
And don’t forget the importance of a forgiveness culture for innovative efforts that don’t pan out. A related talent management practice that has stayed with me for years was a company that had a “giraffe award” to recognize people sticking their neck out for a good idea. IDEO puts this into practice with “business in beta: don’t wait for perfection- launch and learn.”
So as the new year begins, capture and encourage performance outside the chain of command, as ideas, opportunities and project teams emerge. Your systems can optimize talent performance and development with short-term goals that also have clearer lines of sight, and feedback at the completion of each project and effort. If goals were carefully packed in a parachute, it would be designed to open to let your talent soar. Now that most companies have right-sized and retained their critical talent, “let your people go,” and by that I mean support talent's ability to advance the leading edge of your company.
Thanks so much for your comment and insight, Cynthia. Wouldn't it be neat to use a performance/planning tool that allowed co-creation of the business plan, drafting supporting goals with clear lines of sight- to model organizational and individual performance in advance...
You might want to check out this book I enjoyed about co-creating performance through collaboration
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596807375
and a related webcast that is being re-broadcast next week, From Chief of Answers to Leader of Co-creators http://www.hci.org/cfe/communities/867/70233
Hope to see you at a webcast or comment on webcasts, blogs, or articles soon and to hear more about the work you're doing.
How long will it be before human resource programs/systems catch up with work place reality? The performance management methodologies in use today are the same as the 1980s. If we want to encourage our employees to be innovative , then we need to lead by example and demonstrate some creativity in developing new methods of managing employee performance. In fact, managing employee performance is even outdated, and after the fact. What we need is a better way to align and integrate total organizational capability, action, and results.