Rethinking Performance and What I Did This Past Week

Of all things HR, performance management is the one thing I think about more than anything. I posted about it here. I watched it here. I read about it here and here. I tweeted about it here:

Reading WSJ article on performance feedback http://tinyurl.com/5faf3v This is where we need to be heading.

Rericson @lisarosendahl totally agree. Doing a lot of "Gen Y" ee work - for my company and for clients. Shifting culture to one of feedback is key.

The votes are in and the answer is clear- shifting culture to one of feedback is key. This is where we need to be headed. We are not there yet.

That cat is out of the bag. For all of my thinking, posting, watching, reading and tweeting, I am not there yet myself, or with my own staff. Of all the things I do and of all the people I interact with each day, I  devote the least amount of time performance management. After each midterm and annual review I vow to do this differently, yet I never am able to get to it.

I made the time to get to it this week. I set up recurring 30 minute monthly meetings with each person in my department. To start with, we will review program goals/performance measures; discuss what is going well, what is not going well and what we can do about it; and talk about how I can help. I am challenging myself to make, seek out, or create the time between meetings to keep the conversations going.

Will this be of value to anyone but me? It simply has to be.

Should How an Employee Does a Job Matter?

I am stuck on something. I was reading through a bunch of posts, articles, links and comments this past weekend catching up on what happened while I was gone last week.

One thing that did not happen while I was gone were my performance reviews. With this in the back of my mind, as well as a desire to find a better way to accomplish "performance management" within my little corner of the world; posts, articles, links and comments that addressed performance management caught my attention.

Now, I read something, somewhere that is sticking with me that I can't find again (or credit) that I would like get more information or feedback on. It read along the lines of:

The problem with performance reviews is that they don't only focus on results, they focus on how a person gets the job done. If the boss doesn't like the way it was accomplished, it impacts the review.

The writer did not agree with this. I am not sure that I agree with the writer but know for a fact that I did not read the whole post, article, link or comment since I was in skim mode.

I added a section recently to the performance standards of my professional staff that specifically addressed how the results are achieved. I added competencies such as flexibility and adaptability, organizational stewardship, communication and systems thinking. A staff member who gets a result but is unwilling to consider other ideas, who does not consider the big picture or the impact on complimentary systems or is a divisive member of the team can very quickly counteract the positive benefits of the result achieved or sacrifice the long term for the immediate short term.

It may come down to how the desired result is written? Or maybe the writer truly does believe the end is all that matters but I was not left with that impression.

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. If you wrote this or have thoughts on this, I 'd love to hear from you.