GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore
Accountability begins with a voluntary commitment to put yourself in service to bringing about an outcome. To frame this effort for you and your team, I have found Salesforce’s V2MOM management system to be an invaluable tool. In that context:
- Vision describes the outcome you are all in service to.
- Values shape the approach you will all take to bringing it about.
- Methods present what each one of you will do to achieve the outcome and are assigned to single accountable leaders.
- Obstacles call out the challenges the leaders anticipate having to deal with, and
- Measures are the objective signals that everyone will use to assess your degree of success.
Performance management begins with securing each individual’s voluntary commitment to the outcomes associated with their jobs to be done as well as to the values to be honored while doing it. It then moves on to review their methods, obstacles, and measures to test them for coherence, feasibility, and credibility, and to ensure each person is confident they are set up to succeed and that they want to be held accountable for that success. The day-to-day work of performance management consists of inspecting, detecting, dissecting, course-correcting, and resurrecting the stream of work to keep it on track. Most of this effort consists of self-management, supported by regular check-ins with the team leader and quarterly reviews with the higher-ups. The majority of the work is focused on the near term, but this must be balanced with investments in the mid and long-term for sustained success.
That all said, that is not what most people think of when you bring up the topic of performance management. Instead, they associate it with a mandate to manage out under-performers. The word under-performer has unfortunate connotations, and this has cast a cloud over the entire effort.
To set things straight, begin by realizing that everyone is an under-performer at something. If you are unsure about what you personally under-perform at, just ask your spouse or your children, and they will let you know. The point is, there is no shame in under-performing per se. We just don’t want to persist in it.
When it comes to the workplace, under-performance shows up as a series of repeated shortfalls in our measures despite our best efforts to overcome our obstacles by course-correcting our methods. To ignore these signals without taking remedial action is to fall prey to Einstein’s definition of insanity, namely, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Instead, one needs to intervene by invoking the “horse, rider, trail” principle. The horse is the offering, the rider is the person accountable for its success, and the trail is the target market. Changing any one of these factors will materially alter the dynamics of the situation such that you can expect a different result. Just understand that you probably won’t get to do this more than once, so choose wisely.
Finally, understand that while everyone is an under-performer at something, they are also likely to be an overachiever at something else. As a manager, you should act as a steward of your team members’ careers. If they are not the right fit for the job they are in, then both they and you need them to move on. Under-performing in this context is just nature’s way of telling us we are playing the wrong position, perhaps even playing the wrong game. Nobody likes to under-perform, and nobody is served by it. Meanwhile, our world is a needy place, so the sooner we can get people into their right roles, the better we all shall be.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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