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Consultant’s Consultant: Managing Performance of Your People

Managing Performance can be tricky. Managing performance is central to the relationship between managers and employees. It can be a key element of good communication and foster the growth of trust and personal development. An essential goal of performance management is to encourage and improve an employee’s efficiency. It is a continual process where employees and their managers take equal efforts to plan, monitor and review work’s objectives or goals and its overall contribution to the business.
Managing performance in the office can be as simple as managing performance of a machine. When you approach methodically, it all goes effortlessly. If you leave it vulnerable to hazards, things can possibly go wrong.
Encouraging worthy performances and making the most of it, starts with the structure for managing performance. The aim here is to achieve company goals of innovation, performance and partnering. People (human systems) in the company, navigate the company to achieve shared objectives. Successful companies do not materialize accidentally and overnight. They succeed because their human systems are nurtured and kept up to date.
Do you want to achieve and improve on your targets? Is it beneficial for you to have a happy and self-correcting, well-informed staff? Would you wish to stop worrying about things going wrong? Performance management is all about these things. When it’s properly done, it could diminish your problems and keep your staff happy. Here are some insights on how this could be done:
The Motivation Factor
Everyone is inspired by something different. Research shows that few highlighted factors, like being paid more or shorter working hours aren’t as useful in the long term as having colleagues as friends, a decent place to work, or the chance to duck out quickly if your family is in trouble. Managers play numerous roles in a company including being individual contributors, developing every individual in their team and being responsible for encouraging the team to achieve set performance goals. Find out what motivates your people and give it to them as a reward. Take it away if there’s a problem. Tell them why. If you’re confused about what motivates them, just ask them.
Knowing the strength of each person in the team
It’s essential to know how each person contributes to your team uniquely. A strengthened approach is empowering and helps employees focus on ways to manage conflict, communicate, share their voice, build relationships, execute, think strategically, influence and build trust using their strong points naturally.
Bring out Change, Make corrections do-able
If you really want your staff to change some methodologies, they must have a step-by-step method for improving. They can take concrete actions at their subsequent meeting, with their upcoming clients, to bring out change. “Being optimistic” or “cooperating better” isn’t good enough. Be decisive, greet good mornings, or organize an event. All these come under the do-able list.
Monitor how your technique works
While delivering a bad news, try out the sandwich technique – positive one, followed by negative, then again followed by positive (so that the negative is packed and presented in between the positives).
Keep a constant check on whether performance changes due to sandwich technique. If they’re saying “2 out of 3 isn’t that bad” rather than “they’re being nice by giving me 2 positives”, then take out the positive. Just be certain that the correction is do-able.
A quick Rebuke or Reproof
A quick reprimand should be given as soon as an employee does something wrong. It should be broken down into two halves so that it does not cause any negative impact. The first half would include informing people about what they did wrong, how you feel about it followed by a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. This assures the seriousness of the issue. Then in the second half you tell the people how you believe in their capability and how much you value their contribution. An important aspect of your quick reprimands is that it criticizes the work not the doer. The employee is never to be blamed on a personal level, only his work is accused of not being up to the desired level.
Quick rebukes are effective mainly because the feedback is instant, unlike your annual assessments where you are charged for issues occurred several weeks or months ago. If an error is pointed out as soon as it occurs, it can easily be revised. Since one error is pointed at one time, employees hear it seriously and your message is effortlessly conveyed to them.
Appreciate then and there
It’s essential to give good feedbacks too. Always start by highlighting what they did well, why you appreciate their work, and then say thank you.
Short and quick admiration of work shows that you are genuinely interested in your people and care for them and their achievements. Quick appreciations aim at catching people ‘doing something right’ rather than catching them ‘doing something wrong’ like most other organizations. Although the two might seem to be the same thing, there is a lot of difference. If you concentrate on catching people doing mistakes, they become cautious of their work and avoid going above and beyond to produce great results. This produces mediocrity because everyone will tend to stay average and safe. For extraordinary results you need your people to put in their best and that can only happen when you emphasize on pointing out their best.
Now that you know all the secrets of managing performance of your people, implement them in your work style and witness your company attain new heights along with your employees.