Strong Performance Management Requires ‘Soft’ Leadership

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Strong performance management requires soft leadership.  Soft meaning the ability to be empathetic, listen, reflect and ask clarifying questions as in ‘soft skills’ rather than soft meaning squishy or ineffective.  Strong performance management requires more than just intellect and technical knowledge--emotional and social intelligence are what make the difference.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to process emotional informational quickly and accurately, to recognize one’s own emotions as they happen, and to immediately understand their effects on oneself and on others.  Effective performance management is instrumental in insuring that the critical projects in your organization get implemented in a timely basis.  But intelligently using emotion to consistently build relationships and achieve group goals is far more difficult than say, learning how to read a balance sheet or do financial forecasting.  An organization needs to first recognize this fact, and then make a concerted effort to develop and nurture the skill of emotional intelligence in its leaders.

Measurement is Highly Overrated

You may have heard the sentiment that you can only improve what you measure, which I think most people would agree to be true.  But another great axiom is that measuring everything is like measuring nothing.  Organization’s can be guilty of measuring so many things that most employees (other than salespeople) become confused as to which measures are reflective of their performance. 

Clear measures help people move toward a goal, giving them tangible feedback on their performance.  People will focus on what you measure, so it’s important to spend a sufficient amount of time determining what those measures should be and getting the employee’s input and buy-in to those measures. 

The following three qualities are important to consider when defining measures for your business. 

1)      Evaluate the measure to insure it’s evaluating the correct behavior.  Think about the most basic purpose of the process and see if the measure is reflecting that purpose.

2)      Measures that use ratios are generally more meaningful than absolute values and a relative measure provides a more useful comparison over time.

Measures should be reflected as trended data because the meaning is much greater.

Selling Strategically Requires Knowing All the Buying Influences

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Back in 1987 when I was District Systems Manager for a Fortune 100 technology company, I made one of the largest sales of my professional career worth about $500,000 to a bank in St. Louis.  We pulled out all the stops to win the account, including flying the client to our headquarters on the corporate jet (it was the eighties after all and companies still did that). 

The interesting thing about winning that sale was that my primary competitor focused their sales efforts on the executive level at the bank.  While I had created relationships with the executives, I focused the majority of my time defining our proposal/solution to a manager within the end user department of the bank who would be using our system.

As it turned out, upper level management relied more heavily on the recommendation of their internal subject matter expert than they did the outside professionals that had been ‘wooing’ their business. 

That sales experience taught me several valuable lessons about selling: 1) You can never assume you’ve ‘won’ a deal just because you have good relationships with the owner/upper management, 2) Sometimes a technical person who can’t officially say “yes” to your proposal, does in fact have the authority to say “no” and 3) You need to be strategic about how you work with potential clients understanding that in a complex sales cycle, multiple buyers will be involved and will have input into the final decision.

Creating a Blueprint for Growth: It All Starts With a Clear Vision

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The saying, “begin with the end in mind” is never more appropriate then when creating a blueprint for growth for your organization.  Terminology in planning exercises can be confusing, but in order to arrive at your vision, all you need to do is answer the question, “what are we building?” 

If you think about describing what that picture looks like in your mind as you look out over the horizon at your business three years from now, what do you see?  How would you describe it?

A good framework for the vision statement is to identify the geographic scope of the organization, size in terms of revenue and/or people, and a description of what the organization will provide. 

Having a concrete, succinct vision statement is a critical step in the planning process.  It identifies that future point in space and time to which everyone in the organization is moving towards.  If the vision isn’t clearly defined, or everyone has a different idea of the vision, than decision making will reflect that confusion. 

Effective Performance Management Must be a Continual Process

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The term Performance Management means different things to different people.  For some organizations, Performance Management is synonymous with Performance Review which is most often a yearly process of reviewing an employee’s accomplishments and assigning ratings based on pre-determined categories.

Performance management is a broad term coined by Dr. Aubrey Daniels in the late 1970s to describe a technology for managing behavior and results; two critical elements of what is known as performance.  Effective Performance Management involves continual measurement and coaching to ensure that goals are being met. 

Improving an organization’s performance then requires that employees at all levels receive consistent feedback on their results and the behaviors they’re utilizing.  Receiving feedback mid-stream provides the opportunity to refine the approach and align systems.  Providing only a yearly retrospective on performance, means that many organizations are missing the opportunity to effectively manage and improve performance.