Excellent performance begins with clear expectations. As you set expectations with individuals or groups, make sure you not only include what the desired results are, but also get agreement about how you will talk about issues or problems that come up. Talk about the process of accountability and about how you define management vs. micromanagement—from both sides.
Any company that is not ultra committed to continually growing and upgrading its talent will eventually become a sinking ship. Sinking ships do not spend the time making their current people better. They shy away from having difficult conversations with low performers. They let their high performers leave by putting in barriers to make getting great work done hard (like bureaucracy).
Top performers seek out the problems that have the greatest strategic importance...
When an organization knows something about us, and that knowledge is captured in a number, we often feel entitled to know it—to know where we stand.
Imposing a strict system of quantified metrics to evaluate and reward performance has serious deleterious unintended consequences. It induces gaming of the system, a kind of rent-seeking behavior that adds nothing to productivity and often detracts. It siphons attention toward goals whose achievement can be measured and away from goals whose achievement is difficult or impossible to measure but may be of greater importance.
It poisons employees’ desire to do their job by substituting external and often arbitrary-seeming requirements for internal motivation.
In K-12 education, government programs such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) led to extensive gaming and even cheating. Teachers’ schools’ funding, and their own employment, was dependent on their students’ performance on standardized, government-mandated math and English exams. Hence, many teachers spent much of their class time “teaching to the test.” This moved the emphasis toward test-taking and away from arguably more important activities with unmeasurable results, such as cultivating students’ capacity for intellectual curiosity, good behaviour, and creative thought and innovation.
As Muller explains, part of the reason for the increase in metricization is that employees and executives are not trusted. Therefore, quantitative requirements are imposed on their behavior to keep them in line. In response, they behave in precisely those ways that the quantification model expects them to behave. And by gaming the quantification system and cheating, they make it appear that the measurement system is working. And yet, the ultimately desired results are not improved and are often even made worse.
But it feeds the expectations of funders that low overhead is the measure they should be looking at to hold charities accountable. Thus the snake of accountability eats its own tail.
An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.
Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.
Management has authority only as long as it performs.
Many leaders assume the problem with poor performers is they lack motivation; therefore, the obvious way to fix the problem is to motivate their employees. However, motivation is only one of three possible causes of poor performance. It is also possible that the employee wants to perform but is unable to do so because of a lack of skills, knowledge, or resources.
To try and skill up the unmotivated is a waste of time and resources. To motivate the unable only creates depression, not progress.
Responsible leaders care about their people—the one and the many. They don’t callously fire individuals, nor do they allow a single employee to disrespect, abuse, or negatively impact others. They don’t demand change without helping people have the means to change and reasonable time to do it. Responsible leaders give actionable feedback and recognize progress. And they follow through.
Excellent performance begins with clear expectations. As you set expectations with individuals or groups, make sure you not only include what the desired results are, but also get agreement about how you will talk about issues or problems that come up. Talk about the process of accountability and about how you define management vs. micromanagement—from both sides.