Pain-Free Performance Management: Setting Goals

I kicked off a series on making performance management pain-free with last week's post. This week, I'll focus on the critical first step of performance management - agreeing on goals. Just like agreeing on a specific final destination ensures everyone ends up in the same place, collaborating with your team members on to create mutually agreeable goals ensures that they end up where you are expecting them to end up, reduces stress levels and can actually make getting to your destination a lot more fun.

I always talk about "agreeing" on goals because getting your team members' buy-in is critical. When your team members are committed to their goals, they have a much greater chance of being successful, and your life is much easier. If you've ever tried to get somewhere with a toddler who had no interest in getting to the same place you did, you'll know how challenging it can be to get someone who is not committed to the same goal as you to stay on track.

When agreeing on goals, there are five criteria you can use to increase your team members' chances for success - create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

Specific

My favorite story about setting specific goals (not!) comes from a colleague with whom I taught performance management programs in the UK. While reviewing his performance for the year prior, he asked his boss what he needed to do to get to the next rating level during the upcoming year. His boss' response? "Be better." Essentially, his boss told him "I'll know you're there when you get there."

Just think about starting a trip saying we'll know we're there when we get there. You would have no idea how long it would take, what resources you would need, what direction to go... I don't know about you, but I wouldn't start a trip that way!

Use the following questions to help you craft specific goals:

• What: What does this person need to achieve?

• Why: What makes this goal important?

• How: Where and with whom will it be achieved? What are the conditions and/or constraints under which it will be achieved? 

Measurable

Think about what you and your team member will see, hear and/or feel when the goal has been achieved and then look at how you can measure one or more of these. Choose tangible metrics so that anyone evaluating your team member can see whether s/he has succeeded.

Generally, you should agree on metrics in advance, but as people's roles evolve and they have goals they have never achieved before, you will likely need to be more flexible. Think about trips you have taken over and over versus a trip to a brand new destination. You know how long the former takes and how much fuel you need, so it is easy to measure success. For a brand new goal, you can estimate what it will take and what success will look like, but just like taking a trip to a brand new destination, these will only be estimates and may change once you are on the way.

Achievable

Your team member has to believe that the goal you agree on is achievable. You do this by balancing the level of challenge with the level of support that you and others provide. I'll talk in a future post about what to do if you and team member have a fundamental difference of opinion about whether a goal is achievable or not.

When the goal is one the person has achieved before, s/he knows it is achievable and needs less support and guidance from you. If you agree on a very challenging goal, especially one your team member has never achieved before, s/he will need much more support from you and others. Without that support, s/he may not believe it's achievable and may not even try to achieve it. How many of you would start climbing Mount Everest with no advance planning, special equipment or help from others?

Relevant

This is where you tie the achievement of the goal to what matters to your team member - his/her personal values and goals, the team's mission, and the organization's mission. Employees who know how their individual goals affect the overall success of the organization are more engaged and more likely to persist even when times get tough. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." 

Time-Bound

Lastly, set a deadline for when the goal needs to be achieved. These deadlines are what get most of us moving. Again, be realistic about goals your team member has never tackled before. Use your best judgment about what is reasonable but be open to adjusting deadlines. When it's a familiar goal, you can be much more concrete about deadlines.

Personally, I love the process of sitting down with a blank slate for the year and creating a vision of what I will have achieved by the end of the year. Maybe I'm just a goal-setting geek, but setting goals inspires me. I hope these guidelines will help you inspire your team by creating a clear vision of success for each of them.

Pain-Free Performance Management

Most people, leaders included, hate annual evaluations, and we have recently seen a lot of organizations (GE, Deloitte, and Accenture for example) move away from an annual performance evaluation process to something much more nimble. Whether you use this approach or a more traditional annual approach, you can make performance management much less painful and much more effective by approaching it as if you are the GPS (global positioning system) for your employees.

Start by imagining you are taking a trip... You begin by telling your GPS where you want to go. You can provide a general location and end up close to, but not exactly, where you want to go, or you can provide a specific location and end up exactly where you planned.

Once you are on your way, the GPS constantly monitors your progress to make sure you are staying on track. The system continues guiding you towards your destination if you are on track; if you take a wrong turn, it gives fairly immediate feedback to help you get back on track as soon as possible. When you arrive, the system lets you know that you have succeeded and are at your destination.

Just as with a GPS, leaders significantly increase the likelihood that their team members will succeed by agreeing clear, specific, achievable goals. Vague goals make it difficult to know when the team member has succeeded and lead to disagreement, conflict, and even disengagement. Our team members think they have arrived at the destination only to find out that, from our perspective, they still have a way to go.

Once our team members have clear goals, we need to monitor their progress towards those goals, encourage them to stay on track as they make progress, and provide timely feedback if they are off track. "Make a U turn as soon as possible."

And just like a GPS, we need to recognize our team members' success when they achieve goals. When they succeed, we need to pause and recognize their success. "You have arrived at your destination."

Over the next few weeks, I'll provide more detail on each of these steps to help you on your journey to pain-free performance management. I hope you enjoy!

Improving Employee Behavior: Recreating the Playing Field

In my last post, I talked about the value of putting the chalk lines down on the playing field proactively. You may, unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where this has not been done, and now there are hardly any chalk lines left on the field. I have worked with leaders who have gotten into this situation in two ways.

In one scenario, a leader has allowed this to happen while s/he was in charge. One employee started going over the boundary line, erasing part of it. The leader did not step in right away to correct the behavior and re-draw the boundary line, so the individual continued. Others saw this happening, so some of them started going over the lines too and erasing them even more. If things have gotten really bad, the high performers (team members who would never go over the line because of their personal standards) have started taking their balls and "going home." They are either leaving the team or the organization all together. In another common scenario, a new leader comes in and finds that the team's departing leader allowed this to happen.

In either case, you need to embark on a project to change the team's culture - not for the faint of heart. The team did not get to this state overnight, and you will not change the culture with one meeting or one conversation. You will need a plan, other people who will help, and lots of courage, energy and patience.

First, look to the resources you have: your leader, other leaders who have high performing teams, your HR business partner, HR specialists in training and organizational development, and/or external consultants. These individuals can help you create and execute a plan to change culture and can keep you focused when you are running out of patience and/or energy.

Once you have a team, step one is to-re-draw the boundary lines for the team, but which chalk lines do you put down first? Here are my priorities:

1. Behaviors that are creating risk for the organization and/or team members (e.g., unsafe working practices, bullying or harrassment)

2. Behaviors that will be easy to change - things your employees are able to do (e.g., attendance)

3. Behaviors that require skill-building (e.g., effective communication, giving feedback or conflict management)

How do you put boundaries down? There are a lot of options. To start, I recommend a meeting with the entire team to explain what is happening and why and to give details about expectations. You will really need courage for this meeting if you were leading the team as it evolved to its current state. I firmly believe that your efforts to change the team's culture will fail if you are not open about the role you played in getting the team to where it is. You have to lead by example, and you can't hold others accountable if you don't hold yourself accountable. Openly owning your part in the team's current situation and your public commitment to change are fundamental to moving the team forward.

Courage, energy and patience become important after the meeting. First, send out a written summary to clarify, in writing, your new expectations, then role model the expectations yourself and hold each individual accountable using effective feedback practices (more on this in a future post). When a team member goes over the chalk line, put the chalk line back down. If a team member continues to go over the line, you may need to discipline that employee or even terminate his/her employment. This is never easy, but remember how the team got here in the first place. Schedule training to help the team develop needed skills. I strongly recommend that this training be done as a team including leaders. This builds relationships, creates shared language, and ensures everyone has the same baseline of information. Keep revising and working your plan until you and the team have created the culture you want.

Culture change is tough, so ideally, you avoid getting here in the first place by being proactive about drawing chalk lines. But all is not lost if you find yourself on a playing field with no lines. Start somewhere. Follow the steps outlined above with support from people you trust, and one day, you will be proud to share the story of how you turned your team's culture around.

Share your stories and let me know if you have questions in the comments below.