Pain-Free Performance Management: Monitoring Progress

In today's post, we'll cover how you can monitor progress to keep your team on course. Up until now, we've covered setting goals and creating action plans. Now it's time to execute! Your team members will start making progress towards their goals, and your role as the leader is to monitor their progress to make sure they end up achieving them on time.

As I covered in last week's post on action planning, some goals require frequent check-ins while others only require a couple along the way. I have been using a GPS to represent the leader's role in performance management, but in this area, you differ a bit. Unlike a GPS, which is always monitoring progress, you are only able to monitor progress periodically. You are only human after all!

I have found that the best way, by far, to monitor progress are regular one-to-ones with your team members. I have taught many programs on performance management and have heard leaders push back on this concept more times than I can count. They can't imagine how they will make time to meet regularly with their team members. My advice - try it! You will find that the number of interruptions from your team goes way down. Instead of just calling you, emailing you or popping into your office whenever they think of a question, they start keeping a list of things they will cover with you at their next one-to-one.

How often should you meet? Last week's post can help you here. If your team member is focused on work that she has done successfully many, many times (i.e., her daily commute), your check-ins can be infrequent - every 2 weeks or once a month. If the goal is being achieved in a new way or is a completely different goal, or the team member is new, more frequent check-ins will be needed - likely once a week.

If you've never done one-to-ones with your team members, or you have, but you're not sure you are doing them "right," here is a suggested agenda:

Welcome and confirm the purpose of the meeting

Ask for what has gone well on assigned projects since the last one-to-one

Ask for things that could have been done better on assigned projects since the last one-to-one

Ask about progress on professional development

Ask what the person plans to get done before the next one-to-one

Ask what help is needed from you or others (and make sure you follow up!)

As you might guess by the agenda, this conversation will be driven by your team member, not by you. If we continue with our travel analogy, your team member is driving the car, so s/he is best positioned to answer questions about how the journey is progressing. As an outside observer, you will also assess and have an opinion about progress, but letting your team members share their thoughts first gives you a lot more information about them. You have the opportunity to figure out their strengths and weaknesses, how they approach work, and their level of self-awareness for example. If you just jump in with your opinion first, you may never get the chance to assess these things.

Please note that I am not saying you should not offer your feedback; you just shouldn't offer it first. In addition to learning more about your team member, you can build your feedback onto their observations, which often makes feedback easier to take in.

Let's look at a sample discussion. You are having a one-to-one with Sarah who manages large projects for your company. When you ask her what has gone well, she identifies a client meeting where important decisions were made after getting all opinions on the table. You can give positive feedback by adding your observation that Sarah's ability to ask open questions, listen without judgment and reflect back what she heard were important to the success of the meeting. When you ask for something that did not go well, Sarah identifies a deliverable that was turned in late and notes that she had not followed up with the person until the day before it was due. This has happened a few times, so you have an opportunity to give developmental (sometimes called "negative") feedback to Sarah about this potentially becoming a pattern. You can then ask how she can operate differently to get better results and ask what help she needs from you, if any.

Next week, I'll talk more about using feedback to get performance back on track. I hope you have found some ideas you can implement this week that will help you in your role as a leader. If you have questions or feedback, please feel free to email me at susan.salomone@gmail.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Have a great week!