It’s historic!

Dunking witches

One organisation had separate sales teams for new and existing customers. That’s fine. The issue was that the capacity of the business was finite and individual goals had been set to drive individual performance which meant they were encouraged to work for personal gain, however that might adversely impact the business, their customers and their prospects. Asked why they did this the answer was “it’s historic”.

Here’s where some simple high performance team based thinking would help.

Performance killers

We see goals being set and followed that are clearly not working. Often they’re set at the beginning of the year by leaders. Goals are meant to harness motivation by focusing intensity and direction of effort and by providing a measure of success. We frequently see this working really well in the world of elite level sport.

We see far too many corporate goals that do the opposite – they become unachievable and irrelevant, of interest only to leaders, the finance teams and the manager who now has to report on the variance, why they’re behind and what the plans are to make up the gap. The game then becomes even more bonkers as the pressure builds on to the manager to become more directive with staff to achieve the original goal they’ve tied themselves to, rather than re-setting the goal or at least looking at all options to rekindle dwindling motivation amongst team members whose motivation and engagement is at an all time low. Goals are meant to harness motivation, not destroy it. Most people start a job motivated and great leaders and managers nurture that.

For some businesses goal setting should perhaps be re-named Performance Killing. “Shall we set some performance killers this year?” “Yes, let’s pick some numbers that our senior leaders and finance people will like and pay little or no attention to whether they will help harness motivation.

If it looks as though they’ve become unrealistic, that confidence in achieving them is dropping or our people don’t have the skills to do what’s required, then we won’t change them – we’ll just add some pressure in the form of money or fear and that should do the trick”. Motivation genius.

Management disinformation

The use of the term Management Information implies that the sort of feedback and data that can be essential for performance development is owned exclusively by managers who therefore have the authority to make performance decisions without having to do the tedious bit of having to take into account the performance of the people who will deliver the result.

That’s excellent because it makes those people feel even less connected to their work and so sharpens the Performance killer instinct. Maybe Management Information would be better replaced with Performance Information, available to be used by all in the business as part of a feedback loop. That way it serves as a tool to grow confidence and a sense of control over how you’re performing.

KPIs – a new name for a stick

Key Performance Indicators regularly get interpreted as Key Performance Targets and are used to drive short term behaviour, sometimes losing sight of the overall objective. KPIs are indicators of performance and not the end goal, but the way they are sometimes used by managers simply erodes the sense of control and autonomy of performers.

Of course this is different where there are high levels of trust, clearly accepted roles and agreed overall goals. Chris Bartley, rower, and member of the lightweight men’s crew at London 2012 describes how much of their training is repetitive and regimented. And yet he describes having trust in the Olympic rowing programme, trust in the coaches and trust in his team-mates. So he remains very motivated and keeps a strong sense of control in his performance because of the environment and the decision makers rather than in spite of them.

Meeting or a beating?

The rowers also are a good example of performers who’ve a great blend of team and individual goals and targets. Businesses often set individual targets, do individual performance reviews and reward individual performances. They less frequently capitalise on the performance benefits of setting team goals and targets, carrying out team performance reviews and rewarding team performance. Their team meetings are often about dissemination of information, usually top down, and team performance reviews don’t exist (the exception being project reviews when the project has failed).

Team results reviews exist, but not performance reviews. Relatively rarely do business teams discuss how confident they’re feeling, how they’re behaving as a team, how well they’re supporting one another, what they could and should be changing to make things better.

Rarely that is compared to how frequently they look at results, how frequently they look at individual results and rarely compared to high performing sports teams for whom reviewing and learning and innovating and adapting are key competitive differentiators.

Performance choices

Business pressures and lack of time sometimes mean individuals, teams and even whole organisations can get to a critical point where they’re on a spiral of death. More work and greater demands get tackled with the same resources or even reduced resources from the previous year.

This is a choice point, and one recognised by the elite level athlete who’s pushed themselves physically, mentally and emotionally to achieve great things, but who knows that unplanned stepping over the line might result in burnout. The corporate impact could be stress and/or customer dissatisfaction. The alternative is, instead of just working harder, doing something counter intuitive: stopping, thinking, preparing and readying themselves to perform.