Performance Management: the shift you need to make

Since people account for 70-90% of a company's cost base, setting them up for success should be top of the priority list 🥇.

👉 Let's get on the same page

For the avoidance of doubt, the CIPD defines Performance Management as "the attempt to maximise the value that employees create."

🤔 Why change is needed

Let's be honest, the world has fundamentally shifted but Performance Management hasn't.

When Performance Management was introduced people were essentially "technology placeholders" - mindlessly performing tasks that machines would eventually take over. Efficiency and predictability were the name of the game. Performance Management was all about optimising the performance of each 'human cog' in the 'organisational wheel.'

Now, technology is handling all the mundane, repetitive stuff, we humans are free to tap into the qualities that make us uniquely valuable - emotional intelligence, creativity, intuition, the ability to navigate ambiguity. In other words, the human-value-add in the digital era comes not from our ability to mimic machines, but from our capacity to be unapologetically human.

We also need to keep it real - the world moves way too fast these days for old-school hierarchies to work. Think about it: the telephone took 75 years from launch to 100 million users whereas ChatGPT took just two months. That's the kind of chaos we're dealing with! In this environment, having your talented people waiting around to be told what to do or being forced to follow rigid processes is like trying to win a Formula 1 race in a horse and cart.

Organisations need to wake up and realise that their people are at their best when they're trusted to work together, use their judgment, deploy their skills autonomously, and respond to challenges in real-time. The days of treating employees like predictable cogs in a machine are over - it's time to let them be the agile, creative, problem-solving, relational humans they are.

Unfortunately though, most organisations are shooting themselves in the foot, using Performance Management approaches from yesterday to tackle challenges that demand tomorrow's thinking.

🤷🏼So, what's the solution?🤷🏼

It's time to ditch the old-school, individualistic approach to performance management and embrace a more team-based, trust-based model. Instead we need to empowers teams to self-optimise - to share information, trust each other, self-regulate, and work together to solve their problems and seize opportunities.

Humans are wired for connection and their potential and performance cannot be divorced from their context. A high-performing team achieves more than the sum of its individual parts, and in a dysfunctional team, even 'optimised individuals' can struggle.

A team based approach to performance management not only significantly and measurably improves organisational performance, but it also reduces management complexity.

Making the Shift

Transitioning to Team Performance Management involves three key elements:

1. Teams need to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

2. They must be able to surface and address obstacles to their optimal performance in a psychologically safe way

3. A feedback loop should exist to demonstrate and encourage progress.

While this shift may be challenging, it’s essential for organisations to thrive in this new era.

Perspective enables this shift to happen quickly, painlessly, and confidently.

👉Summary 👈

• The Problem: what organisations need from their people has changed fundamentally but performance management hasn't kept pace

• The Shift: technology now handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans to use their unique strengths - creativity, emotional intelligence, and adaptability

• The Reality: today's pace of change demands agile, autonomous teams, not micromanagement

• The Solution: move from an individual to a team-based approach to Performance Management, enabling teams to self-regulate and self-optimise

• The Path Forward: help teams understand their performance, create psychological safety and feedback loops then trust teams to deliver - Perspective makes this easy.

  
  

🫵For those who want to explore this further🫵

Team of Teams, is a great read. When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, he quickly realised that conventional military tactics were failing. McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom to create a 'team of teams' that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralised decision-making authority. Faster, flatter and more flexible, the task force finally beat back al-Qaeda. In "Team of Teams," McChrystal distills his learnings and explains why modern organisations should make the same shift.