bsbmgt502
BSBMGT502
Manage people
performance
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BSBMGT502 - Manage people performance
Author: John Bailey
Copyright
Text copyright © 2009, 2010 by John N Bailey.
Illustration, layout and design copyright © 2009, 2010 by John N Bailey.
Under Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 (the Act), except for any fair dealing for
the purposes of study, research, criticism or review, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from John N Bailey. All inquiries should be directed in the first instance to the publisher at the address below.
Copying for Education Purposes
The Act allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be copied by an education institution for its educational purposes provided that that educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to JNB Publications.
Disclaimer
All reasonable efforts have been made to ensure the quality and accuracy of this publication. JNB Publications assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions and no warranties are made with regard to this publication. Neither JNB Publications nor any authorized distributors shall be held responsible for any direct, incidental or consequential damages resulting from the use of this publication.
Published in Australia by:
JNB Publications
PO Box, 268,
Macarthur Square NSW 2560 Australia.
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BSBMGT502 - Manage people performance Contents
Description: .................................................................................................................................................... 8
Employability Skills: ........................................................................................................................................ 8
Application of Unit: ........................................................................................................................................ 8
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 8
This Learning Guide covers: ........................................................................................................................... 8
Learning Program .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Additional Learning Support .......................................................................................................................... 9
Facilitation ..................................................................................................................................................... 9
Flexible Learning .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Space ............................................................................................................................................................ 10
Study Resources ........................................................................................................................................... 10
Time ............................................................................................................................................................. 11
Study Strategies ........................................................................................................................................... 11
Using this learning guide: ............................................................................................................................ 11
THE ICON KEY ................................................................................................................................................ 12
How to get the most out of your learning guide .......................................................................................... 13
Additional research, reading and note taking.............................................................................................. 13
PERFORMANCE CRITERIA ............................................................................................................................... 14
SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE ............................................................................................................................... 16
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Required Skills .............................................................................................................................................. 16
Required Knowledge .................................................................................................................................... 16
RANGE STATEMENT .......................................................................................................................................
17 EVIDENCE GUIDE
............................................................................................................................................ 18
1. ALLOCATE WORK. ...................................................................................................................................... 19
1.1 CONSULT RELEVANT GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS ON WORK TO BE ALLOCATED AND RESOURCES AVAILABLE. ................. 19
Assumptions ................................................................................................................................................. 20
Motivational Questions ................................................................................................................................ 21
A fundamental team-based approach ........................................................................................................ 21
The Team Model .......................................................................................................................................... 22
Putting Teams to Work ................................................................................................................................ 23
Team Success Model .................................................................................................................................... 24
The only way to find out is to ask your employees! ..................................................................................... 24
1.2 DEVELOP WORK PLANS IN ACCORDANCE WITH OPERATIONAL PLANS. .................................................................. 25 Team Building .............................................................................................................................................. 25
1.3 ALLOCATE WORK IN A WAY THAT IS EFFICIENT, COST EFFECTIVE AND OUTCOME FOCUSED. ....................................... 27
1.4 CONFIRM PERFORMANCE STANDARDS, CODE OF CONDUCT AND WORK OUTPUTS WITH RELEVANT TEAMS AND
INDIVIDUALS. ........................................................................................................................................................ 28 Team Effectiveness ...................................................................................................................................... 28 A Focused Team ...........................................................................................................................................
29
1.5 DEVELOP AND AGREE PERFORMANCE INDICATORS WITH RELEVANT STAFF PRIOR TO COMMENCEMENT OF WORK. ........ 31
The Concepts: Linking Skills .......................................................................................................................... 31
Figure 3: Margerison-McCann Linking Skills Model ..................................................................................... 31
Table 4: ........................................................................................................................................................ 32
Table 5: ........................................................................................................................................................ 32
Table 6: ........................................................................................................................................................ 33
Figure 7: Team Management Wheel ........................................................................................................... 33
Figure 8: Bad and Good Internal Linking ...................................................................................................... 34
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External linking – representing .................................................................................................................... 34
Informal Linking ........................................................................................................................................... 35
Figure 9: 11 Linking Skills ............................................................................................................................. 35
1.6 CONDUCT RISK-ANALYSIS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ORGANISATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT PLAN AND LEGAL
REQUIREMENTS ..................................................................................................................................................... 37
Allocating Work through Delegation ........................................................................................................... 37
Be SMARTER ................................................................................................................................................. 38
The Steps to Delegating ............................................................................................................................... 38
Levels of Delegation ..................................................................................................................................... 39
Coaching and Mentoring ............................................................................................................................. 40
Definition of Coaching is…............................................................................................................................ 41
Definition of Mentoring is... ......................................................................................................................... 41
The difference between coaching and mentoring ....................................................................................... 41
Business coaching & mentoring ................................................................................................................... 41
Table 10: How do coaching and mentoring compare with other services? ................................................. 42
2. ASSESS PERFORMANCE. ............................................................................................................................. 44
2.1 DESIGN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND REVIEW PROCESSES TO ENSURE CONSISTENCY WITH ORGANISATIONAL
OBJECTIVES AND POLICIES ........................................................................................................................................ 44 Performance Standards ............................................................................................................................... 44
Purpose of the Position: ............................................................................................................................... 45
Critical Elements of Positions ....................................................................................................................... 45
Team work through active participation ..................................................................................................... 45
2.2 TRAIN PARTICIPANTS IN THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND REVIEW PROCESS. ............................................... 50
Sequence the Activities ................................................................................................................................ 50
Gather Your Resources and Support ............................................................................................................ 51
How to survive when you're overworked and understaffed: ....................................................................... 52
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How to Allocate Responsibilities and Monitor Results ................................................................................. 52
Table 11: Mistakes to avoid when delegating and assigning work ............................................................. 53
2.3 CONDUCT PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN ACCORDANCE WITH ORGANISATIONAL PROTOCOLS AND TIME LINES. ........ 53
Table 12: Ways to assign work .................................................................................................................... 54
Table 13: ...................................................................................................................................................... 55
There is no skill in seeing the world from your point of view ....................................................................... 55
Handling emotional situations ..................................................................................................................... 56
Characteristics of High Performing Teams ................................................................................................... 56
A High Performing Team .............................................................................................................................. 57
No team is an island ..................................................................................................................................... 58
Putting the leader in the glass house ........................................................................................................... 58
The dangerous unthinking habit .................................................................................................................. 59
Overlooking the practical and the consistent .............................................................................................. 59
Breaking the habits of mediocrity: the nine principles ................................................................................. 59
2.4 MONITOR AND EVALUATE PERFORMANCE ON A CONTINUOUS BASIS ................................................................... 60 Breaking the habits of mediocrity: specific approaches, tools and techniques............................................ 60
How can we support the team to identify and resolve problems which are impeding its performance? .... 61
Table 14: ...................................................................................................................................................... 62
Cultural characteristics ................................................................................................................................ 62
Self organising systems ................................................................................................................................ 64
Lessons from the geese by Milton Olson ...................................................................................................... 65
3. PROVIDE FEEDBACK. .................................................................................................................................. 66
3.1 PROVIDE INFORMAL FEEDBACK TO STAFF ON A REGULAR BASIS. ......................................................................... 66 The giving and receiving of feedback ........................................................................................................... 66
Feedback checklist ....................................................................................................................................... 67
3.2 ADVISE RELEVANT PEOPLE WHERE THERE IS POOR PERFORMANCE AND TAKE NECESSARY ACTIONS ............................. 68 Giving work instructions and delegating ..................................................................................................... 68
The dilemma of giving work instructions ..................................................................................................... 68
Delegating .................................................................................................................................................... 68
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Command and coercion or cooperation and commitment? ........................................................................ 68
Types of work instructions ........................................................................................................................... 69
Table 15: ...................................................................................................................................................... 70
3.3 PROVIDE ON-THE-JOB COACHING WHEN NECESSARY TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND TO CONFIRM EXCELLENCE IN
PERFORMANCE...................................................................................................................................................... 70
Request and implied work instructions ........................................................................................................ 71
Undirected work instructions ....................................................................................................................... 71
Conditional work instructions ...................................................................................................................... 71
Helping employees to accept instructions.................................................................................................... 71
Handling a refusal to carry our directions .................................................................................................... 73
3.4 DOCUMENT PERFORMANCE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. ...... 75
Disagreeing with an instruction ................................................................................................................... 75
Delegation .................................................................................................................................................... 75
Accountability .............................................................................................................................................. 75
Delegation or abdication? ............................................................................................................................ 76
The importance of delegation ...................................................................................................................... 76
What happens if the leader doesn't delegate? ............................................................................................ 76
The steps to effective delegation ................................................................................................................. 77
Table 16: Work delegation plan ................................................................................................................... 78
Does delegation mean losing control? ......................................................................................................... 79
3.5 CONDUCT FORMAL STRUCTURED FEEDBACK SESSIONS AS NECESSARY AND IN ACCORDANCE WITH ORGANISATIONAL POLICY. 79
Suitable tasks for delegation ........................................................................................................................ 80
Employee reactions to delegation. ............................................................................................................... 82
Tips for delegating ....................................................................................................................................... 85
Upwards delegation ..................................................................................................................................... 86
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Table 17: Delegation dos and don’ts ............................................................................................................ 87
Summary ...................................................................................................................................................... 88
4. MANAGE FOLLOW UP. ............................................................................................................................... 89
4.1 WRITE AND AGREE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT PLANS IN ACCORDANCE WITH
ORGANISATIONAL POLICIES. ..................................................................................................................................... 89
Figure 18: The management role and performance appraisals ................................................................... 90
Self-appraisal ............................................................................................................................................... 91
Motivation ................................................................................................................................................... 91
Figure 19: Appraisals can motivate future performance ............................................................................. 92
The management challenge ......................................................................................................................... 92
Case Study .................................................................................................................................................... 92
Appraisal ...................................................................................................................................................... 93
Figure 20: Activity Values ............................................................................................................................. 94
Workplace appraisal .................................................................................................................................... 95
A communication process ............................................................................................................................ 95
Figure 21: Building blocks of an effective performance appraisal ............................................................... 97
Randell’s Taxonomy ..................................................................................................................................... 97
Figure 22: Relationship of appraisal purposes to the operations and the management of the
organisation ................................................................................................................................................. 98 Figure 23: Appraisal purposes and performance ......................................................................................... 99
Figure 24: A Performance Gap ................................................................................................................... 100
Figure 25: Anticipated performance gap. .................................................................................................. 100
Benefits of performance appraisals ........................................................................................................... 101
Figure 26: Benefits of performance appraisals .......................................................................................... 101
Frequency ................................................................................................................................................... 102
4.2 SEEK ASSISTANCE FROM HUMAN RESOURCES SPECIALISTS WHERE APPROPRIATE .................................................. 104 Prepare specific feedback .......................................................................................................................... 104
Does the person have potential? ............................................................................................................... 105
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The performance discussion ....................................................................................................................... 105
Figure 27: Difference between an appraisal interview and a discussion ................................................... 106
Characteristics of an effective discussion ................................................................................................... 106
Figure 28: Elements of effective group functioning required for successful performance discussions ...... 107
Figure 29: The performance discussion model ........................................................................................... 108
Stage 1—Setting up the discussion ............................................................................................................ 108
Appraiser responsibilities ........................................................................................................................... 109
Figure 30: Memo of information to appraisee ........................................................................................... 111
Appraisee responsibilities .......................................................................................................................... 112
Stage 2 - Preparing for the discussion ........................................................................................................ 112
Figure 31: A model of the appraiser preparation process .......................................................................... 114
4.3 REINFORCE EXCELLENCE IN PERFORMANCE THROUGH RECOGNITION AND CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK .......................... 118
Appraisee responsibilities .......................................................................................................................... 118
Figure 32: A model for the preparation of the appraisee for the performance discussion ........................ 119
Stage 3 - The discussion ............................................................................................................................. 121
Figure 33: Dimensions of setting the climate ............................................................................................. 122
Physical dimension ..................................................................................................................................... 122
Figure 34: Seating arrangements for the discussion .................................................................................. 122
Process dimension ...................................................................................................................................... 123
The psychological dimension ..................................................................................................................... 123
Figure 35: Components of each dimension of setting the climate ............................................................. 124
4.4 MONITOR AND COACH INDIVIDUALS WITH POOR PERFORMANCE. ..................................................................... 125 Mentors, coaches and the buddy ............................................................................................................... 125
Figure 36: ................................................................................................................................................... 125
Selecting workplace coaches and mentors ................................................................................................ 126
What does coaching and mentoring involve? ............................................................................................ 126
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Who is a mentor and what do they do? ..................................................................................................... 126
B: The central discussion ............................................................................................................................ 127
Figure 37: The discussion model ................................................................................................................ 128
A problem-solving approach ...................................................................................................................... 128
Focus on self-appraisal ............................................................................................................................... 130
Discuss performance generally .................................................................................................................. 130
Review the job, accountabilities and responsibilities ................................................................................. 131
Discuss major achievements in the job during review period .................................................................... 131
Review performance against objectives and negotiate assessment .......................................................... 132
Figure 38: Strategies for reviewing standards ........................................................................................... 132
Strategies for managing the discussion ..................................................................................................... 133
4.5 PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES WHERE NECESSARY .................................................................................................. 136 Develop improvement plans ...................................................................................................................... 136
Develop objectives for next period ............................................................................................................. 137
Appraise the appraiser ............................................................................................................................... 137
Summarise ................................................................................................................................................. 138
Stage 4—Following up the discussion ........................................................................................................ 140
Problems in performance appraisal ........................................................................................................... 140
4.6 COUNSEL INDIVIDUALS WHO CONTINUE TO PERFORM BELOW EXPECTATIONS AND IMPLEMENT THE DISCIPLINARY
PROCESS IF NECESSARY. ........................................................................................................................................ 142
Managing poor performance ..................................................................................................................... 142
Using the flow chart ................................................................................................................................... 142
Figure 39: Unsatisfactory performance management flow chart .............................................................. 144
Counselling discussions .............................................................................................................................. 144
Figure 40: Difference between performance and counselling discussions ................................................. 145
Analysis ...................................................................................................................................................... 145
Appraisal .................................................................................................................................................... 146 Figure 41: Counselling discussion framework ............................................................................................ 147
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Outputs of the discussion model ................................................................................................................ 147
Figure 42: The counselling discussion model ............................................................................................. 148
Continuing unsatisfactory performance .................................................................................................... 151
Using the skills of Human Resources .......................................................................................................... 151
The written warning ................................................................................................................................... 152
Figure 43: Contents of a written warning .................................................................................................. 153
4.7 TERMINATE STAFF IN ACCORDANCE WITH LEGAL AND ORGANISATIONAL REQUIREMENTS WHERE SERIOUS
MISCONDUCT OCCURS OR ONGOING POOR-PERFORMANCE CONTINUES. ......................................................................... 154 Termination of employment ...................................................................................................................... 154
A decision to terminate .............................................................................................................................. 154
Constructive dismissal ................................................................................................................................ 155
Terminating employment .......................................................................................................................... 156
Performance management and the law .................................................................................................... 156
Non Performance ....................................................................................................................................... 157
Legislation .................................................................................................................................................. 158
Process ....................................................................................................................................................... 158
Legal framework ........................................................................................................................................ 159
When employees cannot be dismissed ...................................................................................................... 160
SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................................... 160
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................. 162
RESOURCE EVALUATION FORM ................................................................................................................... 163
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BSBMGT502B - Manage people performance
Description:
This unit describes the performance outcomes, skills and knowledge required to manage the performance of staff who report to them directly. Development of key result areas and key performance indicators and standards, coupled with regular and timely coaching and feedback, provide the basis for performance management. No licensing, legislative, regulatory or certification requirements apply to this unit at the time of endorsement.
Employability Skills:
This unit contains employability skills.
Application of Unit:
This unit applies to all managers and team leaders who manage people. It
covers work allocation and the methods to review performance, reward excellence and provide feedback where there is a need for improvement.
The unit makes the link between performance management and performance development, and reinforces both functions as a key requirement for effective managers.
This is a unit that all managers/ prospective managers who have responsibility for other employees should strongly consider undertaking.
Introduction
As a worker, a trainee or a future worker you want to enjoy your work and
become known as a valuable team member. This unit of competency will help you acquire the knowledge and skills to work effectively as an individual and in groups. It will give you the basis to contribute to the goals of the organization which employs you.
It is essential that you begin your training by becoming familiar with the industry standards to which organizations must conform.
This unit of competency introduces you to some of the key issues and responsibilities of workers and organizations in this area. The unit also provides you with opportunities to develop the competencies necessary for employees to operate as team members.
This Learning Guide covers:
• Allocate work.
• Assess performance.
• Provide feedback.
• Manage follow up. Learning Program
As you progress through this unit you will develop skills in locating and understanding an organizations policies and procedures. You will build up a sound knowledge of the industry standards within which organizations must
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operate. You should also become more aware of the effect that your own skills in dealing with people has on your success, or otherwise, in the workplace.
Knowledge of your skills and capabilities will help you make informed choices about your further study and career options.
Additional Learning Support
To obtain additional support you may:
• Search for other resources in the Learning Resource Centres of your learning institution. You may find books, journals, videos and other materials which provide extra information for topics in this unit.
• Search in your local library. Most libraries keep information about government departments and other organizations, services and programs.
• Contact information services such as Infolink, Equal Opportunity Commission, and Commissioner of Workplace Agreements. Union organizations, and public relations and information services provided by various government departments. Many of these services are listed in the telephone directory.
• Contact your local shire or council office. Many councils have a community
development or welfare officer as well as an information and referral service.
• Contact the relevant facilitator by telephone, mail or facsimile.
Facilitation
Your training organization will provide you with a flexible learning facilitator. Your facilitator will play an active role in supporting your learning, will make regular contact with you and if you have face to face access, should arrange to see you at least once. After you have enrolled your facilitator will contact you by telephone or letter as soon as possible to let you know:
• How and when to make contact
• What you need to do to complete this unit of study What support will
be provided.
Here are some of the things your facilitator can do to make your study easier.
• Give you a clear visual timetable of events for the semester or term in which you are enrolled, including any deadlines for assessments.
• Check that you know how to access library facilities and services.
• Conduct small ‘interest groups’ for some of the topics.
• Use ‘action sheets’ and website updates to remind you about tasks you need to complete.
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• Set up a ‘chat line”. If you have access to telephone conferencing or video conferencing, your facilitator can use these for specific topics or discussion sessions.
• Circulate a newsletter to keep you informed of events, topics and resources of interest to you.
• Keep in touch with you by telephone or email during your studies.
Flexible Learning
Studying to become a competent worker and learning about current issues in this area, is an interesting and exciting thing to do. You will establish relationships with other candidates, fellow workers and clients. You will also learn about your own ideas, attitudes and values. You will also have fun – most of the time.
At other times, study can seem overwhelming and impossibly demanding,
particularly when you have an assignment to do and you aren’t sure how to tackle it…..and your family and friends want you to spend time with them……and a movie you want to watch is on television….and…. Sometimes being a candidate can be hard.
Here are some ideas to help you through the hard times. To study effectively,
you need space, resources and time.
Space
Try to set up a place at home or at work where:
• You can keep your study materials
• You can be reasonably quiet and free from interruptions, and
• You can be reasonably comfortable, with good lighting, seating and a flat surface for writing.
If it is impossible for you to set up a study space, perhaps you could use your local library. You will not be able to store your study materials there, but you
will have quiet, a desk and chair, and easy access to the other facilities.
Study Resources
The most basic resources you will need are:
• a chair
• a desk or table
• a reading lamp or good light
• a folder or file to keep your notes and study materials together
• materials to record information (pen and paper or notebooks, or a computer and printer)
• reference materials, including a dictionary
Do not forget that other people can be valuable study resources. Your fellow workers, work supervisor, other candidates, your flexible learning facilitator, your local librarian, and workers in this area can also help you.
Time
It is important to plan your study time. Work out a time that suits you and plan around it. Most people find that studying in short, concentrated blocks of
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time (an hour or two) at regular intervals (daily, every second day, once a week) is more effective than trying to cram a lot of learning into a whole day. You need time to “digest” the information in one section before you move on to the next, and everyone needs regular breaks from study to avoid overload.
Be realistic in allocating time for study. Look at what is required for the unit and look at your other commitments.
Make up a study timetable and stick to it. Build in “deadlines” and set yourself goals for completing study tasks. Allow time for reading and completing activities. Remember that it is the quality of the time you spend studying
rather than the quantity that is important.
Study Strategies
Different people have different learning ‘styles’. Some people learn best by listening or repeating things out loud. Some learn best by doing, some by reading and making notes. Assess your own learning style, and try to identify
any barriers to learning which might affect you. Are you easily distracted? Are you afraid you will fail? Are you taking study too seriously? Not seriously enough? Do you have supportive friends and family? Here are some ideas for effective study strategies.
Make notes. This often helps you to remember new or unfamiliar information. Do not worry about spelling or neatness, as long as you can read your own
notes. Keep your notes with the rest of your study materials and add to them as you go. Use pictures and diagrams if this helps.
Underline key words when you are reading the materials in this learning guide. (Do not underline things in other people’s books). This also helps you to remember important points.
Talk to other people (fellow workers, fellow candidates, friends, family, your facilitator) about what you are learning. As well as helping you to clarify and understand new ideas, talking also gives you a chance to find out extra information and to get fresh ideas and different points of view.
Using this learning guide:
A learning guide is just that, a guide to help you learn. A learning guide is not a text book. Your learning guide will
• describe the skills you need to demonstrate to achieve competency for this unit
• provide information and knowledge to help you develop your skills
• provide you with structured learning activities to help you absorb the knowledge and information and practice your skills
• direct you to other sources of additional knowledge and information about topics for this unit.
The Icon Key
Key Points
Explains the actions taken by a competent person.
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Example
Illustrates the concept or competency by providing examples.
Chart
Provides images that represent data symbolically. They are used to present complex information and numerical data in a simple, compact format.
Intended Outcomes or Objectives
Statements of intended outcomes or objectives are descriptions of the work that will be done.
Assessment
Strategies with which information will be collected in order to validate each intended outcome or objective.
How to get the most out of your learning guide
1. Read through the information in the learning guide carefully. Make sure you understand the material.
Some sections are quite long and cover complex ideas and information. If you come across anything you do not understand:
• talk to your facilitator
• research the area using the books and materials listed under Resources
• discuss the issue with other people (your workplace supervisor, fellow workers, fellow candidates)
• try to relate the information presented in this learning guide to your own experience and to what you already know.
Ask yourself questions as you go: For example “Have I seen this happening
anywhere?” “Could this apply to me?” “What if….?” This will help you to make sense of new material and to build on your existing knowledge.
2. Talk to people about your study.
Talking is a great way to reinforce what you are learning.
3. Make notes.
Additional research, reading and note taking.
If you are using the additional references and resources suggested in the learning guide to take your knowledge a step further, there are a few simple things to keep in mind to make this kind of research easier.
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Always make a note of the author’s name, the title of the book or article, the edition, when it was published, where it was published, and the name of the publisher. If you are taking notes about specific ideas or information, you will need to put the page number as well. This is called the reference
information. You will need this for some assessment tasks and it will help you to find the book again if needed.
Keep your notes short and to the point. Relate your notes to the material in your learning guide. Put things into your own words. This will give you a better understanding of the material.
Start off with a question you want answered when you are exploring additional resource materials. This will structure your reading and save you time.
BSBMGT502B - Manage people performance
Element Performance Criteria
1. Allocate work.
1.1 Consult relevant groups and individuals on work to be allocated
and resources available.
1.2 Develop work plans in accordance with operational plans.
1.3 Allocate work in a way that is efficient, cost effective and outcome
focused.
1.4 Confirm performance standards, Code of Conduct and work
outputs with relevant teams and individuals.
1.5 Develop and agree performance indicators with relevant staff
prior to commencement of work.
1.6 Conduct risk analysis in accordance with the organisational risk
management plan and legal requirements.
2. Asses s performance.
2.1 Design performance management and review processes to
ensure consistency with organisational objectives and policies.
2.2 Train participants in the performance management and review
process.
2.3 Conduct performance management in accordance with
organisational protocols and time lines.
2.4 Monitor and evaluate performance on a continuous basis.
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3. Provide feedback.
3.1 Provide informal feedback to staff on a regular basis.
3.2 Advise relevant people where there is poor performance and take
necessary actions.
3.3 Provide on-the-job coaching when necessary to improve
performance and to confirm excellence in performance.
3.4 Document performance in accordance with the organisational
performance management system.
3.5 Conduct formal structured feedback sessions as necessary and in
accordance with organisational policy.
4. Manage follow up.
4.1 Write and agree performance improvement and development
plans in accordance with organisational policies.
4.2 Seek assistance from human resources specialists where
appropriate.
4.3 Reinforce excellence in performance through recognition and
continuous feedback.
4.4 Monitor and coach individuals with poor performance.
4.5 Provide support services where necessary.
4.6 Counsel individuals who continue to perform below expectations
and implement the disciplinary process if necessary.
4.7 Terminate staff in accordance with legal and organisational
requirements where serious misconduct occurs or ongoing
poorperformance continues.
Skills and Knowledge
Required Skills
• communication skills to articulate expected standards of performance, to provide effective feedback and to coach staff who need development
• risk management skills to analyse, identify and develop mitigation strategies for identified risks
• planning and organisation skills to ensure a planned and objective approach to the performance management system
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Required Knowledge
• relevant legislation from all levels of government that affects business operation, especially in regard to occupational health and safety and environmental issues, equal opportunity, industrial relations and antidiscrimination
• relevant awards and certified agreements
• performance measurement systems utilised within the organisation
• unlawful dismissal rules and due process
• staff development options and information.
Range Statement The range statement relates to the unit of competency as a whole. It allows for different
work environments and situations that may affect performance. Bold italicised wording, if
used in the performance criteria, is detailed below. Essential operating conditions that may
be present with training and assessment (depending on the work situation, needs of the
candidate, accessibility of the item, and local industry and regional contexts) may also be
included.
Performance standards
mean:
level of performance sought from an individual or group
which may be expressed either quantitatively or
qualitatively
Code of Conduct means:
agreed (or decreed) set of rules relating to employee behaviour/conduct with other employees or an agreed (or decreed) set of rules relating to employee
behaviour/conduct with other employees or customers
Performance indicators
mean:
measures against which performance outcomes are
gauged
Risk analysis means:
determination of the likelihood of a negative event
preventing the organisation meeting its objectives and
the likely consequences of such an event on
organisational performance
Performance
management means:
• in accordance with relevant industrial agreements
• process or set of processes for establishing a shared
understanding of what an individual or group is to
achieve, and managing and developing individuals in a
way which increases the probability it will be achieved in
both the short- and long-term
Excellence in
performance means:
regularly and consistently exceeding the performance
targets established while meeting the organisation's
performance standards
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Termination means:
cessation of the contract of employment between an
employer and an employee, at the initiative of the
employer within relevant industrial agreements
Evidence Guide The evidence guide provides advice on assessment and must be read in conjunction with
the performance criteria, required skills and knowledge, range statement and the
Assessment Guidelines for the Training Package.
Critical aspects for
assessment and evidence
required to demonstrate
competency in this unit
Evidence of the following is essential:
• documented performance indicators and a critical description and analysis of performance management system from the workplace
• techniques in providing feedback and coaching for improvement in performance
• knowledge of relevant awards and certified
agreements.
Context of and specific
resources for assessment
Assessment must ensure:
access to appropriate documentation and resources
normally used in the workplace.
Method of assessment
A range of assessment methods should be used to assess practical skills and knowledge. The following examples are appropriate for this unit:
• analysis of responses to case studies and scenarios
• assessment of written reports
• demonstration of techniques in providing feedback and coaching
• direct questioning combined with review of portfolios of evidence and third party workplace reports of onthe-job performance by the candidate
• review of work plans, performance indicators, risk
analysis, performance management and review
processes, performance improvement and
development plans.
Guidance information for
assessment
Holistic assessment with other units relevant to the industry sector, workplace and job role is recommended, for example:
other management units.
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1. Allocate work.
1.1 Consult relevant groups and individuals on work to be allocated and resources available.
1.2 Develop work plans in accordance with operational plans.
1.3 Allocate work in a way that is efficient, cost effective and
outcome focused.
1.4 Confirm work outputs with relevant teams and individuals.performance standards, Code of Conduct
and
1.5 Develop and agree staff prior to commencement of work.performance indicators with relevant
1.6 Conduct risk management plan and legal requirements.risk analysis in accordance with the organisational
1.1 Consult relevant groups and individuals on work to be allocated and
resources available.
The process of decision making is of the utmost importance for effective management. As a manager, your decision making must be informed by expert knowledge and experience.
A recent Harvard Business Review paid tribute to the most perplexing factor in
the productivity equation: people. It raises the perennial question, what motivates people and how do we inspire people to contribute their greatest or create barriers for their contribution? They noted a welldocumented paradox in
the motivational/productivity literature -- that of Black Hawk Down.
The soldiers of Black Hawk Down shared an ethos of hard work, dedication,
and team effectiveness. Yet despite the right internal perspective, they lost their mission and 18 soldiers in a failed attempt to capture the Somali warlord in 1992 after several months, as their mission and goals shifted and became more ambiguous. The lesson here was the greater the obstacle to high performance, the lower the level of morale and job satisfaction. Some of the greatest barriers to job satisfaction were role and goal ambiguity, lack of
meaningful work, inadequate resources, and work overload, ultimately contributing to a feeling of malaise that quickly impacted job performance.
How might this situation duplicate itself in the corporate world, and how do we coach people to excel?
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Assumptions
There are several questions we need to ask the employee as well as the organization. First, let's review some assumptions.
• People perform best when their goals and roles are clear.
• People perform best when they understand the connection between what they are doing and how that affects the bigger picture—corporate mission, vision, and goals.
• People perform best when there are both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
• Some of the most important intrinsic rewards are ability to make a difference, ability to achieve, ability to be recognized, ability to improve one's effectiveness and performance, develop professionally.
• Some of the most important extrinsic rewards may be financial, stock, and time.
• If a call to action taps into ones expertise and excitement, it has a greater likelihood of reaching fruition.
• People like to be identified with winners—tell them how they made the
team/company win.
• People achieve extraordinary results when there is alignment between their personal values and the company values and mission.
• People perform best when the expectations are clear and the resources to complete the goal are accessible.
• People will go to extraordinary efforts if they trust and respect the leader and feel trusted and respected as well.
• People perform best when the communication is clear and the feedback is targeted.
• People perform best when their efforts have been acknowledged.
• People perform best when they are stretched enough to feel the gain in the pain but not so much that they are distracted from the purpose of the pain.
• People perform best if both individual and team efforts are rewarded.
• People perform best if their missteps or mistakes are viewed within the kaleidoscope of lessons learned, not the microscope of failed efforts.
Motivational Questions
So given these assumptions, here are some questions you can ask your team to motivate them to do their best.
1. What is most important to you about this project?
2. What do you most want to contribute to the growth of the company?
3. What do you need to better do your job?
4. What have you achieved in the last year that makes you most proud?
5. What makes you most proud of this company?
6. What motivates you?
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7. What confuses you about the company mission? Vision? Values?
8. What inspires you most about the company mission? Vision? Values?
9. How do you see that this project is connected to the company goals?
10. What do you think might motivate your team more?
We can coach our team members to excel, or we can beat them into compliance. It's no secret what motivates people more and what creates companies of excellence.
Team managers have responsibilities to their team and to the individual team members, and at the same time they have responsibilities to the wider organisation and managers to whom they report.
This looks specifically at how your team works in key areas. As a manager, it is important that you are aware of the composition, and skills and knowledge of those you work with. As a manager, the onus is on you to
deliver. The responsibilities and accountabilities of a team manager include meeting the needs of the organisation through the efforts of you and your team.
A fundamental team-based approach
A team-based approach is fundamental to most modern organisations. The reliance upon project teams to drive change and innovation is but one
example! Now more than ever, people need to have "Teamship Skills" which are on par with their functional/technical skill sets, however many have had little training and coaching in this important core area. When the fundamental outcomes of team building have been achieved, the second phase of team
development will accelerate your team's journey toward peak performance. A team development program will provide the teamship skills and operational framework for individuals and the team
to reach its full potential.
One of the most critical mistakes you can make in business is to underestimate the impact of an underperforming employee. Their impact can extend way beyond the individual and their own productivity level to affect the whole team. Staff morale can suffer in a culture that accepts underachievement and for those who have to pick up the slack, job
dissatisfaction quickly sets in. The Team Model
The Team Model provides an architecture from which teams can build a solid foundation. This includes the "science" of how teams are structured in the organization, and the "art" of how they are set up to work together effectively.
Using the Team Model you assess your needs and customize a plan all your own. Used often in combination with the Team Diagnostic Tool, teams can elect to conduct training on critical teaming components, or facilitation of "real work" to make agreements and a plan to move them toward a more ideal
structure.
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* http://www.animationguild.org/_ReuseLibrary/DSBailout.jpg Putting Teams to Work
Every team must know their mission, purpose, goals, and what standards they will live by. Mission, purpose and goals must be in line with those of the organization. They must be a
guidepost against which team members can compare their performance.
Standards must include how team member will interact with each other and with customers.
Quality is determined not by the team, but by the team’s customers. Therefore, team members must keep in touch with customers to find out what targets of quality are required of them. Team members must work effectively within the customer-supplier chain. That
means that internal customer expectations must e incorporated into their standards of performance.
Once the team understands customer requirements, their job is to organize their work processes around meeting and exceeding those requirements. The team must work to improve systems that get in the way of meeting customer requirements. Most team
processes were inherited. The team must look for new ways to do things, based on how well it serves their customers.
Next, the team must collect data to find out how well they are doing at meeting customer requirements. Relying on gut-level reactions won’t work for their customers. If customers insist on timely delivery, the team must keep
score of how well they perform and work to improve their performance.
The team must learn and use an efficient method to solve
problems that get in the way of meeting their customer expectations. Reactive, quick-fix methods that don’t solve problems permanently won’t do for the quality-minded team. Solving simple and complex problems on behalf
of their customers will become a mainstay for team members.
The team will need an improvement plan, including an agreed
Practice
Team Success
Model
Organize Work to Meet
Customer Requirements
Know Your Customers
Measure Results
Continuously Improve
Solve Problems
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on method, and prioritization. They must develop a way to
make improvements to meet customer expectations over time.
When the team isn’t producing goods and services or solving problems, they must find opportunities for making improvements to their processes. Finding ways to improve will challenge and delight team members.
Team Success Model
1. Aligned team purpose and goals
2. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
3. Established communication process
4. Well-defined decision procedures
5. Productive team behaviors
6. Effective group process
The only way to find out is to ask your employees!
“When we look at indices which reflect organizational performance- we find it very difficult to relate them to anything that can't be summarized in numbers. So we know how the number of goods produced, and the money
spent on advertising contribute to the bottom line. But talk about the organizational climate and employee engagement levels- and you get reaction like 'hmmm. Yeah, we're sure that matters. But we can't put it in our grand equation here!'
And even where we can assign numbers, for instance, employee satisfaction
levels- people find it freaking difficult to look beyond the 4's and the 2's. Last month, I was talking to an I/O psychologist who works with a major tech. company. I asked her why, given the resources at their disposal, they didn't
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get into quicker dipstick measures of employee satisfaction; rather than the protracted annual survey. She replied, I'd rather they did this once in two years- as long as they acted upon it's results and assimilated the wealth of data it yields. Instead it turned into yet another performance index and just
another number crunching marathon”
* from presentation of Tom Peters XAlways presentation- slide 35
1.2 Develop work plans in accordance with operational plans.
Four key areas to focus on in developing your team are (in no particular order):
• culture and learning processes
• gaining commitment
• interpersonal relations
• decision making processes.
The transition to effectively managing and developing your team’s performance demands both learning and change. Here are the key points for developing a learning ‘culture’.
• Learning is produced by exploring dilemmas or problems and should be encouraged in team meetings and individually
• We can learn from each other – collectively sharing experiences in a team is a rich source of learning
• Risk taking and innovation should be encouraged. Learning requires both.
• Learning is helped by recognising the value of people, their ideas, and their diversity.
• Open expression should be encouraged and respected. Learning can occur from exploring and understanding others beliefs and values.
Team Building
Team building is an effort in which a team studies its own process of working together and acts to create a climate that encourages and values the contributions of team members. Their energies are directed toward problem solving, task effectiveness, and maximizing the use of all members' resources to achieve the team's purpose. Sound team building recognizes
that it is not possible to fully separate one's performance from those of others.
Team building works best when the following conditions are met (Francis, Dave and Don Young, Improving Work Groups: A Practical Manual for Team Building. University Associates, Inc., San Diego, California, 1979).
1. There is a high level of interdependence among team members. The team is working on important tasks in which each team member has a commitment and teamwork is critical for achieving the desired results.
2. The team leader has good people skills, is committed to developing a team approach, and allocates time to team-building activities. Team
management is seen as a shared function, and team members are given
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the opportunity to exercise leadership when their experiences and skills are appropriate to the needs of the team.
3. Each team member is capable and willing to contribute information, skills,
and experiences that provide an appropriate mix for achieving the team's purpose.
4. The team develops a climate in which people feel relaxed and are able to be direct and open in their communications.
5. Team members develop a mutual trust for each other and believe that other team members have skills and capabilities to contribute to the team.
6. Both the team and individual members are prepared to take risks and are allowed to develop their abilities and skills.
7. The team is clear about its important goals and establishes performance targets that cause stretching but are achievable.
8. Team member roles are defined, and effective ways to solve problems and communicate are developed and supported by all team members.
9. Team members know how to examine team and individual errors and weaknesses without making personal attacks, which enables the group to learn from its experiences.
10. Team efforts are devoted to the achievement of results, and team performance is frequently evaluated to see where improvements can be made.
11. The team has the capacity to create new ideas through group interaction and the influence of outside people. Good ideas are followed up, and people are rewarded for innovative risk taking.
12. Each member of the team knows that he or she can influence the team agenda. There is a feeling of trust and equal influence among team members that facilitates open and honest communication.
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1.3 Allocate work in a way that is efficient, cost effective and outcome focused.
• High level of interdependence among team members
• Team leader has good people skills and is committed to team approach
• Each team member is willing to contribute
• Team develops a relaxed climate for communication
• Team members develop a mutual trust
• Team and individuals are prepared to take risks
• Team is clear about goals and establishes targets
• Team member roles are defined
• Team members know how to examine team and individual errors without personal attacks
• Team has capacity to create new ideas
• Each team member knows he can influence the team agenda
Team building will occur more easily when all team members work jointly on a task of mutual importance. This allows each member to provide their technical knowledge and skills in helping to solve the problem, complete the project, and develop new programs. During this process, team building can be facilitated as members evaluate their working relationship as a team and then develop and articulate guidelines that will lead to increased productivity
and team member cooperation.
As part of this process, team members need to learn how to be willing to manage conflict, evaluate performance of the group, and provide feedback and support that will encourage each member to meet their commitment to the team and the organization.
Team performance can best be evaluated if the team develops a model of excellence against which to measure its performance
1.4 Confirm performance standards, Code of Conduct and work outputs
with relevant teams and individuals.
Team Effectiveness
When evaluating how well team members are working together, the following statements can be used as a guide:
Team goals are developed through a group process of team interaction and
agreement in which each team member is willing to work toward achieving these goals.
Participation is actively shown by all team members and roles are shared
to facilitate the accomplishment of tasks and feelings of group togetherness.
Feedback is asked for by members and freely given as a way of evaluating
the team's performance and clarifying both feelings and interests of the team members. When feedback is given it is done with a desire to help the other person.
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Team decision making involves a process that encourages active
participation by all members.
Leadership is distributed and shared among team members and individuals
willingly contribute their resources as needed.
Problem solving, discussing team issues, and critiquing team effectiveness
are encouraged by all team members.
Conflict is not suppressed. Team members are allowed to express negative
feelings and confrontation within the team which is managed and dealt with by
team members. Dealing with and managing conflict is seen as a way to improve team performance.
Team member resources, talents, skills, knowledge, and experiences are fully
identified, recognized, and used whenever appropriate.
Risk taking and creativity are encouraged. When mistakes are made, they are treated as a
source of learning rather than reasons for punishment.
After evaluating team performance against the above guidelines, determine those areas in which the team members need to improve and develop a strategy for doing so.
The team leader should be the liaison between the team and upper
management. The team leader needs to know and work with upper management to obtain a full commitment from them in support of the team's program.
However, when this happens, team members must realize that they have a major responsibility to make maximum use of the resources and support provided.
The team leader can encourage team member growth, and should be willing to take some risk by having members whose resources are relevant to the immediate task provide the leadership.
The team leader should be fair, supportive, and recognized by team members as one who can make final judgments, work with upper
management, and give direction to the team as needed. To assist the team leader in evaluating the level of team development, have each team member answer the twelve questions on page 27-28. This should be followed by a discussion of the questions to determine where and how changes should be made to help facilitate the development of a strong team.
As team members build commitment, trust, and support for one another, it will allow them to develop and accomplish desired results. This commitment, trust, and self-determination by each team member is critical in achieving a sustained high level of performance. Team members will learn to appreciate and enjoy one another for who they are and will help keep one another on track. The team will have developed its working methods so that they
become an informal set of guidelines.
A Focused Team
When the team resources are focused and members are all working to accomplish the same purpose, teamwork can be very rewarding and productive. This is best accomplished when team members use a proactive
approach rather than a reactive approach to accomplish their
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purpose (Adams, John D., "The Role of the Creative Outlook In Team Building." in Team Building, edited by W. Brendan Reddy with Kaleel Jamison, 98-106. Virginia: Institute for Applied Behavioral Science and San Diego, California: University Associates, Inc., 1988).
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The proactive approach manifests such characteristics as:
1. The team members take a very positive approach in jointly determining the way they are going to work together as a team and what they want to have happen. When individuals and the entire team choose to operate this way and are willing to set petty differences aside, unbelievable results become possible.
When individuals adopt this attitude and commit to use their resources, knowledge, and skills to contribute to the goals of the team, alignment with the team's overall purpose comes about. This will not happen unless both the team leader and team members choose to do so.
2. Having a well-defined purpose or vision of what the team will accomplish is a very powerful force for the team leader and members. Goals are aligned with the team purpose, and team members are empowered to
accomplish the goals. This process leads to a high level of team productivity.
3. Team members have a positive attitude toward change and are willing to accept and allow change to occur as needed in order to accomplish desired results.
4. Team members understand that patience is required, and that for some
goals, a long-term commitment is needed to accomplish the desired results.
5. Interests of both the team leader and team members are focused on desired results rather than on shorticulture-term problem- solving activities.
If people learn to focus simultaneously on both the current situation and the desired results, problems that arise will be solved as part of the total process of achieving the desired results.
6. The sixth characteristic of a well-functioning team is that the members have a strong feeling of control within the team. They are able to establish priorities and then commit time and resources for accomplishing these tasks.
7. The seventh characteristic of a well functioning team is team members verbally and publicly support each other. They recognize that negative comments about others tear the team down.
Team leaders and members that make a conscious, sustained effort to make these seven characteristics a part of their mind set will find that both creativity and accomplishment of desired results will be much higher than it would be otherwise
1.5 Develop and agree performance indicators with relevant staff prior to commencement of work.
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The Concepts: Linking Skills
Linking Skills are the activities and behaviours that managers and others need to exhibit in order to successfully integrate and coordinate the work of a team. These
skills were identified through extensive interviews with teams and team leaders worldwide. Data collected from, for example, banking teams, engineering teams, administrative teams, marketing teams, production teams, and research teams, in the private and public sectors, highlighted a number of common elements that were responsible for integrating a team into a coherent 'whole'.
Figure 3: Margerison-McCann Linking Skills Model
Arranged around the outside of the Linking Skills Model are the six People Linking Skills. These skills need to be implemented as part of the workplace behaviour of the team leader and all team
members, if a team is to be highperforming. These skills are: Table 4:
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Inside the People Linking Skills are the five Task Linking Skills. These are essential to the key tasks of the leader and the more senior team members.
Table 5:
At the core of the Linking Skills Model are the two Leadership Linking Skills of Motivation and Strategy. Unless the leader has these skills and makes them part of their daily behaviour then the team is unlikely to reach its full potential.
PEOPLE LINKING SKILLS WHAT LINKERS DO
Active Listening Listen before deciding
Communication Keep team members up to date on a
regular basis
Team Relationships Encourage respect, understanding, and
trust among team members
Problem Solving and Counseling
Are available and responsive to
people's problems
Participative Decision Making Involve team members in the problem
solving of key issues
Interface Management Coordinate and represent
team members
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Table 6:
Unless all Linking Skills are exercised effectively, a team may lose momentum and direction.
Figure 7: Team Management Wheel
TASK LINKING SKILLS WHAT LINKERS DO
Objectives Setting Set achievable targets with the
team but always press them for
improved performance
Quality Standards Set an example and agree on high
quality work standards with the
team
Work Allocation Allocate work to people based on
their capabilities and preferences
Team Development Develop balance in their team
Delegation Delegate work when it is not
essential to do it themselves
LEADERSHIP LINKING SKILLS WHAT LINKERS DO
Motivation Inspires others to give their best
Strategy Devises effective action plans
achieve goals
to
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Charles Margerison and Dick McCann, in their book Team Management: practical new approaches (Management Books 2000 Ltd) talk about linking skills for success.
Linking is at the centre of the Team Management Wheel It is a skill that team
members can learn. Linking is not a preference, it is definitely a skill.
What is linking? There are a few different things and types. There’s internal linking, external linking and informal linking.
Margerison and McCann have researched hundreds of managers – in all cases, they say, there was a clearly thought-out approach that enabled
people to cooperate and work together as a team. Much of the managers’ time was given over to what they called ‘internal linking’ – a process of
ensuring that all members of the team are coordinated and integrated towards a common goal.
Figure 8: Bad and Good Internal Linking
This shows, in the first diagram, that the links between the team leader and
the rest of the team are good, but the links between team members are virtually non-existent. This managerial style would be to have everyone coming to them whenever there were problems.
Most likely all decisions would also have to pass through them and as a result that manager would be under considerable pressure.
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In the second diagram, there is good internal linking where robust links have
been established between team members as well as through the leader. A team which is managed in this way is strongly linked together and is more likely to act as a ‘unit’ rather than as a collection of individuals.
External linking – representing
A team leader or manager also represents the team. I this task they are also playing a most important part as an ‘external linker’.
Each team needs effective members who can represent team members both upwards and laterally. Managers have to be effective advocates of what their team requires by way of resources so that the tasks can be achieved optimally. They also need to promote both the individual and group efforts to those people in the organisation who have wider influence. However, other team members also act as external linkers on projects and committees.
To stay in business it is rare for one department or division to be able to do its job adequately without cooperation from other units and therefore the role of the manager as an external lateral linker is of increasing importance and demands particular skills in problem-solving and communication.
One of the key skills of the external linker is to identify the areas that impact
upon the success of the team and to spend time in managing these. Informal Linking
Internal and external linking are formal roles which should be undertaken by the team leader or manager. In addition to these there is also another facet of linking which can be done by all team members. This is known as informal linking. All team members can contribute to the establishment of links within
their team and also make individual contributions towards developing external links. This is all part of what is called networking to discover what is going on and having contacts to deal with problems and opportunities as they arise.
There are 11 linking ‘skills’ that encompass all three types of linking. Listed below are the key points noted about linking, together with the more general
‘skill’ associated with each point.
Figure 9: 11 Linking Skills
What linkers do Linking skills
Listen before deciding Active listening
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So you can see, from
the previous list – that the skills for linking are part of the skill requirements for a frontline manager.
Next, we will be
working through role allocation (number five above) and skills analysis. This activity captures all
the areas you are learning about in this session:
• your team meeting the organisation’s requirements
• working together with the team to make sure the skills and abilities match the roles and requirements of the team
• using initiative – taking risks
• making the most of coaching and mentoring opportunities.
Keep team members up to date
on a regular basis
Communication
Are available and responsive to
people’s problems
Problem-solving and counselling
Allocate work to people based on
their capabilities and preferences
Work allocation
Encourage respect,
understanding and trust among
team members
Team relationships
Delegate work when it is not
essential to do it themselves
Delegation
Set an example and agree high
quality work standards with the
team
Quality standards
Set achievable targets with the
team but always press them for
improved performance
Objectives setting
Coordinate and represent team
members
Interface management
Involve team members in the
problem solving of key issues
Participative decision making
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1.6 Conduct Risk-Analysis in accordance with the organisational risk management plan and legal requirements
Allocating Work through Delegation
Delegation is one of the most important management skills. These logical rules and techniques will help you to delegate well (and will help you to help your manager when you are being delegated a task or new responsibility).
Good delegation saves you time, develops your people, grooms a successor, and motivates. Poor delegation will cause you frustration, de-motivates and confuses the other person, and fails to achieve the task or purpose itself. So it's a management skill that's worth improving.
Delegation is a very helpful aid for succession planning, personal development - and seeking and encouraging promotion. It's how we grow in
the job - delegation enables us to gain experience to take on higher responsibilities.
Effective delegation is actually crucial for effective succession. For the successor and for the manager too: the main task of a manager in a growing thriving organisation is ultimately to develop a successor. When this happens
everyone can move on to higher things. When it fails, the succession and progression becomes dependent on bringing in new people from outside.
Delegation can be used to develop your people and yourself - delegation is not just a management technique for freeing up the boss's time. Of course there is a right way to do it. These delegation tips and techniques are useful for bosses - and for anyone seeking or being given delegated
responsibilities.
As a giver of delegated tasks you must ensure delegation happens properly. Just as significantly, as the recipient of delegated tasks you have the opportunity to 'manage upwards' and suggest improvements to the delegation process and understanding - especially if your boss could use the
help.
Managing the way you receive and agree to do delegated tasks is one of the central skills of 'managing upwards'. Therefore while this is essentially written from the manager's standpoint, the principles are just as useful for people being managed.
Be SMARTER
A simple delegation rule is SMARTER. It's a quick checklist for proper delegation.
Delegated tasks must be:
Specific
Measurable
Agreed
Realistic
Time bound
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Ethical
Recorded
Traditional interpretations of the SMARTER acronym use 'Exciting' or 'Enjoyable', however, although a high level of motivation often results when a person achieves and is given recognition for a particular delegated task,
which in itself can be exciting and enjoyable, in truth, let's be honest, it is not always possible to ensure that all delegated work is truly 'exciting' or 'enjoyable' for the recipient. More importantly, the 'Ethical' aspect is fundamental to everything that we do, assuming you subscribe to such philosophy.
The Steps to Delegating
1. Define the task:
Confirm in your own mind that the task is suitable to be delegated. Does it
meet the criteria for delegating? 2. Select the individual or team:
What are your reasons for delegating to this person or team? What are they going
to get out of it? What are you going to get out of it?
3. Assess ability and training needs:
Is the other person or team of people capable of doing the task? Do they understand what needs to be done. If not, you can't delegate.
4. Explain the reasons:
You must explain why the job or responsibility is being delegated. And why
to that person or people? What is its importance and relevance? Where does it fit in the overall scheme of things?
5. State required results:
What must be achieved? Clarify understanding by getting feedback from the other person. How will the task be measured? Make sure they know how you intend to decide that the job is being successfully done. 6. Consider resources required:
Discuss and agree what is required to get the job done. Consider people, location, premises, equipment, money, materials, other related activities and services. 7. Agree deadlines:
When must the job be finished? Or if an ongoing duty, when are the review dates? When are the reports due? And if the task is complex and has parts or stages, what are the priorities?
At this point you may need to confirm understanding with the other person of the previous points, getting ideas and interpretation. As well as showing you that the job can be done, this helps to reinforce commitment. Methods of
checking and controlling must be agreed with the other person.
Failing to agree on this in advance will cause this monitoring to seem like interference or lack of trust.
8. Support and communicate:
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Think about who else needs to know what's going on, and inform them. Involve the other person in considering this so they can see beyond the issue at hand. Do not leave the person to inform your own peers of their new responsibility. Warn the person about any awkward matters of politics or
protocol. Inform your own boss if the task is important, and of sufficient profile.
9. Feedback on results:
It is essential to let the person know how they are doing, and whether they have achieved their aims. If not, you must review with them why things did
not go to plan, and deal with the problems. You must absorb the consequences of failure, and pass on the credit for success
Levels of Delegation
Delegation isn't just a matter of telling someone else what to do. There is a wide range of varying freedom that you can confer on the other person. The more experienced and reliable the other person is, then the more freedom you
can give. The more critical the task then the more cautious you need to be about extending a lot of freedom, especially if your job or reputation depends on getting a good result.
It's important also to ask the other person what level of authority they feel comfortable being given. Why guess? When you ask, you can find out for sure and agree this
with the other person. Some people are confident; others less so. It's your responsibility to agree with them what level is most appropriate, so that the job is done effectively and with minimal unnecessary involvement from you. Involving the other person in agreeing the level of delegated freedom for any particular responsibility is an essential part of the 'contract' that you make with them.
These levels of delegation are not an exhaustive list. There are many more
shades of grey between these black-and-white examples. Take time to discuss and adapt the agreements and 'contracts' that you make with people regarding delegated tasks, responsibility and freedom according to the situation.
Be creative in choosing levels of delegated responsibility, and always check with the other person that they are comfortable with your chosen level. People
are generally capable of doing far more than you imagine.
The rate and extent of responsibility and freedom delegated to people is a fundamental driver of organisational growth and effectiveness, the growth and
well-being of your people, and of your own development and advancement
Coaching and Mentoring
What are Coaching and Mentoring?
Both coaching and mentoring are processes that enable both individual and
corporate clients to achieve their full potential.
Coaching and mentoring share many similarities so it makes sense to outline the common things coaches and mentors do whether the services are offered in a paid (professional) or unpaid (philanthropic) role.
• Facilitate the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist the individual in making real, lasting change.
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• Use questioning techniques to facilitate client's own thought processes in order to identify solutions and actions rather than takes a wholly directive approach
• Support the client in setting appropriate goals and methods of assessing progress in relation to these goals
• Observe, listen and ask questions to understand the client's situation
• Creatively apply tools and techniques which may include one-to-one
training, facilitating, counselling & networking.
• Encourage a commitment to action and the development of lasting personal growth & change.
• Maintain unconditional positive regard for the client, which means that the coach is at all times supportive and non-judgemental of the client, their views, lifestyle and aspirations.
• Ensure that clients develop personal competencies and do not develop unhealthy dependencies on the coaching or mentoring relationship.
• Evaluate the outcomes of the process, using objective measures wherever possible to ensure the relationship is successful and the client is achieving their personal goals.
• Encourage clients to continually improve competencies and to develop
new developmental alliances where necessary to achieve their goals.
Work within their area of personal competence.
• Possess qualifications and experience in the areas that skills-transfer coaching is offered.
• Manage the relationship to ensure the client receives the appropriate level of service and that programs are neither too short, nor too long Definition of Coaching is…
"a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be a successful a Coach requires a knowledge
and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place"
Eric Parsloe, The Manager as Coach and Mentor (1999) page 8. Eric is a respected author and Director of the Oxford School of Coaching and Mentoring
Definition of Mentoring is...
"off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work or thinking"
Clutterbuck, D & Megginson, D, Mentoring Executives and Directors (1999) page 3 . David Clutterbuck & David Megginson are both directors of The European Mentoring Centre and highly respected authors, academics and consultants in the mentoring arena.
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The difference between coaching and mentoring
As can be seen above, there are many similarities between coaching and mentoring! Mentoring, particularly in its traditional sense, enables an individual
to follow in the path of an older and wiser colleague who can pass on knowledge, experience and open doors to otherwise out-of-reach opportunities. Coaching on the other hand is not generally performed on the basis that the coach has direct experience of their client’s formal occupational role unless the coaching is specific and skills focused.
Having said this, there are professionals offering their services under the name of mentoring who have no direct experience of their clients' roles and others offering services under the name of coaching who do. So the moral of the story is, it is essential to determine what your needs are and to ensure that the coach or mentor can supply you with the type and level of service you require, whatever that service is called.
Business coaching & mentoring
Organisational development, changes brought about by mergers and
acquisitions as well as the need to provide key employees with support through a change of role or career are often catalysts, which inspire companies to seek coaching or mentoring.
At one time coaching and mentoring were reserved for senior managers and company directors, now it is available to all as a professional or personal development tool. Coaching and mentoring are also closely linked with
organisational change initiatives in order to help staff to accept and adapt to changes in a manner consistent with their personal values and goals.
Coaching & mentoring, both of which focus on the individual, can enhance morale, motivation and productivity and reduce staff turnover as individuals feel valued and connected with both small and large organisational changes.
This role may be provided by internal coaches or mentors and, increasingly, by professional coaching agencies.
Coaching and mentoring programmes generally prove to be popular amongst employees as coaching achieves a balance between fulfilling organisational goals and objectives whilst taking into account the personal development needs of individual employees. It is a two-way relationship with both the
organisation and the employee gaining significant benefits.
There is also an increasing trend for individuals to take greater responsibility for their personal & professional development and even those who are
employed in large organisations are no longer relying on employers to provide them with all or their career development needs. There has been an increase in the number of individuals
contracting coaches and mentors on a private basis. Some are looking for a career change, but many are also seeking to maximise their potential with an existing employer or achieve greater balance with their work and home lives.
Table 10 : How do coaching and mentoring compare with other services?
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Traditional forms of training Coaching/mentoring
• Wholesale transfer of new skills, e.g. change in procedures, new systems (e.g. software application training), new job function.
• Programmes are mostly generic and not tailored to individual needs. Delegates generally have to complete standard modules, so there is little room for tailoring the program to account for existing knowledge, skills or preferences.
• Not always sufficiently similar to the ‘live’ working environment to ensure effective skills transfer.
• Best suited to transfer of knowledge and certain
skills rather than the development of personal
qualities or competencies
• Actively untaps potential.
• Fine tunes and develops skills.
• Development activities are designed to suit client’s personal needs and learning styles.
• Eliminates specific performance problems.
• Can focus on interpersonal skills, which cannot be readily or effectively transferred in a traditional training environment.
• Provides client with contacts and networks to assist with furthering their career or life aspirations.
• Performed in the ‘live’ environment
• Highly effective when used as a means of supporting training initiatives to ensure that key skills are transferred to the ‘live’ environment.
• Coaches and mentors transfer the skills to the client
rather than doing the job for them.
Counselling Consultancy
• Explore personal issues and problems through discussion in order to increase understanding or develop greater self-awareness.
• The aim of counselling is to lead the client toward self-directed actions to achieve their goals.
N.B Many coaching relationships involve an
element of counselling but this is distinct from the
services offered by a professional counselling
service. Professional counsellors deal with personal
issues in much greater depth than would generally
be explored within a coaching context.
• Focus is on developing organisational practices, processes and structure.
• Role generally more strategic and often used to instigate and design broad ranging change programs
• Consultancy frequently involves expert advice about specific issues and organisational processes.
• Consultants are often brought in to provide specific ‘solutions’ to business problems and needs
• Consultant does the job for the organisation, rather than the employee/client becoming up-skilled to do the job themselves.
N.B. The term consultant coach is often used when the coach is external to the organisation and therefore offering services on an ‘external’ or ‘consultancy’ basis. This is not, however, the same as consultancy per se.
Coaching and mentoring has been offered by
consultancy companies for many years, even though it
is not specifically ‘consultancy’ It is only recently that
people have begun drawing a distinction which in some
cases, like the distinction between coaching and
mentoring is not useful in distinguishing between them.
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2. Assess performance. Design performance management and review
2.1 processes to ensure consistency with organisational objectives and policies.
2.2 Train participants in the performance management and
review process.
Conduct performance management in accordance with
2.3 organisational protocols and time lines.
2.4 Monitor and evaluate performance on a continuous basis.
2.1 Design performance management and review processes to ensure
consistency with organisational objectives and policies
One of the first steps needed in developing a team is to seek to establish a winning culture: high levels of trust be achievement or outcomes oriented, take risks, be innovative, and be willing to change and accept new challenges.
It is important that as part of the winning culture, we develop a learning culture where members are free to discuss or challenge values and actions. Team members also cooperate to support each other and achieve team goals.
The first step in achieving team goals is to gain acceptance by involving the team in the goal.
The second step in achieving team goals is to gain team commitment to the goals and their achievement and this is a real challenge for team leaders taking some risks, but where the returns can be very rewarding.
This is also about decision making and problem solving, and it’s about the intangibles such as relationships, behaviours, dynamics and dialogue.
Feedback is extremely important and in high performance teams (we get onto that in this session too) – it is once again emphasised.
Performance Standards
Planning Performance Management
"Planning" means setting performance expectations and goals for groups and individuals to channel their efforts toward achieving organisational objectives. It also includes the measures that will be used to determine whether expectations and goals are being met. Involving employees in the planning process helps them to understand the goals of the organisation, what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how well it should be done.
Writing Performance Standards
The first thing to do is to identify the purpose of the position. This is generally easy to do because it is stated separately or is included in the introduction to the position description. We have highlighted the appropriate words on the position description. An excellent sanity check to use in
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determining if the overall performance plan and related standards make sense is whether they reflect the purpose of the position itself.
Purpose of the Position:
To provide managers with objectively based information for making decisions. Next, you need to identify the major duties of the position using the position description.
Let's take an example of a position that has four key tasks. Within the descriptions of each of the duties, key words can be found that tell what the
duties involve.
• Studies the structure and/or functions of organisations
• Provides program cost analysis, annual and multi-year fiscal planning
• Provides program support, assessment and consultation services
• Conducts management surveys and research projects
Note that duties one and four involve the conducting of studies, surveys and other projects that require similar skills. Therefore, they can be combined into a single critical element.
Critical Elements of Positions
During this step you are again trying to place the position within the context of the organisation. Two questions come to mind:
• What is the organisation attempting to achieve?
• What contribution can this position be expected to make?
This step demands more creativity than simply reviewing a position or job description for key words. Other questions to ask might include: Does my
organisation have any special projects to accomplish this year, are there any initiatives that my department/division could work on or support, or, are there some long standing problems that could be addressed?
This is by far the most difficult step. This step states clearly what you expect the employee to do as well as how well he or she is expected to do the work
assigned.
This takes time and thought. We will work through each of the three critical elements and describe each standard. The standards may then be consolidated into the draft performance plan.
Team work through active participation
That old saying ‘its quicker to do it yourself’ – heard it? Well, there are any number of managers who continue to following that adage. There are some who think it is easier and quicker to make the decision themselves. “Well, accountability rests with me – so I will make all the decisions.” Not a realistic method if you are truly the manager or leader of a team. Think about how a group can help build ideas and provide motivation, how
involving people in the decision-making process can enhance
the outcome (more brains, better results). In other sessions in the Team work learning (Skill development and role allocation – Manage and develop team performance) we have learned about those who make judgements or assumptions on skills and abilities. We learn that any good manager will include team
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members (and others interested perhaps) in scoping or planning work. So, where were we – decision making and problem solving.
Individuals and the team are more committed to a decision they helped make
because their involvement has given them a better understanding of it. How were those decisions arrived at? This greater understanding will also help them achieve the agreed results.
Does this mean that the work group should participate in every decision? Two types of decision in particular are not suited to a group solution: programmed decisions and those that have no real effect on the team. If the
team has no interest in a decision, involvement would be a waste of everyone’s time – the manager should make the decision and explain it.
One way of increasing team effectiveness is through diagnostic meetings.
The purpose of diagnostic meetings is to encourage a general analysis of the performance and effectiveness of groups. They are designed to take
stock of "What we are doing?", "Where are we going?", "What are our strengths?", "What are our weaknesses?", and to surface and identify problems and opportunities. Have you ever participated in a SWOT analysis? SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) has much the same outcomes and is used as a planning tool. There’s more information on SWOT analysis through the frontline management work on planning.
Throughout the frontline management learning’s, you will use a number of diagnostic tools to assist you, your team and your organisation, better understand relationships and dynamics.
A characteristic of winning cultures and enjoyable and cooperative working climates in organisations is the quality of the interpersonal relationships
and behaviours seen between team members.
Good working relationships and the way we conduct ourselves, and communicate, are strongly influenced by our own observations (or perceptions). Healthy and positive perceptions of yourself and of others
lead to healthy and open relationships. There is much more to learn on perceptions [perceptual positions: managing conscious attention (adapted
from Facilitating Change in Complex Systems (1998) Steve Zuieback), and we pick that up in the frontline management unit on relationships.
Good working relationships can also be influenced by the capacity of team members to be assertive in their relations with others. The term "assertive"
is frequently misunderstood being associated with forceful, bordering on
aggressive, behaviours. It does not mean this. It means having or showing positive assurance or self confidence so that one can honestly express thoughts and feelings to another person. It means expressing these so that you do not attack the person and make them defensive or aggressive, while at the same time not allowing others to make you feel defensive or aggressive.
Good working relations are a contributor to having a cohesive work team. Without a cohesive team, where individual team members feel a strong bond of liking, goodwill and mutual support towards each other, it will be hard to achieve outstanding results. Yet too much cohesion can be counterproductive. It can cause people to feel that the approval of their colleagues is more important than stating an opposing point of view, even when it might add new
information or provide a better perspective. As a result, a team can reach
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wrong or even dangerous decisions, or develop policies or strategies that harm the work area or organisation as a whole.
Irving Janis, a social psychologist, called this the ‘groupthink syndrome’. He
found that groups can become cohesive (sticking together) to the point where their efficiency declines. When this happens, they desire agreement above realism, and lose their desire to seek and consider alternatives. Such teams ignore negative aspects of their decisions and fail to test them against reality. Conforming overrides the desire to develop new and better ways and innovative approaches. Those who dare to disagree are seen as ‘deviants’
or ‘traitors’ to the group.
There is a great deal of literature and research in these fields and in many others that influence interpersonal relations. Towards the back of this learners pack you will find additional reading, on assertiveness and groupthink.
There has been considerable research over many years into the process of decision making. In this activity we will look at some characteristics of effective decisions, which have been modified from decision making competencies developed by Janis and a co-worker Leon Mann.
Competencies for effective discussion making:
• Choice: Availability of alternatives and willingness to choose.
• Comprehension: Understanding of the process and pitfalls of decision
making.
• Creative problem solving: Creatively generating alternatives and
alternative approaches to the decision making process.
• Compromise: Facing practical realities to modify or accept less than the
ideal.
• Consequentiality: Ability to think from actions to outcomes, expected and
unexpected and from cause to effect to identify likely or possible outcomes.
• Correctness of choice: Based on the ability to obtain and process relevant
information efficiently and logically as well as exercise balanced judgment.
• Credibility: Ability to assess the credibility/validity of information and
sources.
• Consistency: Stability and reliability of the decision making process with a
consistent focus and effective decision criteria.
• Commitment: Commitment to the decision made and action follow up is vital
but not blind commitment with failure to critically evaluate outcomes.
• What do some of the nine C's imply for development of your
personal skills?
• What personal skills do you think you need to develop?
• Are there other characteristics you can identify which you believe are not covered?
• Why is the commitment to action and critical evaluation of outcomes so vital?
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There are many specific approaches to decision making that you can research which will add to your skills and ability. We have looked at some basic aspects that will assist in effective decision making. If you are seeking to develop your own decision making skills and those of your team you could
do the following. Get involved in a variety of decision situations to gain more experience, particularly where the context of the decision varies, eg. situations of urgency or with significant risks.
• Good interpersonal relations are the result of good interpersonal behaviours and that our interpersonal behaviours are strongly influenced by our
perceptions of ourselves and our work colleagues. Healthy and positive perceptions of ourselves and others lead to healthy and open relationships.
• When making group decisions we have to be wary of some of the traps we can fall into. If the team has strong cohesion there are simple strategies for avoiding the problems of groupthink.
The Definitive Drucker by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim. Copyright 2007 by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim talks about Peter Drucker the man who is regarded as The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society
“Peter F Drucker was passionate about management effectiveness - setting priorities, managing time, and making effective decisions. His internationally best-selling book The Effective Executive is very much about getting the right thing done. In the Lego world, with knowledge workers and a vast array of collaborators playing important roles in the enterprise, people cannot be loosely supervised. They can only be helped and supported in their ability as managers to make effective decisions. The days of the gray-suited micromanager hovering over his or her employees' desks are over.
Managing in this amorphous environment is a delicate balancing act between preserving what makes the enterprise strong and channeling innovation to go beyond past successes. Peter used a circus analogy: The company must constantly be on a strategic tightrope toward the future, finding this balance even as the safety net below is shrinking.
Logic suggests that decision making and decision execution, which define this narrow and demanding path, are made easier by today's vast amounts of information and knowledge. This is not true. Rather, the broad base of
accessible information is rendered somewhat dense, difficult, and shifting by both the blurred boundaries between parties in the value chain and the speed of change in the market-these distinguish today from earlier periods in business history. As Peter put it, today's manager faces a fast-moving barrage of apparent knowledge, some relevant and reliable, some not. Because events shift so quickly, a decision can be obsolete before it even gets put in motion.
So, ironically, in the age of information, intuition and judgment play an even greater role in effective decision-making and well-placed strategic bets than ever before. Don't get me wrong. There is no substitute for factbased decision making, and no excuse for managing from the gut. But with unprecedented rates of change everywhere, setting the right assortment of reliable facts can be impossible within the time window available to take action. Sometimes we have to be able to see around the corners, and intuition and judgement play a valuable role in choosing which facts or feedback to trust.
Although access to information was more limited in the past, the landscape was less volatile and managers could rely on certain assumptions or facts to inform decision-making in a reasonable period of time. Today,
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management's challenges are exacerbated by the increasingly bewildering transformation of the economic and social landscape. Forget predictability. Forget longevity. To make things happen, management has to step up and have the stomach to take risks. Beyond that, the culture of the organization has to support judicious risk taking”
There are some basic competencies associated with effective decision making which we can seek to develop, to help ourselves and our team make better decisions.
2.2 Train participants in the performance management and review process.
Bearing in mind the team's overall goals and Purpose, decide what the team and its individual contributors must achieve. If the undertaking is large or complex, break down
the goals into a series of sub-goals and timelines that progressively move you towards the overall goal.
Now decide what must be done to achieve the goals. Establish clear Measures of Success for these tasks. Depending on your enterprise's vision and key goals, the measures you select might be financial, or quality-, quantity-, safety-
, accuracy-, service- or time-related. They might be derived from enterprise standards, benchmarks, or comparison with other teams or projects or your organisation's code of conduct, or they might be standards you agree with your manager, system users or client group, work group or project group.
Remember: what gets measured gets done, so decide how you will measure success carefully, and make sure the measures will be easy and inexpensive
to track.
As far as possible, make the measures lead indicators, rather than lag indicators. Lag indicators measure the results after the work is done. If work has been completed poorly, an important deadline has been missed or a project has over-run its budget, it's too late to do anything except apologise.
Lead indicators are better because they are current measures of what is happening. They give you a chance to put things right, before it's `too late'.
Try to involve your work team in selecting the Measures of Success they are accountable for achieving. This will increase their commitment and understanding of what they are responsible for accomplishing.
Sequence the Activities
The next question is: What is the best way to order these tasks so that the team achieves its goals and meets its timelines? Establish a logical sequence for the activities that need to be carried out, and set time frames for starting and completing them if these haven't been incorporated into your Measures of Success.
For recurring duties, establish a cyclical time frame that allows you to
produce the work correctly and on time. You might find that individual and group tasks depend upon each other and that it makes sense to sequence tasks using a Gantt, PERT or flow chart.
Plot the way these operations flow through your office. Is it in a smooth, flowing line, or is backtracking or repetition evident that should be
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eliminated? Are there any potential bottlenecks and awkward pauses or waiting periods that need to be streamlined?
Gather Your Resources and Support Think
through the Five Keys:
1. What To: Have you developed STAR Measures of Success for, and can you
explain the importance of each task?
2. Want To: Are tasks combined in an interesting and meaningful way?
3. How To: Are team members sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable, or have
you planned training for them? Have you allowed sufficient time for people to build their confidence and expertise?
4. Chance To: Have you provided the resources (suitable tools and equipment, well-designed
work systems and procedures, time and information, a skilled team and supportive team atmosphere) that will enable people to meet their performance expectations? Are the facilities adequate?
5. Led To: Are you providing the kind of leadership that polishes people's gold?
Here's how to fine-tune your strategies for boosting productivity:
• Keep asking: How can we do this better, easier, faster, more cheaply or
differently?
• Find out how others are achieving their objectives and see what you can adapt or learn from them.
• Talk to experts about how they would achieve the objectives.
• Redesign and streamline your office's work from top to bottom.
• Look for ways to remove bottlenecks and wasted time, effort and materials.
• Use improved technologies.
• Monitor results regularly, and brainstorm ideas for improving them on your own, with your team and with your manager.
Make sure there is sufficient administrative support for your plan. Will you need additional staff and, if so, should they be part-time, casual, full-time, temporary, or some combination of these? Can people work from home, or do they need to be office-based? Will you need to increase the hours of any part-time or casual employees?
Hold a team meeting to fine-tune the plan, agree it is feasible, and make sure that everyone understands it, knows who is responsible for doing what by when, and is committed to its goals. Draw on the thinking of the team members to ensure that you've thought of everything. If you identify any resource shortages in the Chance To key, or if any of the other keys are wanting, discuss how to rectify matters with the team and with your manager.
The more you involve people, especially your team or the user group, in developing work plans, the more successfully they will be executed.
Once your plan is operating, monitor it and keep adjusting and fine-tuning procedures to make continuous improvements and take changing circumstances and events into account.
How to survive when you're overworked and understaffed:
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Is your organisation expecting `the impossible'? If, for example, you're expected to find a 50 per cent improvement with 30 per cent fewer staff, all of whom feel overworked already, here are some ideas:
• Don't try to achieve everything.
• Set priorities. Focus on your critical goals, those that mean the most to you, your team and the organisation. Use these six criteria to help you decide what your priorities are:
1. What is the financial impact o f this goal?
2. Is it aligned with the organisation's strategy?
3. How important is it to our stakeholders?
4. Am I willing to give my own and my team's time and energy to it?
5. Is it in our skill set and capabilities?
6. Do we have the resources to accomplish it?
Agree your answers with your manager.
• Focus your team on the high-priority goals. Keep communicating their importance at team and individual meetings, at the water cooler, at lunch, etc.
• Celebrate the small wins and milestones along the way to keep people energised and positive.
• Keep everyone looking for ways they could do things differently to provide better results more easily.
How to Allocate Responsibilities and Monitor Results
Who will be responsible for doing what? When distributing tasks and responsibilities among team members, bear in mind each person's skills, knowledge and attributes, as well as their work-style preferences and learning and development goals. Consider who would benefit from the experience and who would enjoy which tasks. Try to strike a balance between using everyone's skills and abilities to the full and
to the benefit of the team, and allowing each team member the opportunity to broaden their competencies.
Think about the most cost-effective way of achieving your work plan, too, in terms of the mix of external temporary and contract staff and internal employees. To make sure you allocate work in an advantageous way, ask yourself: `Who is the lowest-paid employee who would be able to do or learn
to do this job well?'This will keep your costs per task down.
Whether you are delegating some of your own duties, distributing tasks among members of a project team, assigning general duties to members of your work group, the way you do it will affect the way the assigned tasks are completed. The figure below shows the most common mistakes and how to
avoid them.
Table 11: Mistakes to avoid when delegating and assigning work
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2.3 Conduct performance management in accordance with organisational protocols and time lines.
Before assigning work, make sure it is necessary and think through the Five Keys to ensure that the resources the employee will need to do the job well are available. Then think about which employee would be best to do it, bearing in mind current workloads, skills, knowledge and attributes, and interest areas. Try to achieve a good match between an employee's preferred working style
and the task when delegating and assigning work.
Should you assign work to everyone the same way? Common sense tells us that some approaches work better with some people than with others. If you give a dogmatic and explicit instruction to a willing and able employee, animosity is the likely result, while an uncooperative employee might ignore a request.
Use the descriptions in the following figure to decide the best way to assign the work. Base your choice on the urgency and importance of the task and the skills and willingness of the individual to whom you are assigning the work. If you choose correctly, your assignments will be understood, accepted and carried out properly. (These categories also apply to `reminders' to
complete a task, tidy up a work area, and other work instructions.)
As we know from the What To key, people need to know clearly what is expected of them. Give full and clear information so the employee doesn't have to second-guess you. Explain why the task is important, how it fits into the work of the office, and how it will contribute to the organisation or help your clients. Clarify where the new task fits into the employee's priorities, too,
so that it won't be emphasised over duties that are more important. Table 12: Ways to assign work
Rushing Take the time to explain the assignment fully
Mixed messages Show your confidence in the employee’s ability
Arrogant or overly
authoritative attitude
Treat the employee respectfully and build confidence
Voice tone Don’t ‘bark‘ out an ‘order’. Remember your manners!
Insufficient detail Fill in all the blanks: performance standards, timelines,
why the task is important, etc.
Vague and unclear Take the time to check that you have explained the
assignments clearly
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People often like to know why they (and not someone else) are being asked to do something. This is your chance to provide some positive feedback. Clarify the resources available and any constraints or restrictions. Agree monitoring
and reporting procedures. Then find out if the employee has any questions or concerns.
Be courteous. Show that you have faith in the employee to complete the assignment correctly. Use assertive body language: look the employee in the
eye and use a clear, calm and level tone of voice. Act as though you expect cooperation. The
process for assigning work is summarised in the table below. Table 13:
Explicit assignments:
These are direct instructions that leave no room for
discussion, choice or initiative. They state precisely what is
to be done, how and when. Use them when it is important
that the employee follows a particular procedure or safety
instruction, in emergency situations and when time is short.
Use them with inexperienced or careless employees,
employees who continually fail to follow standard
procedures or safety rules, chronic objectors, and people
who refuse to do what you ask with no good reason.
Conditional assignments:
These allow latitude and flexibility in how the task is done.
Assigning only the end result allows people to think for
themselves. Use them with employees whose skills and
willingness are reasonably high.
Request:
These begin with something like `Would you ...?' or
`How about ...?' They encourage cooperation and don't
upset relationships. Use them with employees who are
willing and skilled and with older and sensitive employees.
Implied requests:
Use indirect requests such as `We need to ...' when you are
looking for an end result but are willing to leave it up to the
employee to decide when and how to achieve it. They allow
latitude, judgment and initiative, draw on ideas and invite
cooperation. Use them with skilled and experienced
employees who have an understanding of the situation and
who assume responsibility easily.
Open requests:
These don't specify who is to do something, but rather, call
for volunteers. State what is required and why, especially for
tasks `beyond the call of duty'.
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There
is no skill in seeing the world from your point of view The
Courage To Listen
• We fail to listen because we don’t have the courage to do it. Why
does it require courage?
• Real listening involves seriously entertaining the ideas of the other person.
• When we listen we make ourselves vulnerable, we run the risk of finding that we are wrong.
• Listening requires us to move out of our comfort zone and security.
The Generosity to Listen
• When we listen we are offering the other person the gift of understanding;
• The gift of acceptance;
• The gift of taking that other person seriously.
• To be listened to is to be valued.
• To be listened to is to be recognised as an individual with thoughts worth
expressing.
What will motivate us, to bother to listen with our full attention?
The answer is love, care, or duty: we either do it because of our affection for or commitment to the other person, or we do it because of our position in the family, in the organisation, or in the community.
The Patience to Listen
• If words were actions, we would never tolerate the interpersonal violence which we inflict on each other in the name of conversation or worse in the name of communication.
• The failure to listen is a violent act, because it represents a violation of the integrity of the person who is trying to capture our attention.
• We have to acquire the patience as well as the courage and generosity to listen in a non-judgmental way: that is, accepting and understanding the other
person’s message before we make any judgments about it.
Ask yourself ‘Is it necessary?’
Ask yourself ‘are the required resources available?’
Plan how you will give the information and how you will assign the task
Present the information assertively
Agree clear Measures of Success
Convey faith and responsibility
Follow it up
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• Trigger words always test our patience as listeners: they are the words which evoke such a strong emotional eruption within us we are likely to lose the thread of what is being said and retreat into the private world of our thoughts.
Handling emotional situations
Most team members over time exhibit characteristics emotional behaviour which provides the team manager or leader with an insight into their needs and expectations. Some people may readily show their emotions, while others may be more controlled, or selective in who or how they share their emotions.
The effective manager recognises the individual differences and learns how to interact with each team member in a manner which overcomes relationship tension and motivates the individual to achieve.
Uncharacteristic changes in a team members’ behaviour should alert the manager to a possible underlying problem causing the individual distress.
Whether caused by work related or domestic factors, the manager needs to deal with the problem if the team members’ behaviour is affecting workplace performance.
Sometimes all the emotionally upset person needs is an opportunity to air their problems or grievances to somebody who cares enough to listen. However, often just listening is not enough. The supervisor needs to be able
to conduct a counselling interview where the team member is encouraged to identify the cause of the problem and carefully guided to suggesting and agreeing on action to solve the problem.
In most cases, careful planning and preparation will be necessary to handle a counselling interview. Selection of a mutually convenient time and place
which is free from interruptions is essential. An atmosphere of openness and trust must be developed to overcome defensiveness or anxiety which the team member may feel at this time.
Characteristics of High Performing Teams Team
members:
• Share a common purpose / goals
• Build relationships for trust and respect
• Balance task and process
• Plan thoroughly before acting.
• Involve members in clear problem-solving and decision making procedures
• Respect and understand each others' "diversity"
• Value synergism and interdependence
• Emphasize and support team goals
• Reward individual performance that supports the team. • Communicate effectively
• Practice effective dialogue instead of debate Identify and resolve group
conflicts
• Vary levels and intensity of work.
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• Provide a balance between work and home.
• Critique the way they work as a team, regularly and consistently Practice
continuous improvement
© Copyright 1998 by Reid Moomaugh & Associates Permission is granted to reproduce this document for training and education.
A High Performing Team
How many of us have been part of a truly high performing team? One which not only delivers to expectation but moves beyond it? One where working within it and contributing to it is a sheer pleasure and makes us feel stimulated, aware and alive?
Think back, chances are that if you have been lucky you will have had one or two experiences like the one described above. You may also have had a few others that approach but do not quite get there.
Why is it that on the whole these great team - working experiences are the exception rather than the rule? Why is it that most team working seems semi
- conscious in character when compared against these best experiences?
Working in a team can so often feel routine and uninspiring and so lead to only mediocre performance. It will identify the bad habits that inhibit team performance and offer ideas and approaches to help break these habits.
The uninspiring greyness of the herd
Teams are made up of individuals. Individuals have their own likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses and motivations. Have you ever joined a new team, full of bright ideas and enthusiasm, only to be told, quite early on and firmly,
that the ideas you have and your approach to work are “not the way we do things around here”?
You accept this freely given advice but as the months pass by you get that repeated thought “why don’t we do things like that here?” What reasons are there? You may even ask these questions of your colleagues. The answers
you get, and the passage of time, gradually reveal the real reason for the rebuff of your ideas. New ideas, approaches and even people make the team feel uncomfortable and nervous. The herd is already in formation and very comfortable with where it is going. It does not want any doubt cast on the direction it has chosen.
The team herd has a well mapped out territory. It is its stamping ground. It
knows where everything is and how to get there. The territories over the hill are unknown, would take a great deal of effort to get to and could well turn out to be dangerous. So best not go there. The problem is that the herd, through its repeated, habitual use of the same old tracks, is slowly trampling down the vegetation that provides it with variety and goodness, turning everything dust grey. The stimulating colours of
creativity and innovation are steadily being smeared away and trodden under foot. Also, individuals in the herd are starting to ape each other’s behaviour, language and attitudes. What is frightening is that you can feel yourself
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becoming monochrome grey, picking up the group habits and losing your individual spark.
Teams that get stuck in the land of the herd lose their ability to move on to
undiscovered countries and they snuff out the sparks of individualism that could help them look up and focus on new horizons. They are doomed to wander their ever darkening, used up lands until eventually, deprived of any creative energy or spark, they become extinct.
No team is an island
Just as individuals need each other for help and support, so too do teams. The self - managed team is very focused. It looks at the objectives of the organisation and what it needs to do in order to contribute towards their achievement. It looks in on itself, its resources and people and works out just what it needs to obtain and develop in order to achieve the best it can. It may also look around itself and consider what consultation and cooperation with other teams and
organisations may be needed. But time is pressing and the team has its objectives, so best get on with it and talk to others as and when possible.
Anyway, other teams have their objectives also, so they cannot spare the time to do anything but nod in your direction on their way towards their goals.
At the end of the year the team objectives have been met, but it is a matter
of never mind the quality but feel the width. This is repeated year after year until suddenly productivity starts to dip. Then, when people look around at their team members and the other teams around them, they find that most of their old colleagues have gone. There are new faces all around; fresh cannon fodder to be aimed and fired at the coming year’s organisational objectives.
All at once those that are left feel old and very, very tired.
Putting the leader in the glass house
The team needs to change direction, the leader knows exactly what needs to be done and the team is more than happy to follow their lead, at first. The initial changes to structure and processes are identified and explained by the leader. Comments and ideas are requested from the team. The team say, “It sounds good - let’s do it”. Implementations starts, slowly; and then it gets slower.
The team come up with helpful ideas for improvement and ask for additional direction from the leader. The leader, impressed by the team’s interest, retires
to his/her glass partitioned office to consider the new insights and requests for support. The leader’s responses duly fly forth and land on the team’s desks, only to be sent back with further comment and requests for clarification. Team members are spending an increasing amount of time in the team leader’s office having detailed meetings about the changes and their effects on
the team.
Suddenly the team leader feels more responsible than ever for the changes and feels that he/she has to single - handedly make them work. The leader works away in their glass partitioned office, wondering how this could have happened despite the apparent enthusiasm of the team, and feeling more
distant from their staff than ever before.
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The dangerous unthinking habit
The office needs reorganising and the desks relocated. They are duly placed in exactly the same sort of arrangement as they were previously, but on the
opposite side of the office. The team leader sits a little away from the team, just as before, the clerical support are bunched up in a corner, just as before. The IT specialists have partitioned off their own ‘technical areas’, just as before. The chronic communication problems that existed prior to the move continue to cause problems. Somewhere, just beyond clear focus, the team leader feels that an opportunity of some kind has been missed. Still, it was better just to get the move
over and done with wasn’t it?
Overlooking the practical and the consistent
The team has values and principles. The professional development of each individual is very important and it must be given attention. Effectively and
efficiently meeting the requirements of the customer is central to the team.
People are duly sent on helpful training courses and given guidance concerning good customer care. The team works very hard at meeting the needs of the customer, but every so often, a bit too regularly for comfort, mistakes happen, deadlines are forgotten and promises not kept. Despite
everybody’s best intentions even people’s personal development has gone onto the back burner and become ad hoc.
The leader asks the team why this might be happening. How does the team keep track of its staff’s development? How are the promises made to customers logged? Some ad hoc notes appear, very detailed and conscientiously kept, but there is no practicality, no consistency and no
system. The team and its leader wonder how this could have been overlooked for so long.
Breaking the habits of mediocrity: the nine principles
So, how can we break the above bad habits and encourage the teams we work in to become stimulating, high performing environments?
Firstly, there are 9 general principles that all team members (not just the leader) need to remember and live by:
1. Always remember that development of the team (and its people) is ongoing and constant.
2. Question the everyday and routine once a day each and every day. 3. Regularly ask: What does the team do and what does it need to do?
Address any inconsistencies.
4. Regularly ask: Why does the team do what it does and why does it do it in the way that it does?
5. Always actively look for opportunities to make things better. If a change is going to happen, however routine, always ask if it can be used to improve some aspect of the team’s performance.
6. Show a clear interest in individuals and actively seek to incorporate individual interests and strengths into some aspect of the team’s work.
7. Always think of responsibility for the team and its performance as being split 50/50 between the team leader and members. All the team, not just
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the leader, are responsible for the team’s performance, processes and outputs.
8. Make sure the team has clear, practical systems and processes that are aligned with and support the team’s purpose, vision and values.
9. Always seek to understand the needs of and work with the network of teams and stakeholders that surround you.
2.4 Monitor and evaluate performance on a continuous basis
Breaking the habits of mediocrity: specific approaches, tools and techniques
In addition to the above general principles there are specific approaches and techniques that the team and its members can apply to their work and/or their own behaviour, here are some of the
key ones:
• Set yourself a special emphasis goal. This is a simple task or behaviour that you can do each day to address and improve a medium to long - term key area of team performance/your performance within the team.
• Request regular informal peer or team reviews to discuss how a task is progressing or how the team is performing generally.
• List your stakeholders and clients and create a stakeholder map showing your relationships with them. Use this map as the basis for identifying ways to maintain and improve your stakeholder relationships.
• Create a practical system for agreeing and tracking each task the team does for a client. Make sure individual team members are shown as
having responsibility for specific pieces or work.
• Set up a liaison or ‘buddy’ system to maintain contact and manage relationships with other teams and stakeholders.
• Conduct not just a skills audit of the team but also a person audit, which notes the individual interests of each team member.
• Set up a team development plan detailing the development needed by the team and its individual members and setting objectives for its attainment.
• Agree and set ground rules, informed by your team’s purpose and values, that outline what is expected from each team member in terms of their everyday behaviour and approach to work.
• Ask how well each team member is interacting with clients, stakeholders, other teams and his/her own team? Encourage each team member to do a daily audit of how they are performing against the team’s agreed ground rules.
• Have team refocusing meetings at least twice a year and use them as
launch pads for continued ongoing team development.
• Rotate individuals around the team regularly to avoid stagnation and encourage new insights into everyday routine tasks.
• Seek one piece of feedback each day to improve your own and the team’s performance. Always ask what can be done better tomorrow.
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• Identify one internal team relationship (with a person or group) that you would like to enhance. Set one or two special emphasis goals to help you achieve this.
Being part of and working within a truly stimulating and high performing team is the exception rather than the rule.
High team performance is inhibited by:
• The dominance of herd instinct over individual creativity and innovation.
• Teams single-mindedly working towards the achievement of their own
objectives without reference to the other teams and environment that surround them.
• Heaping all the responsibility for team performance onto the leader, rather than sharing it 50/50 between the leader and the rest of the team.
• Not noticing the unhelpful habits that teams acquire and allowing these
to dictate future team behaviour and organisation.
• Overlooking the need for simple, straightforward processes and systems that serve to support the team’s purpose, vision and values. By following the 9 general principles and using the specific approaches and techniques described above, teams can begin to break their bad habits
and start to lay foundations for stimulating, high performing environments.
How can we support the team to identify and resolve problems which are impeding its performance?
We need to focus on organisational and team or group cultures, and identify some characteristics
of successful cultures associated with high performance and continuous improvement. How can we work towards and achieve these characteristics? As with other team or organisational issues, effective change and development starts with knowing where we are now, and where we want to be, and what we have to do to get there.
Table 14:
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The wisdom of team.
High-performance teams are teams committed to common purpose, goals, a working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable and has members who are committed to one another’s personal growth and success.
The high performance team significantly outperforms all other like teams,
and outperforms all reasonable expectations given its membership. It is a powerful possibility and an excellent model for all real and potential teams.
Where on this curve is your work team?
Cultural characteristics
Over recent years significant research studies have been undertaken to try and discover if top performing and leading edge organisations, with a history of continuous improvement, have any common cultural characteristics and if
there are, to identify and describe them. Such a study was that reported by Peters and Waterman in the international best seller "In Search of Excellence", and others including "The Change Masters" by Moss-Kanter. In the following table we have summarised the characteristics identified in a numbers of such studies.
• What characteristics appear to be most lacking?
• Where the characteristics are lacking why do you think this is so? Or who or what do you see as the greatest barriers to the development of these characteristics?
• As a frontline manager or team leader how will you seek to develop these
characteristics?
This next activity is taken from the work of Katzenbach J.R. & Smith D.K.:
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The creation of a winning or high performing culture and climate is challenging but attainable in any organisation or group. Apart from leadership which plays a key role it is largely dependent on the ability to generate greater understanding of real and often complex issues to be faced and the ability and willingness to face these issues.
The ability to learn, changing and experimenting with new ideas, risk taking, valuing people and their differences, throwing away authority and replacing it with responsibility and leadership are all an important part of the process.
Research indicates that in many organisations too many managers still appear to rely on authority, position power, and traditional structures rather
than leadership. This comes from an apparent failure or willingness to recognise that the environment has changed and that the days of "us and them" and authoritarian approaches to managing are relics of the past, ineffective in today's world and a recipe for failure.
The success of companies who have changed their culture to one of
continuous improvement and have taken up new corporate value systems is evident in their commercial success in increasingly challenging and competitive environments.
Effective change starts from discovering where we are now, and continuously improving until we reach where we want to be. There is no single culture within organisations, nor is there any single “right” culture. The
manager needs to be aware of the organisational culture best suited to the team’s tasks and to seek to develop this culture within the team.
Now that you have completed that activity – revisit the previous activity (five: what is a high performance team) and mark any changes you think. Once again, use a symbol or date/time to indicate your rethink.
Self organising systems
The key benefit of this model is to explain the importance to the organisation of the ‘soft’ issues that is relationships (teamwork), information (communications) and identity (visions and values).
It also emphasises that managers can ‘manage’ complex structures, systems
and processes, however, leadership is needed to influence identity with your organisations goals and to create the environment of teamwork and communications.
Information
• What information do I need to do my job?
• What information do I have that may be of use to others?
• What barriers are currently in place that restrict the flow of information?
Relationships
• What are the formal relationships in and between my team and do they honestly reflect how we get work done?
• What are the real relationships through which we are most effective?
• Is there agreement or discord between the two? Identity / self reference
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• Do we have a shared understanding of who we are and what our role is in a business environment?
• Are we working from the same sense of shared purpose?
• How do we know?
Structures
• What new structure do we wish to create?
• What approaches do we wish to put into place?
• How shall we stay open and fluid across these things?
Processes
• What issues and dilemmas, problems, differences and constraints do we face?
• What ground rules do we commit to guide our actions
Systems
• How can we stay open to new ways of seeing ourselves? What
standards do we commit to?
Lessons from the geese by Milton Olson
FACT: As each goose flaps its wings it creates an uplift for the birds that follow. By flying in “V” formation the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.
LESSON: People who share a common direction and sense of community
can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are travelling
on the thrust of one another.
FACT: When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It moves quickly back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.
LESSON: If we have as much sense as a goose we stay in formation with
those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.
FACT: When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into formation and another goose flies to the point opposite.
LESSON: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing the
leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other’s skills, capabilities, and unique arrangements of gifts, talents or resources.
FACT: The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
LESSON: We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups
where there is encouragement the production is much greater. The power of encouragement (to stand by one’s heart and core values, and encourage the heart and core of others) is the quality of honking we seek.
FACT: When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation to catch up with the flock.
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LESSON: If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in
difficult times as well as when we are strong.
3. Provide feedback.
3.1 Provide informal feedback to staff on a regular basis.
3.2 Advise relevant people where there is poor performance and take
necessary actions.
Provide on-the-job coaching when necessary to improve
3.3 performance and to confirm excellence in performance.
3.4 Document performance in accordance with the organisational performance management system.
3.5 Conduct formal structured feedback sessions as necessary and in accordance with organisational policy.
3.1 Provide informal feedback to staff on a regular basis.
The giving and receiving of feedback
Effective managers are aware of the obstacles that threaten successful communication, and take steps to overcome them. Otherwise, these barriers
would play havoc with their effectiveness and peace of mind.
Avoiding communication breakdowns takes common sense, practice and effort. Another of the barriers to clear communication is neglecting to ask for or to give feedback. The main focus on feedback (from the frontline management perspective) is handled in the relationships unit. It is covered in
personal development, and has been threaded throughout the learning in these Team work
sessions.
What we are going to do now is to gather some of those threads and look at a feedback ‘agreement’. Below you will find a feedback agreement – this is like a contract or a pact you can make with yourself and/or share with others in the team.
The giving and receiving of feedback is another step towards the objectives to promote and support the team’s focus, solidarity (togetherness) and productivity. Feedback agreement
• that I am entitled to my opinion and experience regardless of whether others think it is right or wrong
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• that everybody else is entitled to his/her opinion and experience, regardless of whether I think it is right or wrong
• to disclose/share my opinions and experience without trying to convince
others that I am right • to have an intent to build understanding and shared meaning, genuinely
listening, without interrupting or arguing afterwards
• to seek and understand the intent of others, rather than to believe or act as if my assumptions, fantasy, judgments are reality
• to sort the information gained into ‘useable now’ and ‘stored for later possible use’, in a way that both challenges and supports myself and my learning
Receiving “negative” feedback…an opportunity to learn and grow
Receiving negative feedback offers the possibility of learning something new and valuable about your performance. It must be remembered that ‘negative’ feedback should be based on past, and not future, behaviour.
Feedback checklist
• reframe my thinking about ‘negative’ feedback from an attack on me to an opportunity to learn and grow personally and professionally
• manage my emotions – breathe
• listen carefully
• try not to let my defences build
• mentally note my questions/disagreements
• paraphrase what I have just heard (check for understanding)
• seek clarification
• ask for examples – paraphrase again
• carefully evaluate the accuracy, usefulness and potential of what I have just heard
• collect additional information from other people observe my own
behaviour more closely
• observe other’s reaction to my own behaviour more closely
• don’t over react to feedback where appropriate – modify and evaluate the outcomes
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3.2 Advise relevant people where there is poor performance and take necessary actions
Giving work instructions and delegating
Adapted from - Cole, K (1998) Supervision: Management in Action, Prentice Hall: Australia
Giving work instructions and delegating are facts of life in most organisations. All managers, including team leaders, need to be able to give and receive work instructions. Some orders that a team leader gives will originate at more senior levels in the organisation. These can be difficult to pass on if the team leader is uncertain of the reasoning behind them or if the team leader is not
in agreement with them. The same applies to the staff's reactions. If they can't see the reason for the directions or don't agree with them, there is little hope they will be carried out with full cooperation and to the standards the leader expect.
This means that the best instructions are those that explain fully what the leader want done and why it is important. People usually prefer to see things in their wider context—it gives them a better understanding of what the
leader require and they feel more committed to it.
The dilemma of giving work instructions
In these days of empowerment and participation, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about giving work instructions. 'Yesterday's' team leader was the supreme order giver. Is a team leader who gives orders today a relic from the past or a strong decisive leader?
Delegating
For a team leader to be able to delegate appropriately, the employee must be fully trained and competent, willing and confident. Using the delegating
style of leadership with someone not fully trained or willing is an incorrect use of that style. Delegation means assigning one of the leader's own duties or responsibilities to a member of the work team. This may be someone who is already competent and willing to do the job; or it may be someone who does
not know how to do it, and the leader will need to train them.
Command and coercion or cooperation and commitment?
How do people prefer to receive orders? In most cases, people respond more willingly to a request than to a command. Of course, different circumstances will determine how the leader should give directions, but at all times the leader should be striving for cooperation, not mere compliance. There is a big difference between how those employees who are cooperating with the leader will carry out the order to the best of their ability; and those who are only
complying will do just as the leader ask, no more and no less. Whether we use the term 'order', 'request', 'direct', 'instruct', 'bid' or 'ask', the tone of voice and body language will make a big difference to the way people 'hear' and respond to the instructions. A position of mutual respect will help the leader to give to work instructions in a way that fosters cooperation. If the leader respects both him/herself and the person he/she is directing, this will come across in the way the leader gives the instruction. The leader will win cooperation and commitment and
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avoid mere compliance. Telling someone to do something isn't enough. The ability to give orders and directions that others follow willingly results from the combination of three skills:
• good leadership,
• the ability to motivate and
• clear communication. These can be learned.
Types of work instructions
Work instructions come in various strengths. How strongly the leader make a
request depends on the situation and the employee. People have different expectations of their job. Some see each job as one step in their career path and the sooner they master it, the sooner they can move on to the next. Others are happy to stay at the same job doing what is expected of them. Career-oriented employees need jobs that provide stimulation and the opportunity to express initiative. They generally respond best to work
instructions that state the end result and allow them the freedom to decide the best way to achieve it. On the other hand, those who see work only as a necessity for survival may prefer the leader to spell out directions step by step. Between these two extremes is a host of different people, each with their own expectations of their job. These affect how they will react to different types of order. Here is a summary of the main types of work instructions the leader can give.
Table 15:
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3.3
Provide on-the-job coaching when necessary to improve performance and to confirm excellence in performance.
There are occasions when team leaders must use a direct approach, or revert to their authority, when giving instructions that must be followed without question. For example, when an employee is engaged in an unsafe work practice, prompt action is required and the leader may need to resort to giving a direct order. Occasionally, there may be employees who, because of past experiences or the attitude to the job, only respond to direct orders. Explicit orders state both the
'what' and the 'how'. They state the end result or goal and describe, step by step, how to achieve it. Explicit instructions are used with new, unskilled or inexperienced employees. Generally, though, under normal working situations, these types of orders cause resentment among employees. Leaders try to avoid them if other approaches can be used effectively. Too many commands and direct orders seldom achieve more than grudging compliance and often reflect unsure or immature team leaders. Any lack of respect for the person receiving the order will come
through loud and clear. When a spirit of cooperation is lacking, employees will rarely do more than what the leader specifically tell them. This stifles initiative, creativity, suggestions and ideas and the team leader is faced with the problem of directing reluctant staff. On the other hand, if the leader gives direct and explicit instructions only occasionally, employees will know it is for a particularly good reason and will respond better.
Direct order These are commands, leaving no room for
discussion. They are useful where time is critical.
Used for health and safety matters; for example,
instructions might say: 'You must close the machine
guard fully before proceeding.'
Explicit order Here, the leader state clearly and precisely who is
to do what, when it is to be done, how it is to be
done and where it is to be done. Used with people
who are limited in their experience and/or abilities
or with those who lack a sense of responsibility or
commitment to the job.
Request order These begin with 'Would the leader', 'Will the
leader', etc. Used with nervous, sensitive, skilled or
motivated workers.
Implied order Here the order is implied, or not explicitly stated; for
example, 'We need to...' Used with people who
readily accept responsibility or where improved
methods are sought.
Undirected order These call for volunteers. Used when a job is
'beyond the call of duty' and states not only what is
required but also why.
Conditional
order These allow latitude, limits, judgment and initiative
in the how, when and what areas. They help
maintain cooperation and commitment and are
used whenever possible.
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Request and implied work instructions
Employees expect and deserve more than the one-way situation of "I tell - you do'. Often, because of their education, specialist skills or experience, employees are
capable of modifying or improving an instruction and carrying it out competently and eff1ciently. Requests and implied orders allow this latitude. People tend to resent change, yet many directions that team leaders give require some change. Giving employees the opportunity to express their opinion or to feel they have contributed to implementing a change will help overcome resistance. Request and implied work instructions are particularly
useful in complex situations, where change is required, or where the leader has capable and willing employees. These instructions allow some discretion and initiative in carrying out the request. Asking 'Would you...' or 'Could you...' or saying 'We need to...' are polite ways of softening work instructions and encouraging cooperation.
Undirected work instructions
Occasionally, the leader may need someone to do something 'above and beyond the call of duty'. When this is the case, the leader explains the task and asks for a volunteer, rather than selecting an employee and giving a direction. The opportunity to volunteer can provide an employee with the motivation needed to do the job, especially if in doing so the person is able to satisfy one of their own needs or wants.
Conditional work instructions
With experienced and responsible employees, it is often best to explain the overall objective that is required and allow them to determine how best to achieve it. Conditional orders state the end results required but leave the
method of achieving to the employee. This approach is best for experienced and willing employees. It can also be used to effect when training and developing employees in order to upgrade their skills, although the leader should talk through with them how they will approach the task, other than just letting them 'get on with it'. People with low levels of task readiness are unlikely to be able to carry out a conditional order successfully, either through lack of skills or lack of readiness, so this approach can be dangerous with
inexperienced or unreliable staff. It should not be used when the team leader is not able to give specific objectives or current background information.
Helping employees to accept instructions Guidelines
for giving effective orders:
• The order should be clear and specific in what is expected.
If it is not, there is little chance that employees will know what the leader expects. They are not mind readers and the leader cannot expect them to see
things as the leader does if he/she has not given sufficient information or clear objectives. Specific objectives should always be established and communicated clearly with other relevant information.
• The instructions should be sequenced in the most logical order possible.
• The right person for the job should be carefully chosen.
Choosing someone with both the ability and the desire to carry out the task will help to ensure the
instructions are carried out effectively.
• Confidence and calmness are helpful in the delivery.
The confidence will be contagious.
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• Headings that can be used:
WHAT is to be done in terms of?
o quality o
quantity o
time o
safety
WHY that person is being asked to do it
WHY the task is important
HOW to do it (for direct and explicit work instructions only).
• The instructions must be understood fully.
If necessary, repeated. If an employee who has not carried out a direction to the satisfaction says 'I didn't know that was what the leader wanted', the leader has not communicated clearly or sufficiently. The employee should be
given ample opportunity to ask questions, to clear up any areas of uncertainty or doubt, perhaps the employee should be asked to repeat the instructions back to the leader.
• Reasons for the directions should be given whenever possible and suggestions encouraged on how to achieve the objectives. This recognises and uses the skills and knowledge of the employee.
• The leader should give the directions at an appropriate time. It is unwise, for example, to give work instructions when angry. Other examples of poor timing are when employees are about to go to lunch or knock off for the day, or when the direction comes on top of an incident that has lowered the
morale of the group. Occasionally, the leader may need to pass down an order from upper management at a time when it could cause friction among the work group. Team leaders need to be constantly aware of the level of group morale so that they can anticipate the reaction to an instruction and time it so that it will be accepted.
• Progress should be monitored so that if things start to go wrong the leader
will have enough time to rectify the situation and check on the final result to ensure it is in line with the objectives the leader set.
• Employees should be praised or thanked for their efforts when appropriate, and the feedback should be timely and specific.
Handling a refusal to carry our directions
One approach may be to refer the offender to the manager, like a teacher sending a naughty student to the head-teacher for punishment. Another approach may be to try to enforce the authority or use bribes to gain compliance. None of these would be very effective in getting the job done or ensuring future cooperation and they could make a hero of the erring person in the eyes of workmates.
Both parties might 'lose their cool' and get into a heated argument. This won't help at all. So the first advice to follow is: keep calm, count to ten and give oneself time to consider whether the order was a reasonable one. Is the employee clear
about what the team leader asking? Does the person receiving the work instruction have the skill, ability and time to carry it out in the required fashion?
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If the leader cannot understand why an employee won't do what the leader asks or instructs, try a direct approach. Ask what the trouble is and find out why they don't agree with the suggestions. Maybe they have a good reason for not doing what the leader requested. Maybe they misunderstood. Maybe
something the leader said or the way they interpreted it annoyed them. A questioning approach can help find out.
DO be sure the leader know exactly what the leader want before
giving instructions.
DON'T be careless or offhanded if the leader want employees to take
the leader seriously.
DO be sure the leader know the employee has the ability to carry
out the assigned tasks.
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DON'T assume he or she can do the job or understands what is
expected. Find out!
DO Give orders and instructions only when needed
DON'T get order happy. Make sure one task is completed before
giving more. Don't give orders unnecessarily to make the self
appear important.
DO distribute tasks and instructions evenly between employees.
DON'T overwork some because they will accept the directions with
less fuss than others.
DO be consistent with what is to be done and the standards
required
DON'T give all the good jobs or the unpopular jobs to the same
people all the time.
DO follow up to see that the directions have been carried out in
the desired manner and to the specified or expected time and
quality standards.
DON'T assume that after the leader have given the order, it will be
carried out to the satisfaction.
DO ensure the order is understood and will be carried out
willingly.
3.4 Document performance in accordance with the organisational performance management system.
Disagreeing with an instruction
The leader will often be required to relay instructions and information from the manager to the work team. Occasionally, the leader will not agree with them, or the leader may believe that they
will result in an adverse reaction from the work team. An easy response to such a situation would be to take sides with the employees and accuse senior management of being 'out of touch' or unaware of the repercussions and to
pass on the information or instructions, adding something like: 'I know it's crazy and won't work but that's the way they want it done.' Rather than creating harmony within the work group, such a negative attitude only makes it harder to enlist the cooperation of employees.
Negative team leaders are usually those who are unable to see 'the big picture' or understand the overall reasons behind an order or a change in
policy or procedure. They cannot understand that sometimes a 'tough' decision must be made, despite the fact that it is likely to be unpopular.
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The leader should thoroughly talk through with the manager any instructions he/she doesn't fully agree with. The opinions should be stated calmly, slowly and clearly, citing any relevant examples, facts or figures to illustrate the points. Negativity should be avoided - the remarks should be constructive
and offer some alternative approaches.
If, at the end of the discussion, the manager still requires that the leader relay the instructions, it is his/her job to do so, provided that no organisational policies or legal issues are contravened. If the leader believe that rules are being breached, he/she may raise the matter again with the manager or, if
necessary, with the manager's manager. If there is no breach of the law or corporate policy, the order should be carried out or passed on to the team, explaining the reasons behind it as fully as possible. The team leader is part of the management team and must be a supportive member of that team.
Delegation
Giving work instructions involves directing people to carry out duties and tasks that are part of their job. Delegation involves giving people the authority to carry out tasks that are normally the responsibility of the leader. The leader gives someone else the authority and responsibility to carry out a specific task while the leader retain the accountability for it.
Accountability is being held answerable for work for which the leader have been
given authority and responsibility. The leader can delegate authority and responsibility, but the leader cannot delegate accountability.
In other words, the leader may delegate one of the tasks to an employee together with the authority to do it, and hold the employee responsible for getting it done correctly and on time, but the leader cannot delegate his/her
own accountability to the manager and the organisation for getting the task done safely and correctly. Delegation or abdication?
Some team leaders delegate a task and leave the employee, floundering, to 'get on with it'. They mistakenly believe that this 'sink or swim' approach is
delegation, that it is a way of training staff, and that it is an acceptable way to 'test an employee's mettle'. This is not delegation, not staff development and not a fair way to 'test' someone. It is abdication.
Delegation is not quick and easy way to off- load the work onto someone else. When the leader delegate a task to someone, he/she must make sure they will
be able to do it; that they have the training and the resources (time, equipment, information) they
need; that they are clear about what they are asked to do, and why the team leader is asking them; and that they will approach the task correctly and efficiently. Most often, this means talking it through with them first, stressing the results required and the importance of the task.
The importance of delegation
Delegating effectively helps the leader get the maximum benefit and output from
the employees and free up some of the time to do other things.
Some team leaders resist delegating, saying that 'the buck stops with me' or 'it's quicker and easier to do it myself'. They don't want to spend the time training their employees or they don't trust them to do the job to the required standard. Others fear 'letting go' or 'losing control', or worry that passing on knowledge
will weaken their power base or value to the organisation. Some use the easy tasks as relaxation or as a way to avoid doing other parts of their job. These
are just excuses.
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Delegating is a good way to involve others and build an effective team. It can give employees a sense of participation. It can be a great source of job enrichment and is a good way to develop, train and coach employees on the job. Sharing knowledge and skills can also be a great motivating influence. It
can make employees feel that they belong, that they have some say in things and that they are not just cogs in a wheel.
Delegating is also a good time-management tool. It will give the leader time to look ahead - time to plan the work and the department's work more effectively. The leader won't be troubled by today's problems all the time.
Effective delegation can free the leader from details, giving the leader time to be sure that the department is operating smoothly, output is integrated and synchronised, and the team leader attaining the key objectives in a manner that is both effective and efficient.
What happens if the leader doesn't delegate?
If the leader doesn't delegate, he/she will probably end up doing everything him/herself. The leader will be the kind of team leader who is always pushing carts around the floor, photocopying memos, cleaning a machine, relieving an operator, filing the day's typing and doing a thousand other tasks, rather than the job of supervising. In short, the leader will be so busy doing odd jobs that the overall job will suffer. The desk will be overflowing and the employees will
be in a state of confusion because the leader hasn't organised things properly.
If this happens, the basic problem is probably that the leader doesn't understand what delegation is or how it makes for good supervision and can be a 'sanity-saver. The leader can't do it all him/herself. Giving some authority and responsibility to the work team to make decisions and do things where
they have the necessary competence and information helps. Wise delegation helps the leader get on with the job of supervising the work and workers in the department. Team leaders get things done through others. If the leader find him/herself using any of the excuses below for not delegating they need help. They are not sound!
The steps to effective delegation
Delegating involves assigning a suitable task to a suitable person, providing the right information and training, and following it up effectively.
Some common excuses for not delegating
• My staff are too inexperienced to do this. I have to do it myself.
• It takes more time to explain the job and farm it out than it does to do it myself, so why bother?
• I can't afford to have my staff make a mistake for which I will be responsible.
• This job is different. It demands my personal attention.
• My workers are all busy, too, and don't have time for an additional load.
• I don't have anyone who will take the responsibility for work like this.
• I got where I am today doing this type of work, and I don't plan to stop now.
• If I pass it on to an employee, I'll lose control of the job. I won't know what's going on.
• People will think I'm lazy—that I'm just passing the buck.
• No one knows exactly how I want this job done.
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• If the leader want a job done well, the leader has got to do it him/herself.
• This job is too important to trust to an employee.
• This is my occupational hobby, and I don't plan to turn it over to someone
else.
• I've got to OK the final product anyway, so why not do it to begin with? Step
1: Decide what to delegate
Use the work delegation plan below to help the leader decide what tasks the leader could or should be delegating. When new work comes into the department, ask the self whether the leader could delegate it.
Step 2: Decide whom to delegate to
The leader could choose a person who is already clearly able and willing to
take on the responsibility for doing a task or has a flair for it. Or the leader could choose an employee who wants to learn the task in order to develop or extend their skills or make their job more interesting or challenging. It could be that the leader have planned to develop someone's skills for future promotion, and delegating a task or duty to them is a good way to do this. Or perhaps an employee has shown interest in a particular type of work and the
leader decide to delegate it to them so that they can decide whether they really like it. Whatever the reason for delegating a particular task to an employee, make sure the team leader clear about it so that the leader can communicate it to the employee. Table 16: Work delegation plan
Step
3:
Delegate
As with giving instructions, delegate using the following headings:
• Quality
• Quantity
• Safety
• Time
• Why the team leader delegating this task to this person and why it is important
Employees should not be left wondering why the leader have selected them, how important the job is, by when or how often the task is to be done, the standards or end result the leader expect, or whether there are any
Recurring and routine tasks
Who can do it now? Who could
trained to do it?
be
Tasks which would
increase or develop
an employee's skills
or knowledge
Who can do it now? Who could
trained to do it?
be
Occasional duties or
tasks
Who can do it now? Who could
trained to do it?
be
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constraints such as time or money. Discuss how the leader will monitor the task to ensure that it is being completed effectively. Train or coach as necessary to fill in gaps in knowledge or skills. Discuss how the employee will approach the task (don't insist that it be done in the way the leader used
to do it or would have done it). In other words, delegate according to the results desired, not according to the methods to use, unless these are very clear-cut and specific and really are the best way to approach the task. Once the leader have delegated, don't hound the employee and try to keep on top of every last detail. Worse still, don't take it back and do it for them. Let them get on with it and monitor only the critical control points the leader have
agreed upon.
Step 4: Inform others if necessary
Sometimes the leader will need to inform the employee's colleagues, other team leaders or senior managers that the leader have delegated a particular task or duty to someone else, particularly if that employee will be liaising with
others in order to carry it out. Let them know, too, that the leader have complete confidence in the employee's ability to succeed in the task. Step 5: Monitor results
Although the leader delegated responsibility and authority for the task, the leader retain accountability, so the leader must ensure the results are meeting expectations. The leader will need to make sure that the task is being carried out efficiently and effectively and to the standards the leader
require. Monitoring allows the leader to make any necessary corrections to the way the task is being done. If the employee is making any mistakes, use them as an opportunity for training and guidance.
Does delegation mean losing control?
Delegation should not result in losing control over the task. If the leader follow the steps to delegation outlined above, the leader will monitor results (step 5). This will ensure that things do not get out of control and that the job is done correctly. The monitoring should alert the leader in plenty of time if things are going off the rails, enabling the leader to take swift corrective action.
If the person the leader have delegated to gets it wrong; there is no need for
panic. When the leader delegate, the leader also delegate the right to make mistakes. We all make mistakes from time to time. Rather than take the job
back or berate the employee, review what went wrong and use it as a learning opportunity.
3.5 Conduct formal structured feedback sessions as necessary and in accordance with organisational policy.
Remember Murphy's law, which states that, 'In any field of endeavour, anything, which can go wrong, will go wrong.'
Team leaders can't afford to delegate a task and hope for the best. They need to keep tabs on it to ensure the employee is carrying it out as safely, correctly and eff1ciently as expected and progressing satisfactorily towards the goal. Do this by monitoring critical control points. Examine results at certain key stages
and compare them with the expected or desired results. If there is a gap between the results required and what is achieved, discuss what corrective action can be taken. To monitor delegated duties, set up a systematic method of measuring progress against targets that will alert the leader
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and the employee to any deviations from the requirements. The leader can set up this system so that the employee gets the information directly and comes to the leader only if there is a deviation (management by exception); this works well with highly skilled and motivated employees. Or the leader can arrange it so that the actual results go directly to both the leader and the employee
for comparison with the desired results. Either way, the leader will need to do two things when setting up a monitoring process:
1. Decide what needs to be monitored. What is important? Production? Quality? Costs? Sales? Expenses? Monitor only what is important.
2. Establish the target or standard—the gauge against which the leader will
both measure performance. Follow the formula for SMARTT targets; make sure they are:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant (related to the organisation's key measures and goals)
Trackable
Time-framed Try to measure positive, not negative, data. In other words, measure what the leader does want,
not what the leader doesn't want; for example, set a target and measure the number or percentage of items passing quality control inspection rather than items failing inspection. Try to monitor lead indicators rather than lag indicators.
Use the system below to monitor results. It involves three steps, although the leader won't need the last step when the employee is carrying out the
delegated task correctly. This monitoring process is a continual cycle.
Step 1 Measure actual performance. Keep the information the leader gather
to a minimum, but make sure it is key information. What the team leader after is clear, quick, low-cost information.
Step 2 Compare actual with target. Preferably, management by exception
should bring to the attention only performance that is outside expectations.
Step 3 Correct any deviation. Encourage employees to work out for
themselves what corrective action would be best; only if they are really stuck should the leader tell them. This is not to make life awkward for the employee, but to ensure that the task is not delegated back up to the leader, and also to help people learn from their errors.
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Suitable tasks for delegation
Tasks that are not suitable.
• Don't delegate tasks that are well beyond employees' training or experience. Setting people up to fail is the worst possible kind of supervision.
• Do not delegate confidential matters such as discipline, performance counselling or pay.
• Keep matters dealing with organisational policy or security and any highrisk or high-cost tasks in the own hands.
• Avoid delegating boring 'go-fer' jobs and jobs that the leader don't like to do him/herself, especially dangerous, unpleasant or otherwise disagreeable tasks.
• Don't delegate planning and monitoring activities, or anything that needs to be done quickly.
That leaves most other tasks as suitable for delegation. Recurring and routine duties, tasks that would be particularly suitable for training and developing employees and tasks that would make their jobs more interesting
in some way, are all suitable for delegation.
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Employee reactions to delegation.
Not all employees respond positively when the leader delegates a task to them. One person might say, 'I already do enough', and this may be true— they may be
overworked. On the other hand, they or the department may be poorly organised. Another employee may complain to workmates that 'I never know what I'm expected to do!' If this happens, ask whether the leader have delegated completely and clearly and provided all the necessary information. Or perhaps the employee lacks confidence or is worried about what the reaction to mistakes will be.
An employee may complain, 'You knock yourself out and never a word of thanks!' In this case, the leader had better review the information on managing performance and motivation and learn to give positive feedback. Someone else might say, 'Tell me exactly what the leader want me to do.' This may be because the leader have always thought for them and told them
exactly what the leader wanted them to do, step by step. Possibly they don't want to take on this task at all, and this is their way of telling the leader.
'I can't do it!' might mean 'I lack confidence and need a bit of help', while 'Why should I bother?' or 'Why should I be doing the job for the leader?' may mean 'The leader don't reward me enough' or 'There's no point in my doing it—I'm going nowhere in this job anyway!' or 'Why should I help the leader out—the
leader never do anything for me?'
Deal with these reactions tactfully. Use the active listening skills and ask clarifying questions to make sure the leader fully understand the employee's objection to taking on the task the leader want to delegate. The responses may be valid or they may signal a deeper morale and motivation problem.
that, if they have the authority to make an important decision, and must take direct responsibility for the outcome—especially if that choice proves to be a
What prevents most people from becoming effective leaders? They believe
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mistake—they must make that decision personally. It seems impossible to consider that they might allow a subordinate to make the decision under any circumstances. It seems too great a risk—bordering on culpable folly—to allow someone else to make a potentially erroneous decision for which you
will ultimately be held responsible. Yet that is an essential part of all good leadership.
Leaders are continually urged to become better delegators. It’s sensible advice. Much of the overwork and pressure that is endemic in organizations comes from a simple inability to delegate. Whether you call it “staying in the
loop” or “keeping your finger on the pulse,” or use any of the other fancy ways of describing the rooted tendency to want to be involved in everything that
might possibly affect you, the behavior is the same. It’s why circulation lists have become bloated out of all proportion, and people waste large amounts of their time attending pointless meetings.
The result is obvious. Their subordinates are given boring, routine, trivial work—and expected to like it—while they hold onto anything interesting that
might affect actual business results.
But have you noticed that almost nobody has the slightest problem in delegating work that they see as boring, trivial, routine, or inconsequential? They cannot be rid of that fast enough. What they cling onto—like leeches— is whatever they think is important, especially if the result might reflect on
them or alter their standing in the eyes of the people above them. The result is obvious. Their subordinates are given boring, routine, trivial work—and expected to like it—while they hold onto anything interesting that might affect actual business results.
That isn’t delegation. That’s the action of any privileged person who can
afford servants to handle the boring parts of life, while he or she sits around and pretends to be above such mundane concerns. It turns subordinates into slaves or despised gophers, who can learn little of any use for their future development, since they are rarely allowed to deal with anything challenging. It’s also extremely risky. Should some crisis occur, when passing important work to subordinates becomes an unavoidable necessity, those
subordinates will have neither the knowledge nor the experience to handle it. Mistakes and muddles are inevitable, further reinforcing the leader’s comfortable view that only he or she has what it takes to deal with important issues correctly.
Many of the greatest leaders spend nearly all their time coaching others to
do the jobs that they would otherwise have done, believing (correctly) that their real job is to train and develop their subordinates, not carry out tasks they could perfectly well have delegated.
Delegation is inviting others to share your full workload, not just the boring bits. It is getting them involved in ways that can add to your own thoughts and ideas. It is using all the extra ability and creativity that they can bring. Of
course, it inevitably involves some risk: the risk that they will make a mistake that you might not have made yourself. But then, they may very possibly save you from mistakes you definitely would have made, so it balances out. Indeed, many of the greatest leaders spend nearly all their time coaching others to do the jobs that they would otherwise have done, believing (correctly) that their real job is to train and develop their subordinates, not
carry out tasks they could perfectly well have delegated.
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Being a major-league leader means delegating everything you possibly can— and then some. It means accepting that you will continually carry the can for things that others have done; and dealing with that by training and developing them to do what you ask them as well as possible, not by hanging onto the
decisions yourself. The essence of delegation is trust, which is why it is so often poorly done. If you don’t trust your subordinates, why are you their leader? They would be far happier and better off without you. Consider that.
Tips for delegating
If the leader follows these tips, the leader will discover the 'art' of delegation.
1. Don't wait until the last minute. Delegate early. Take a step back and plan the delegation. Look at the deadline and work back from there.
2. Be sure that the leader delegate to the right person. Before the leader delegate, consider their skills, experience and motivation with respect to the
new job. Don't delegate more than is justified by the employee's capabilities and experience.
3. Make sure that the leader give the reasons for selecting the employee for this particular job. It is important to show that the leader have confidence in the choice.
4. Explain clearly and check the leader has been understood. Clarify what the team leader delegating and why. Define at the outset what the job is all about. If the leader can't delegate the whole job but only a part of it, explain where it fits into the whole picture. Explain exactly what has to be done the limits of the authority and how the leader will measure results. Unless the leader need to train the employee to do the job, the leader don't need to
specify how to do it, but make sure the leader clearly state the results the leader expect.
5. Ensure the employee understands the importance of the task.
6. Give any guidance and support that is necessary without oversupervising or criticising. Pass on any information relevant to the performance of the
job that the employee will need to know.
7. Make sure the leader provide the necessary resources.
8. Agree review methods and dates.
9. Delegate, don't abdicate. Keep control through feedback. Get periodic reports and offer suggestions or advice only if it is warranted.
10. Inform others who need to know what the leader have delegated and to whom.
11. Don't overdo it. Don't pile so much on the employees that they become overburdened.
12. Don't hover. There is a fine line between interfering and helping. Let the
employee get on with the new task.
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Upwards delegation
Some employees have a habit of shifting their responsibilities upwards, to their team leader. People sometimes do this if they are unsure about what they are
supposed to do. Or they may feel unable to carry out some of their tasks due to lack of training or experience, or because of environmental barriers such as poor or unsuitable tools and equipment or lack of time or information. Sometimes, an employee is simply unmotivated. If any of these situations apply, the leader may well find tasks being subtly passed up to the leader.
This can happen in many ways. For example, employees may ask for the help. If this happens, make sure the leader don't end up doing their job themself. If some particular operation (or machine) is not working smoothly, the employee may ask the leader to see what is wrong. The leader promise to think about it and say the leader will be back in touch.
Through this simple manoeuvre, the responsibility for sorting it out has been
shifted on to the shoulders. Situations like these can add up and when they do the leader will find themself solving the employees' problems and doing their work instead of supervising the department.
Upwards delegation can eat away at the time the leader have to run the department. It can result in dependent employees who can't think for
themselves or act without permission. Team leaders can end up doing everyone's job except their own.
What should the leader do when an employee approaches the leader for help? Be courteous, listen to the problem and help any employee who really needs it. The leader will have to be the judge. For those employees who are trying (perhaps without even being aware of it) to get the leader to solve their
problems for them, let them know that the leader have every confidence in their ability. Let them know that it is their job and that the team leader confident they will come up with an excellent solution. Talk the difficulty through with them if the leader thinks it appropriate to do so. Later, check back to see what the employee has done. Offer suggestions if the leader wish and give praise where praise is due.
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Summary
• Giving work instructions does not necessarily mean being harsh, militaristic or dictatorial. It involves assigning duties to a team or a team member.
• Delegating involves assigning one of the own duties or responsibilities to a
team member in order to increase their skills, knowledge and job interest.
• Giving instructions and delegating need to be done in a way that fosters cooperation. This involves a combination of three skills: good leadership, the ability to motivate and clear communication.
Table 17 : Delegation dos and don’ts
DO:
Let delegates know t hey can come to you if they get stuck.
Use delegation to develop and extend employees' skills and heighten job interest.
Delegate in plenty of time so that you can explain and train properly.
Explain the complete picture, including the importance of the ta sk, why you chose that person, any constraints, the standards and time frame.
Provide the necessary resources (including time).
Delegate the thinking as well as the doing - that is, delegate according to the results desired, not the methods to use (except for standard procedures or when you need to train someone to do the task).
Remember that when you delegate, you delegate the right to make a mistake. Use any mistakes as learning opportunities.
Remember to thank delegates when they've completed a task succ essfully.
DON'T :
Use the lame excuse 'It's quicker to do it myself' for not delegating.
Hover. Let the employee get on with the task.
Delegate all the best jobs to a select few employees.
Abdicate. Monitor to make sure the task is being done to the requir ed standards.
Overdo it by piling so much of your work on to your staff that they can't get their own work done.
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• Work instructions vary in strength from explicit instructions, which state the 'what' and 'how', to conditional instructions, which state only the 'what', leaving the 'how', up to the employee. Each of the six types of work instruction should be used appropriately.
• To give work instructions effectively, be clear about what the leader expect the employee to do. Give instructions calmly and with confidence. Provide full information, ensure the employee has understood, and install a built-in monitoring system to ensure the required results are achieved.
• If an employee refuses to carry out a direction, team leaders have a range
of options, from first-step 'whisper' strength questioning to find out why, escalating to 'loud hailer' disciplinary action.
• If instructions are not carried out correctly, team leaders should help the employee understand the reasons and take corrective action.
• Written instructions should be issued when there is a permanent change of
procedure, when precedent dictates they should be in writing, when the directions are complex, and when the same message needs to be given to a number of people.
• The unity of command principle states that each employee should only receive instructions from one person. In matrix organisations, people often
have more than one boss. Take care that there is no overlap in reporting for specific duties.
• All managers, including team leaders, need to give and receive instructions. When receiving instructions, ask for guidelines on timing, quality, quantity, etc., to ensure the leader know fully what is required.
4. Manage follow up. Write and agree performance improvement and
4.1 development plans in accordance with organisational policies.
4.2 Seek assistance from human resources specialists
where appropriate. Reinforce excellence in performance
through
4.3 recognition and continuous feedback.
4.4 Monitor and coach individuals with poor performance.
4.5 Provide support services where necessary. Counsel
individuals who continue to perform below
4.6 expectations and implement the disciplinary process if necessary.
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Terminate staff in accordance with legal and
4.7 organisational requirements where serious misconduct occurs or ongoing poor-performance
continues.
4.1 Write and agree performance improvement and development plans in accordance with organisational policies.
To be able to achieve through others, managers need to monitor and appraise performance and make appropriate adjustments to performance where necessary while providing support, as required, to individuals.
The management role
The traditional perspective of the management role covers five functions of
management
1. planning,
2. organising,
3. staffing,
4. leading and
5. monitoring
The performance appraisal process tends to be classified under the staffing area as a human resource function, rather than across all the management functions. Thus appraisals are often seen to be a human resource matter, separate from the management function. Appraising performance and
providing feedback is a means by which managers can execute the functions of management and motivate staff. The figure below demonstrates how performance appraisal and feedback are part of all the management functions.
In Figure 18 a manager's role and responsibilities are grouped around the functions of planning, organising, staffing, leading and monitoring. There are
significant aspects of managing performance and improvement in each functional area, and some of these are shown in the figure. In part, how a manager manages will determine how successfully individuals perform and meet the individual requirements and objectives that, combined, form the vehicle through which the organisation achieves its plans and objectives. Managers therefore have an important and involved part to play in appraising
performance, both informally through day-to-day management activities, and formally in performance appraisals.
According to the literature, performance appraisal has been handled badly by management for many years. It tends to have negative connotations because of the lack of skills management have used in implementing
schemes or systems and the negative attitude some managers have towards the concept of performance management. Those being appraised (appraisees) have not been provided with the appropriate skills to get the most out of an appraisal. Appraisals have tended to concentrate on the completion of forms and compliance with the rules set down by Human
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Resources rather than the performance and potential of appraisees and the specific needs of work groups.
Self-appraisal
People appraise their performance all the time. Look around any car park and you will see drivers turn into parks and then back out, straighten up and reposition the car in the park. To do that drivers have made an appraisal of their performance in parking the car. Then they have taken some corrective action to improve the performance, tried again and succeeded in achieving a pre-set
standard of parking the car that they had in their mind. We have all been next to a driver who obviously doesn't have any standards for parking the car. It is very frustrating trying to squeeze into your car when the door can't be opened far
enough for you to get in! There are always consequences for others when people do not selfappraise. These consequences are likely to be more significant at work because of the team- based nature of organisations and the interdependence of workers.
Appraisal is a naturally occurring process in humans. We give ourselves continual feedback on how we are doing against a set of personal standards and objectives whether it is playing sport, work, bringing up children, cooking or jobs around the house. Some of us have very high expectations of ourselves, such as an urge to climb mountains, while others have more modest objectives and standards by which they live. Whatever your personal
standards or objectives may be, you appraise yourself against them daily. This self-feedback provides guidance, motivation a reinforcement in
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your life, precipitating rethinks and new directions, or feelings elation when objectives are attained. Thus feedback is an important and fundamental component of performance appraisal in the workplace.
While individuals tend to provide self-feedback, it is not sufficient in workplace to leave them to their own devices. Outside work, people are responsible to themselves, so it is up to them to take an objective view of how they are going to make adjustments. If they fail to do so they suffer the consequences, whatever that may be. In the workplace, however, people are responsible to others, so the ball game changes somewhat. While we
continue to give ourselves feedback, this must supplemented with feedback from superiors and major stakeholders in the work that we do, because their perspectives are likely to be different from ours. What we not see ourselves is documented in the literature as blind spots—things that others know about us but we do not know ourselves. In order to improve our performance we need to know what these things are. The only way we are going to find out
is if people provide us with feedback.
Motivation
Just as self-appraisal can be motivating for the individual, when a workplace performance appraisal is conducted with skill, both parties should be motivated appraisal where both parties have had an opportunity to discuss openly their fears,
concerns, hopes and aspirations, and to focus on how these can be attained, en a more productive work environment. Relationships will strengthen and personal pride and performance will be enhanced. Appraisees will feel empowered motivated to achieve their best; they will feel more comfortable alerting management to problems because they know that the important thing will be to solve the problem rather than conduct a witch hunt for a person to
blame. Managers will also feel more motivated after conducting a skilled performance appraisal as they will be to get on with the job of managing and also see individuals achieving results. The figure below illustrates the principle that a skilled performance appraisal discussion can motivate the parties involved and then underpin future performance, and thus the cycle continues.
The management challenge
The challenge for managers in performance appraisals is to ensure that trust
and honesty are developed with staff. This can only be achieved through effective communication and interactions during day-to-day workplace activities and feedback during the appraisal period. The manager has the most direct influence on staff through daily workplace activities. The influence of the manager during the actual performance appraisal is much less, because skills, knowledge and dispositions are learnt during work, not
in a two-hour discussion on performance.
Figure 19 Appraisals can motivate future performance :
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An appraisal discussion provides the foundation on which to base new learning, in order to achieve more of one's potential. The feedback you give and the discussions about performance that you have with staff, will set the tone for your relationship with individual staff members. How the manager
coaches, guides, directs, delegates, communicates and provides learning and developmental opportunities for staff will also influence the degree of trust and honesty that is developed. The yearly formal performance appraisal should simply be a review of matters that you have both previously dealt with. During the discussion you formally record what has happened and concentrate on the period ahead, facilitating new knowledge and skills, new
standards of performance and greater realisation of organisational, appraiser and appraisee needs. When this is done skillfully, it has a great influence on the motivation, attitude and achievement of individuals.
Case Study
Alison is a manager of four people who work in a garage that specialises in repair and maintenance of high performance cars. The garage is a messy place with dirt and oil all over the place. They have a great deal of trouble finding all the equipment they need to do a job and sometimes spend up to half-an-hour looking for things. Ivan, Peter, Sarah and Thomas are becoming very frustrated, as they believe they could do a much better job if things were
more organised. They are also concerned about the number of customer complaints they get as they feel it is a reflection on them. This is affecting their working relationships—they seem to be on edge with each other and snap all the time. They are constantly asking Alison for some time to discuss their feelings with her. As she is always so busy (often looking for things), she says, 'Yeah, sure, walk with me.' The staff have all found it difficult to
walk and talk about the things they would like to discuss, so inevitably the conversation is superficial and does not get to the issues they would like to discuss. Alison keeps saying they must have a longer chat but there never seems to be time to do so. Thomas and Peter are actively looking for other jobs in the industry.
Analyse this situation and make some suggestions to Alison about how she might be able to improve the performance of her business and the staff.
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Appraisal
Appraisal is a real and vital part of our living. Without appraising the value of certain actions, effort, materials, equipment and people, our decision making would be
impaired because we would be unable to determine priorities, or the worth of doing one thing over another. For example, people may have different values and attitudes about mowing the lawn. Depending on how they value the activity of mowing the lawn, or what it can bring them, they will mow or not mow the lawn or find other ways of achieving the same outcome. The table below demonstrates the different perspectives people may have of mowing the lawn.
You will see that the actions look very similar—that is, the lawn gets mowed. The difference is that either the owner does it or someone else does it. The value that a person places on the activity of mowing the lawn, or what the activity can provide, determines where it sits in terms of the priority of that person. For example, the individual in item 1 might place the activity high on the list in the order of things to do, it may even be a daily activity, whereas the individual in item 4 might
spend very little time on the lawn, it has a low priority in the order of things to do. The person in item 6 may spend a great deal of time in the garden, using the lawn, but does not mow it, and may give it as high a priority as the person
in item 1. These people have made decisions based on their appraisal of the activity and the pleasure or otherwise that the result of the activity may bring. The reasons for doing similar things are therefore very different.
Figure 20: Activity Values
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Appraisal is essentially a very subjective activity and tied closely to an individual's values of what is worthwhile. Consequently, it is vital to get
agreement on standards of performance to bring some objectivity into the process. There must be a shared understanding of what has to be done and how well it must be done so that all parties value similar things about the performance and the result.
In the workplace, people make decisions based on their appraisal of situations, equipment, other people and performance. Organisations have traditionally appraised the use of plant and
equipment and kept precise records on the performance of each item to determine the return on investment. Similarly, exact records are kept of the financial performance of organisations. Such records have been highly valued by the business world and governments, and legislation has been enacted to enforce the preparation and release of reports such as annual reports and, more recently, affirmative action reports. Organisations also have strategic, marketing and business plans for which a large number of records need to be kept to facilitate the monitoring and
achievement of the plans. Until quite recently, there has been little emphasis on the monitoring of the performance of individuals within the organisation. It has been difficult to determine the contribution that people make to the organisation. The return on investment in people was in many cases unknown, and very few records were kept to monitor performance and achievement.
The modern age has brought with it a focus on productivity and global competition that has made it necessary to monitor the worth or value of the
performance of individuals. Its staff represents one of an organisation's largest expenditures. Today, when the productivity and competitiveness of an organisation determines whether it will survive, it is vital to ensure that all the organisation's resources are operating at maximum capacity. This includes the human resources through which the activities of the organisation are achieved. The appraisal of human performance is vital for the success
of the organisation.
Value Activity Possible Actions
Lawn should look good and
reflects upon the individual
Mowing
the lawn
Mows lawn regularly
and spends a lot of time
looking after it
Not a good use of my time (want to be doing other things)
Pays someone to do the lawn
Activity for children to earn
some pocket money
3. Children mow lawn, subject to
whims of children and desire to
earn money
Not an important activity,
hate doing it
4. Leaves lawn, only mows infrequently or pays someone else to do it
Usual weekend activity
around house
Schedules into other household chores on weekends, mows regularly
Want good looking lawn but don't want to spend the time or effort
Pays someone to do the lawn,
may check work
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Workplace appraisal
Appraising an individual's performance at work is similar to the process we use outside of work as individuals living in society.
However, there is at least one significant contextual difference between the way we appraise as members of society and how performance is appraised in the workplace. In the workplace, the appraisal is done in conjunction with another person. As a
member of society, you appraise alone with only your own thoughts, which may sometimes be informed by discussion with others. At work, the
appraisal involves your superior and—if 360-degree methods of appraisal are used—your peers, your subordinates, your customers and your suppliers. Outside work, appraisal tends to be informal and sometimes unconscious process. This may partly explain why many people do not like formal workplace performance appraisals: they are seen as threatening because you have to share the process with someone else. So that it can be a useful and motivating activity for all concerned, it is vital that both parties involved in the appraisal use appropriate skills.
A communication process
The performance appraisal is primarily a communication process between two people who share information about the performance of one party, with the aim of coming to a shared understanding of that performance.8 It is the time when the manager and staff member evaluate the performance of the staff member against the
standards and objectives agreed earlier in the appraisal period. Notice the joint approach—both parties will have perspectives that should be shared and any differences investigated and talked through to arrive at a better understanding of the performance of the staff member.
It is only possible to come to a shared understanding by communicating effectively. As a specialised communication process, performance appraisal demands high-level communication
skills in both appraiser and appraisee. Lack of sufficient high-level communication skills will destroy a performance appraisal even within the best performance management system. Even systems that provide lots of guidelines, formulas and paperwork in an attempt to manage
performance effectively will fail if appraiser and appraisee do not have the appropriate communication skills.
Instead of motivating and inspiring individuals to perform, a lack of communication skills will create defensive strategies and responses, misunderstanding, distrust, lack of honesty and an unwillingness to talk. In such circumstances the appraisal becomes an unpleasant experience for all involved and reinforces the general opinion that appraisals do not work. This
serves to build further resistance to performance management systems.
It is the lack of appropriate skills and attitudes in managers that has prevented the successful implementation of performance management schemes and appraisals in the past, and that will undermine future endeavours if appropriate communication skills are not developed. Unfortunately, too many managers see performance appraisals as unconnected to the running of the business, conflict ridden, mere
administration and ineffective, thus providing further evidence that the design of a performance management system, the forms and measures that are used, are not enough for the process to be effective.
As recently as 1996 Cascio found that employees act negatively towards performance appraisals: they are often less certain about where they stand
after being appraised; they tend to evaluate their supervisors less favourably after an appraisal; they often report that few actions or improvements result from appraisals; and they feel that the traditional 'tell and sell' approach to
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appraisals is entirely inappropriate. Managers are in the driver's seat here.
The manager controls the appraisal process. Managers should show leadership and demonstrate the appropriate skills. Where managers feel they do not have the skills to conduct appraisals skillfully they should undertake development activities. Cascio implies that it is the manager who most strongly influences the outcome and therefore the success of the appraisal process. Thus, part of the success of a performance appraisal will
be a function of the manager's skills in conducting it and of the manager's ability to develop appropriate skills in appraisees.
In many organisations it is assumed that managers have the appropriate skills to conduct effective appraisals. In Australia the Karpin Report demonstrated that managers did not have these skills. Managers need, deliberately and methodically, to develop key skills in interpersonal
communication to be effective managers of performance. The figure below demonstrates the building blocks of an effective performance appraisal. This model illustrates that it becomes very difficult to conduct an appraisal if the interpersonal communication skills are not in place.
The model assumes that communication skills are at an adequate level to facilitate the development of performance standards, the monitoring of performance, an analysis of
performance and the improving of it where desirable. As these skills underpin the knowledge and skills required for the other activities, no amount of training in the other building blocks will produce results if the communication skills are not at a competent level through which the skills and knowledge of the other building blocks can be articulated. This section will assist you to develop some of the key skills required for conducting performance appraisals.
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Randell’s Taxonomy
The figure below illustrates the connection of Randell’s taxonomy of performance appraisal purposes to the operations and management of the
organisation. Without the loop that connects performance appraisal with strategic and operational plans, through management, there can be no effective organisational performance. Effective organisational performance is defined as the ability of an organisation to meet its
strategic and operational goals.
Randell’s taxonomy is useful in placing into perspective the many uses of the performance appraisal. However, it can be folly to place too much emphasis on any one of these purposes, because they are too specific. Organisations do not implement performance management systems solely to identify training needs, for example; there are other ways of doing this. Performance appraisals are conducted to gather data on the performance of an individual and to plan the future. This data is part of the plethora of data collected to measure the performance of
an organisation. Personal performance data, correctly and appropriately fed into the management system of an organisation, will enhance the decision-making processes and thus the overall performance of an organisation
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Remember that performance appraisals are conducted to check how things are going and, specifically, to identify the current level of performance and plan for future required levels of performance. The figure below demonstrates some of the activities that might be involved in the three phases of the performance appraisal model. It also attempts to place
Randell’s taxonomy into the model to show how it fits with the performance appraisal model.
Performance appraisals that concentrate only on reviewing past or current performance don’t do the whole job, just a small part of it. Where only part of the appraisal is performed, negative results such as those observed by Cascio above will permeate the staff within the organisation, thus effectively disengaging the performance management process as a viable management and
motivational tool.
Figure 23: Appraisal purposes and performance
Performance
Current performance
(Where are you?)
How do you get to?
Future performance
(Where am I going?)
Review Planning Development
• Discuss past performance
• Motivate
• Validate
organisational state
• Plan for the future
• Identify future performance requirements
• Identify career aspirations
• Identify promotional potential
• Decide on pay increases
• Succession planning
• Motivate
• Identify training needs
• Identify developmental needs
• Document current skills
• Agree performance standards and objectives
• Motivate
Randell’s Taxonomy
• Evaluation
• Auditing
• Validation
• Evaluation
• Auditing
• Succession planning
• Controlling
• Motivation
• Evaluation
• Auditing
• Training
• Development
• Motivation
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The purpose of performance appraisals is to review an individual's performance to date and to plan performance and development for the future. To achieve the purpose of the appraisal, both parties must have the evidence to support their views and the communication skills to be able to articulate and discuss them
both in a formal and an informal way. Put very simply, performance appraisals allow managers to measure actual performance against required performance, as illustrated in the figure below. This deals with current performance against current performance requirements, even where actual performance exceeds
performance requirements, but does not address the issue of how performance may change in the future. Appraisals that use only current performance as the basis for an analysis of
performance will not address future requirements and thus the process becomes ineffective. Life in organisations today is not static. It is in a state of constant change, flexibility and adaptation in response to the demands of a large number of stakeholders (from customers to shareholders) who require their needs to be met. No organisation, no individual will be able to meet these needs without addressing the requirements of the future, and this includes the performance required of all workers in a workplace as well as the organisation as a whole.
Figure 24: A Performance Gap
The figure below incorporates the concepts of future performance requirements that will be tied to strategic plans and objectives, and developmental requirements that will be tied to both the current level of performance against standards and anticipated performance requirements Benefits of performance appraisals
By now you will have realised that there are numerous benefits in conducting performance appraisals. However, you will also understand that these benefits are predicated on the
Required Performance
Performance
exceeding
requirements Actual performance
(1) Performance gap
Actual performance (2)
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assumption that both parties conduct the appraisal with skill and in a competent manner. The benefits of conducting a performance appraisal will be directly related to the skills of the individuals who participate in it. When an appraisal is conducted effectively, there are real and tangible benefits for the appraisee, appraiser and the organisation. Conducting an appraisal should be
hard work for all concerned, not because it is difficult to do but because it requires skill, time, effort, knowledge and the appropriate attitudes. There is the same requirement whether the appraisal is formal, such as a yearly performance review, or informal, such as the day-to-day feedback that you provide as a manager. The figure below identifies some of the specific benefits of performance appraisals for the appraisee, the appraiser and the organisation.
Figure 26: Benefits of performance appraisals
One of the difficulties in developing the appropriate skills for conducting performance appraisals is that they are not conducted frequently enough for participants to be able to practise the skills regularly and therefore become more expert at the process. If you feel this is the case with your own development then you should schedule them more frequently so that you and
your staff get better at participating in them. Of course, this should be discussed with staff and a sincere effort made to explain the reasons and
benefits of the action, so as not to threaten staff. Gaining their cooperation and agreement in this
Appraisee Appraiser Organisation
• Increased motivation
• Increased job satisfaction
• Increased sense of personal worth
• Increased self-confidence
• Improved working relationships with the manager
• Improved communication
• A clear understanding of what is expected in the job
• A clear understanding of the performance standards required
• Opportunity to discuss work problems and develop solutions
• Opportunity to discuss career aspirations and any guidance, support or training needed to fulfil these aspirations
• Identification of training and development needs
• Individual talents recognised
• Improved relationships with staff
• Improved decision making
• Increased job satisfaction
• Increased sense of personal worth
• Improved departmental or branch performance
• Opportunity to develop an understanding of individual jobs and complete work teams
• Identification of areas for improvement
• Opportunity to link team and individual objectives and targets with departmental and organisational objectives
• Opportunity to clarify the contribution the manager expects from teams and individuals
• The opportunity to re- prioritise targets
• Improved performance due to:
- more effective communication of the organisation's objectives and values
- increased sense of cohesiveness and commitment
- improved relationships between managers and staff
- managers who are better equipped to use their leadership skills and to motivate and develop their staff
• Improved overview of the tasks performed by each member of staff
• Identification of ideas for improvement
• Expectations and long-term views can be developed
• Training and development needs identified more clearly
• A culture of continuous improvement and success can be created and maintained
• The message is conveyed that
people are valued
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way will establish further trust between you and the staff and consolidate the performance appraisal process.
Consider the opposite argument for a moment. The skills used in
performance appraisals are no different from those a skilful manager uses in everyday practice. Hence, if performance appraisals are not being conducted effectively there is the possibility that the manager lacks some of the skills required for effective management. Of course, it may not be solely because of the manager's lack of skill— the appraisee may lack the skills to handle the performance appraisal effectively. Yet this is still a management
problem: staff do not possess the appropriate skills. Such situations provide a rich source of information for the appraisal discussion, however. Further, if you are in the early stages of implementing performance management processes within your organisation and you believe that your staff do not have the appropriate skills to handle the process, train them. Do not try to implement formal performance appraisals without the proper training. Doing
so will only threaten staff and consolidate opposition to the process.
These benefits are not guaranteed nor will they happen overnight, but a well run performance management system will develop these benefits over time and influence the culture of an organisation.
Frequency
Linked with the issue of how beneficial performance appraisals can be is the issue of how frequently they should be scheduled. The first point that should be made about frequency is that performance appraisals are an ongoing process and part of the daily management responsibilities of a manager. So, in a sense, the question of 'How frequently?' does not arise, as appraisal should be
continuous. The question is more 'how frequently should formal appraisals be conducted?' There are two issues associated with this: the administrative support required for a formal appraisal; ' and the system of appraisal your organisation uses.
Formal appraisals require a lot of paperwork and time and so tend to be scheduled only once each year. It is unrealistic to expect that formal
appraisals can be conducted on a monthly basis, given the documentation and consequent filing that goes hand in hand with formal appraisals. However, it is not unreasonable to have quarterly formal appraisals, especially if the documentation can be converted to allow for quarterly comments on performance standards and objectives.
The performance management system that your organisation uses will also
influence the frequency of your formal appraisals. Most systems only provide for a formal review once each year, the reason for which is probably reflected in the previous paragraph. These yearly systems tend to reinforce the belief that appraisals take place once a year and increase the likelihood of invalid appraisals because the time frame of one year makes it difficult to remember performance unless all parties involved write regular notes.
Managers and staff alike tend to become bound by the rules and regulations set by their organisations regardless of whether the system works for them. The concept of a yearly performance appraisal should not limit the activities of individual managers in working with their staff and formally appraising their performance.
Despite the apparent barriers discussed above, appraising performance needs to be done on a regular basis so that individuals are receiving feedback in time
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to do something about it. It is not sufficient to limit this process to a once yearly activity. How frequently you schedule formal appraisals outside the daily informal appraisals that take place will depend on the dynamics of your organisation, the internal and external environments and the individuals you are working with. For example, if you are in an organisation that is changing rapidly
in response to market forces it is likely that you will need to conduct a formal review of performance much more frequently than once a year. If you are in a government agency that is undergoing restructuring or merging with other departments, then appraisals will need to be more frequent. If you are working with highly adaptive and flexible individuals you may not have to appraise performance so frequently.
The minimum frequency you should aim for is once each quarter. A lapse of only three months between appraisals makes it easier to review the period— it is more easily recalled—and easier to correct unsatisfactory performance.
The yearly formal performance review can be counterproductive to a successful performance management system. For example, most organisations insist on conducting performance appraisals at a given time
of the year. Managers are expected to get around to all their staff and complete a useful and competent appraisal of each staff member. This is okay if you have only one or two staff reporting to you but, for managers that have many people reporting to them, it becomes difficult to find the time to conduct effective appraisals in the given period allocated by the organisation. The result is poorly conducted appraisals that satisfy no one.
Several options could be utilised to overcome this problem. The yearly performance appraisal could be conducted on the nearest date possible to the birthday of the staff member, or on the anniversary date of when the employee joined the company. This would smooth out the number of appraisals to be done at any given time, thus ensuring that adequate time,
effort and preparation could be invested in the activity.
Whenever the yearly performance appraisal is scheduled, it must be integrated with the formal planning processes of the organisation, division, department or section. If performance appraisals are isolated from the planning process they become meaningless with standards that are hollow, and do not contribute to the objectives of the work area and the organisation.
Managers need to be assertive and insist that the timing of performance appraisals meets operational and planning needs.
In summary, performance appraisals need to be regular and should have some degree of formality so that both parties take notice of the activity. Meeting quarterly to go over the last three months adds recency to the
process, allows for adjustments to be made to standards, and permits the rewriting of standards and objectives if necessary. Scheduling of the appraisal should fit into the operational and strategic needs of the organisation.
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4.2 Seek assistance from human resources specialists where appropriate
Prepare specific feedback
At this step you need to establish what specific feedback you will give to the individual or team about the actual performance to point out what the agreed performance standard was and, from
your evidence, what the actual performance demonstrates. You will also need to identify what has to be done to get performance back on track and, as a result, you may also want to suggest new performance standards or objectives. Alternatively, having determined that the individual or team has the skill(s), that
these skills have been used in the past and that they are used frequently, there may be other reasons for non-performance. If you feel this is the case then you need to work through the steps on the right-hand side of the analysis
framework.
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Does the person have potential?
Having worked through the rest of the analysis framework, you have enough evidence to suggest that the individual or team can do the job and there is
nothing preventing the agreed standard from being achieved. It is at this point that you need to question whether the staff member has the commitment to achieve, is capable of achieving, or simply does not care. The evidence on which you have been making your decisions as you work through the framework will help you to identify whether the person has potential. If the evidence suggests that there is potential, you move back to the feedback
step and prepare specific examples of where performance is not satisfactory and how you will approach the issue. To do this, you will need to be convinced that there is potential. It is likely to take a heavy investment of time and energy on your behalf to get the individual or team back on track and to sustain the investment long enough, with close monitoring, to ensure that standards are reached.
Where you do not consider the person to be a good investment of your time and energy you have reached the stage of preparing to terminate their employment, or seeking to relocate them to another part of the organisation where they may be better suited. It is at this time that you will use your organisation's unsatisfactory performance procedures to begin termination proceedings. It is feasible that, through this process, the individual or team
may be prepared to commit to achieving outcomes, or through your intervention develop appropriate skill(s) to meet required standards. In this case you would not continue with termination proceedings.
The framework now guides you in preparing for the performance discussion so that evidence is arranged appropriately and can be used in the discussion to support your position.
The performance discussion
While methods of appraisal are many and varied, nearly all use a discussion in which to provide feedback to the individual or team and to extract feedback about the manager. The discussion has generally been known as the performance appraisal interview. The word 'interview' is suggestive of one individual asking another
questions, that is, one person being in control and the other reacting. As this is not the purpose of the performance appraisal, this book uses the term 'performance discussion', which suggests a more equal footing between participants (the appraiser and the appraisee) and a process in which two-way
communication occurs. The difference is illustrated in the Figure below.
The performance discussion is the central tenet around which the appraisal is built and needs to be handled skillfully if it is to be a useful activity for all parties involved. The broad aim of the discussion is to pool information about performance and how it can be improved. In the course of the discussion,
both parties present examples and evidence of performance to support opinions and conclusions. From this, an understanding of performance is gained and can be analysed to determine how further improvements can be
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made. Finally, agreement can be reached about how to proceed in the future.
This section of the chapter reviews the performance discussion in depth and introduces a model to help you manage the discussion.
Characteristics of an effective discussion
While it might be stretching the concept to say that the two people involved in a performance
discussion constitute a group, it is useful to look at group theory to determine the qualities of effective discussion. In any case, the issue is relevant when working with teams. Johnson and Johnson suggest that, for group discussion to be effective there must first be evidence of the development of an effective group. From their identification of 12 elements of an effective group, the guidelines shown in the next figure below have been developed and must exist if the
performance discussion is to be effective.
These guidelines reinforce the main points already made in this chapter but also make it very clear that, prior to the actual performance discussion, much has to be done for the discussion to be successful. For example, communication interpersonal skills need to be developed by both appraiser
and appraisee. It is unreasonable to expect that staff will attend a performance appraisal discussion be able to contribute in a useful way if they are not adequately prepared and developed appropriate skills and an understanding of the process. Similarly, the manager or appraiser must also be adequately equipped to handle this specialised form of communication. This work is not onerous but merely part of being a skilful manager.
However, the chances of completing an effective performance discussion are considerably reduced if any of these skills or adequate preparation is missing Dove and Brown, suggest that appraisal training ought to take in the
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factors contained in the 12 guidelines to strengthen the appraisal process. It can be self-destructive to conduct performance discussions if guidelines have not been established, because the lack of an appropriate climate and skills by both parties will sabotage the discussion. A sabotaged process,
resulting in the outcomes claimed by Cascio earlier; is worse than not appraising performance at all.
Figure 28: Elements of effective group functioning required for successful performance discussions
1. A clear set of performance standards for the work area and for individuals
2. Accurate two-way communication between staff members and manager
3. Widespread distribution, participation and leadership among staff members
4. The use of consensus to arrive at answers, solutions and decisions
5. Power and influence based on expertise, access to information and
social skills, not on the authority of the manager
6. The frequent occurrence of controversy within the section managed by the manager
7. The open confrontation and negotiation of conflicts of interest among staff members and between staff members and the manager
8. High cohesiveness between manager and staff members
9. High trust between manager and staff members
10. A climate of acceptance and support between manager and staff members
11. A climate of individual responsibility and accountability, helping and sharing, and achievement between manager and staff
12. A high level of interpersonal skills in both parties
Managers must ensure that they have put enough effort into using effective management practices which are embedded in their everyday management
of the staff they work with before attempting appraisals of performance. Where gaps exist, the manager must ensure that appropriate strategies are invoked to counteract these or risk failure of the appraisal process.
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Next, a model of the discussion is presented to assist appraisers and
Stage 1—Setting up the discussion
Adequate preparation is needed for the performance discussion to be beneficial. Unless enough time is given to preparation by both appraiser and appraisee, the discussion
cannot be full, open and honest. On average it should take each party about one hour to prepare for the appraisal discussion. The appraiser must also put in further time preparing for the whole process—how much is likely to depend on how many staff you have to appraise. The responsibilities of the appraiser are discussed next. Appraiser responsibilities
The appraiser is the facilitator of the appraisal discussion and as such you need to focus on the process and outcomes of the discussion. Before scheduling appointment times for the discussions you need to give considerable thought to how you will prepare the appraisees for the discussion. There are four important areas that need your attention in setting up the discussion: the venue, interruptions, appointments, and information or instructions to appraisees.
1 Deciding upon the venue
Finding a suitable venue can sometimes be difficult. In choosing a venue, consider the following criteria: privacy, free of interruptions, easily accessible to appraisees. While your office may satisfy these criteria it is
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always a good idea if you can hold the discussion in a room other than your office so as to be on neutral ground.
Holding the interview in your office may add to the anxiety of appraisees.
However, you may not have any options other than to hold the discussion in your office (and this may, in fact, be desirable after your appraisees get used to the process). If this is the case you must attend to the following matters.
• Avoid having the discussion across the desk as this sets up power relationships that you want to avoid in a performance discussion. Many
offices now have desks that are pushed up against the wall, preventing this arrangement. The point is that you need to get away from the desk altogether. If you do not have a table in your office that you can use, arrange the chairs near each other and as far away from the desk as you can practically manage. This is a legitimate attempt to ensure equality in the discussion and will facilitate a better quality of discussion.
• Ensure absolutely that your telephone will not ring. A ringing phone can be off-putting when you are in a delicate stage of discussion. Letting it ring out destroys concentration, and most people get agitated when phones ring for too long. This single item has the potential to wreck your performance discussion. Ensure therefore that you can switch your phone through to someone and that it will be answered.
• Ensure that you will not be interrupted in any other way—for example, people barging into your office wanting to talk to you. This sort of interruption can create havoc when you are in the middle of a discussion and cause a great deal of embarrassment for all concerned. Ask someone to ensure that no one goes into your office for the period of the
interview and let the person know how important this is to all involved in the discussion. If necessary, place a sign on your door, one that will be seen and stop people from entering. However, if you need to go to this extent it is probably advisable to seek an alternative venue.
• Move all distracting papers and work from the immediate vicinity. Files and papers can sometimes attract the attention of yourself or the
appraisee and trigger lapses in concentration, causing discussion to falter, thoughts to be confused, misunderstandings to occur, and false assumptions to be made.
• If your organisation has open-plan workstations, you may not have an office so you will need to locate an appropriate room for the performance discussion. There is no reason why you couldn't meet appraisees at a
venue outside the organisation, provided it satisfied the above criteria.
2. Containing interruptions
Ensure that you will not be interrupted for anything except emergencies. Clarify your definition of emergency so that there is no misunderstanding. Allowing the performance discussion to be interrupted sends signals to appraisees that they are not important enough to have your undivided attention for a specific period of time.
Turn off all mobile phones and pagers and redirect other phones if
necessary and ask the appraisee to do the same, if applicable. The discussion is a period of quality time that you will rarely get with your employees. Protect it strongly and both of you will reap the benefits.
3. Scheduling appointments
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Give appraisees as much time as possible to prepare for their performance discussion. One month is adequate. This gives them enough time to go over the documentation and to think about how they are doing.
• When scheduling appointments, avoid seeing too many appraisees on the same day. For example, if you have five people to appraise, holding one interview each day over five days is preferable to holding them all on the one day. The reason for this is that you should spend about one hour getting yourself ready for the discussion, about one hour (or more, depending on the job) in the discussion, and at least half-an-hour after
the discussion thinking about it.
• Realistically, the average performance discussion should take about two and a half hours to complete if it is done effectively. Thus it is only possible to manage two effective performance discussions in the one day. More than two in one day creates the possibility of confusing the discussions, and that could have significant consequences for decision
making.
• Whatever you decide as the basis for scheduling the appointments, when you do make an appointment with an appraisee, that appointment must be fixed. That is, only under the most urgent circumstances should you alter the appointment. This must be so for appraiser and appraisee.
Failure to adhere to the schedule shows disrespect for each other as well as undermining the appraisal process and its importance.
4. Information/instructions to be given to appraisees
Appraisees will need some guidance and support in preparing for the discussion, especially if this is a new process and they have not been through it before. The more information you can give them the less anxious
they will be, although you will not be able to eradicate all anxiety until you have been through the process with them a couple of times.
The information needed by appraisees fits into three categories:
• process
• housekeeping
• instructions
It is useful to provide this information in both written and spoken format to ensure that you achieve a shared understanding in your communication. Thus, a memo and a discussion when giving out the memo will go a long way to allay fears about the appraisal discussion.
Your prime reason for providing information is to reduce the potential threat of the discussion, and you need to keep this in mind as you help appraisees to prepare for the discussion. The more appraisees know about what is going on, the less threatened they will feel and the more cooperative they will be. This approach reinforces that it is a serious matter and that all concerned must invest appropriate time and effort into the process.
The memo should first deal with the process to be used, then the housekeeping and, finally, the specific instructions for preparation. Once you have written a memo you will probably find that it will suffice for each subsequent appraisal discussion with a few minor changes. The items you
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should deal with under each of the three categories are shown in the figure below
Finally, attach any appropriate forms to the memo and discuss them when
you hand it to each appraisee.
When you get to this stage you have set up the performance discussion but you now have a great deal of work to do yourself in preparation for each
appraisal discussion
Appraisee responsibilities
Appraisees also have responsibilities in setting up the discussion. These are not as exhaustive as those of the appraiser but they are still required for an effective performance discussion. In the lead-up to the formal performance appraisal period in your
organisation you should be letting your staff know what their responsibilities are in relation to the discussion. Appraisees should:
• note the date, day and time of the appointment and take steps to ensure they will be able to attend;
• ensure that others know of the appointment;
• make arrangements for phones or desks to be covered as necessary during the appointment time;
• follow any instructions provided by the appraiser; schedule personal
preparation.
Figure 30 : Memo of information to appraisee
Memo
Process
Review the orga nisation's performance management system
Introduce the performance discussion phase
Explain the purpose of having a performance discussion
Explain what happens after the performance discussion
Explain how the discussion will run
Housekeeping
Identify the date and time of the discussion with the appraisee
Clearly state the venue for the discussion and provide an address such as building number and room number
Provide an estimation of the time required for the discussion
Instructions
How the app raisee should prepare for the discussion
Responsibilities of the appraisee
Instructions specific to t he forms that may need to be completed
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Next we will work though what each party has to do in order to achieve an effective and purposeful performance discussion. The preparation for the discussion can make or break the appraisal in terms of the evidence and examples, and thus the quality of discussion that the preparation will
generate. It is therefore an important stage in the whole appraisal process.
Stage 2 - Preparing for the discussion
The appraiser
Solid preparation and firm evidence will result in greater cooperation from the appraisee, more open and honest communication, fewer defensive strategies
being used and greater willingness to problem solve. The figure following provides a model of the appraiser preparation process. You may use this to start with, but feel free to add steps to it and change things in it once you have developed your own way of doing things. The model will lead you systematically through the evidence that you have available on the
performance of the appraisee. This will ensure that you can conduct an in-depth discussion with
the appraisee, as objectively as possible. The more specific answers you have to the questions in the model the more prepared you will be for the discussion. The more prepared the appraiser is, the greater the benefit for both appraiser and appraisee.
Step 1 - What is the job?
Review the job specification for the appraisee. Note any area in which the job has changed and where the description needs to be rewritten as this will
need to be discussed with the appraisee. In particular, look at the level and classification of the position. If the work has changed fundamentally, you will need to look at ways in which you can reclassify the position and arrange for a different salary scale, if this is appropriate. It is fundamental to the performance discussion that, as the appraiser, you understand the job and how it operates prior to the discussion. It is particularly important that you
know exactly what is expected of the position in terms of outputs. Step 2 - What evidence demonstrates performance?
Arrange the analysed evidence around each of the performance standards to develop a solid picture of performance for the whole appraisal period. It is likely that you will have evidence of satisfactory performance, unsatisfactory performance and even performance that is beyond
expectations, or any combination of these for each performance standard.
Step 3 - What does the analysis show?
Look for examples of where performance standards have been exceeded, where they are satisfactory and where they are unsatisfactory. Here you are making your decisions about the performance of the individual. Ensure that you have enough evidence to support your position and you are confident
that you can support a case for the decision you have made. This applies just as much to excellent or good performance as it does to unsatisfactory performance. One or two examples are not enough to develop a case. You will recall that there should be no surprises in the formal performance discussion, so there will be no 'new' evidence that has not already been discussed with the appraisee.
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Figure 31: A model of the appraiser preparation process
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Step 4 - Why was performance excellent?
In the case of excellent performance consider why the performance was excellent. Ask yourself the following questions. If you are unable to answer them they will form the basis of questions to ask during the appraisal
discussion.
• Did the appraisee:
bring any special skills to bear on the standard that need to be recognised?
put in an extra special effort that needs to be recognised?
come up with an innovative idea that needs to be recognised?
deal with a particularly difficult issue well?
change any procedures or processes?
use any different materials or equipment?
use any new software?
• Did the excellent result in one area negatively affect results in other areas?
• How was the excellent result achieved?
• Who else was involved in achieving the result?
• Can the result be achieved on an ongoing basis?
• What factors that were out of the appraisee's control influenced the result?
These questions allow you to probe for the way the excellent performance was achieved, and for the appraisee to bask in the glory of having achieved excellent performance. The questioning allows you to document how things were done so that different approaches might be incorporated into practice within the workplace. It further allows you to determine whether this individual and any other staff members can maintain the level of
performance.
Remember, excellent performance needs to be dealt with and recognised just as much as unsatisfactory performance. Step 5 - Why was performance satisfactory?
In the case of satisfactory performance consider why the performance was
satisfactory. Ask yourself the following questions. If you are unable to answer them they will form the basis of questions to ask during the appraisal discussion.
• How was the performance achieved?
• Was anything different about the materials, equipment or software used?
• Can the performance be maintained?
• Could the performance be moved to excellent? How?
• Were there any performance impediments?
• How did these impediments affect the result?
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• How were impediments overcome?
These questions allow you to recognise performance that is satisfactory and demonstrate your interest in how it was achieved. The appraiser gets to
share the pride in achieving the standard. They also enable you to document practices, procedures and methods applied by the successful individual so they can be utilised elsewhere.
Step 6 - Why was performance unsatisfactory?
In the case of unsatisfactory performance consider why the performance was unsatisfactory. Ask yourself the following questions. If you are unable
to answer them they will form the basis of questions to ask during the appraisal discussion.
• How big is the gap between satisfactory performance and the unsatisfactory performance?
• What, exactly, was not achieved?
• Was the standard of performance understood by the appraisee?
• Was adequate support given to the appraisee?
• Was adequate training and development given to the appraisee?
• Was the appraisee properly monitored through the appraisal period?
• Did the appraisee receive appropriate feedback during the appraisal period?
• Was there anything in the environment that may have prevented the appraisee from achieving the performance standard?
• Were there any extenuating circumstances that should be taken into account?
• Why was performance not up to standard?
• What problems were encountered during the appraisal period?
• Might there be any personal problems affecting performance?
• How might performance be improved?
• How can it be done better?
The full range of these questions is important because they can highlight the complex array of reasons for lack of performance. Many of these you will
not be able to answer, and you will need the guidance and cooperation of the appraisee during the discussion. It is important not to jump to conclusions and form firm opinions of the performance until you have fully explored the reasons for the non-performance during the discussion; otherwise, you may judge an appraisee unfairly. Step 7 - What needs to be addressed in the discussion?
From the evidence you have collected, and from the tentative inferences you have drawn about the individual's performance, you now need to identify the following:
a) specific questions you wish to ask in the discussion;
b) specific areas that need clarification or elaboration during the discussion;
c) specific examples of performance where you might be unsure of the level of performance;
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d) specific areas that need joint problem solving during the discussion;
e) specific developmental areas that need to be addressed in the discussion.
Step 8 - What strategic/organisational planning impacts are there?
You need to note any strategic planning impacts on your work group and any operational planning impacts for the group. Determine how these will affect individual jobs and what impacts there are for new performance objectives and standards.
Step 9 - What performance is required in the future?
Identify carefully the specific performance that will be required during the next performance appraisal period. Again, seek guidance from the strategic and operational plans of the organisation, department, branch or work group. You must also consider the specific abilities and skills of appraisees. Will the next period stretch them? Will it provide enough of a challenge? Are they ready to move on to other jobs within the organisation? Are they ready
to take more responsibility and how might this be reflected in the performance standards and objectives? You will need to have some ideas on this subject so that you can facilitate thinking about the issue during the discussion.
Step 10 - What changes need to be made?
What new performance objectives need to be set? Also, identify those that must change, and those performance standards that may need renegotiating as a result of this performance discussion. You will need to review carefully strategic and operational plans to be clear on what the important issues are for the next appraisal period. If the job description or duties are to change, this is the time to discuss it with the appraisee. It is
vital to have their considered and committed involvement and support for the changes. You will have to develop strategies for how the issues are to be introduced and handled in the discussion if you expect that the appraisee may not be fully supportive of the changes that need to be made.
Step 11 - What development needs to be planned?
Think about what developmental planning (including training) is required for
the appraisee. Develop a number of options with specific outcomes that you could discuss. Tie these into increased performance. For developmental opportunities to be taken up with enthusiasm, they must be jointly agreed with the appraisee. While you should prepare some options you should not provide answers for the appraisee, but instead introduce your options during discussion or add to those suggested by the appraisee. This area of the
appraisal will need careful consideration. As the appraiser, you should be very clear in your own mind how much you can afford to spend on the individual for training and development purposes. You should also have some ideas about what activities, projects and options are available for internal development for the appraisee. This process is developed further in the next chapter.
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Step 12 - How do I run the discussion?
Based on the discussion stage (stage 3 below), determine how you will conduct the discussion. What things should be looked at first and how will you group issues that go together?
You are now ready to go into the performance discussion. Before this area is reviewed, we look at what the appraisee ought to be doing in preparation for
the discussion.
4.3 Reinforce excellence in performance through recognition and continuous feedback
Appraisee responsibilities
For a performance appraisal discussion to go well each party must put rigorous effort into the preparation. Just as the appraiser has a significant amount of work to do before the discussion, so has the appraisee. The appraisee has a responsibility to be equally prepared and not leave it all up to the appraiser. If you find the appraisee is unprepared, early in the discussion, you should probably terminate the discussion, make very clear the precise reasons for
doing so, and make a new appointment time with the individual in a few days' time. Do not give them too much time, as they should feel a little pressure
because of their lack of original effort.
The following guidelines will assist appraisees to prepare for their performance discussion. You may also wish to use them as the instructions
in your memo about the performance discussion. The figure below presents a model for the preparation of the appraisee.
The model parts are useful for instilling the responsibility that appraisees have in preparing for the performance discussion. You will be able to determine very quickly if the appraisee has put the required effort into preparation for the discussion. Each part of the model is explained below.
Appraisees need to:
1. Review
• job description to check that nothing has changed. If things have changed then an agreement to rewrite it should be gained at the
performance discussion. Appraisees should note anything in the job that has changed since the last appraisal in relation to responsibilities or duties. Appraisees should be encouraged to provide specific evidence of these changes to develop a case for the rewrite of the job description.
• performance standards and performance objectives. It is important that
appraisees have these clearly in their minds when they enter the discussion, so that the discussion can be specific. They should base their collected evidence around each of the performance standards.
Figure 32: A model for the preparation of the appraisee for the performance discussion
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• feedback on performance received throughout the appraisal period.
Feedback received during the appraisal period is valuable evidence for consideration in how performance has changed from the previous appraisal period. Appraisees should note the examples of feedback and be able to report on what changes have occurred and how this has affected performance. Areas where feedback was not received and would have been appreciated should also be noted for discussion in the
formal performance discussion.
• actual performance against the above. If adequate performance feedback has been provided throughout the appraisal period, appraisees should have a good understanding of their own performance levels and should be able to clearly support their position with evidence—which will
be similar to what the appraiser has collected. Appraisees should be made aware that they need to collect sufficient evidence against each of the performance standards to substantiate their opinion of their level of performance.
Review
Job description
Performance standards
Feedback on performance
Actual performance
Collect Evidence of performance
Document
Reasons for performance
Suggestions for improvement
Training and development
Reasons for renegotiation
Identify Problems encountered
Develop Suggestions for new objectives
Participate Open, honest communication
Voice opinion, suggestions
Appraise Give feedback to the appraiser
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2. Collect
evidence of their performance for the appraisal period, including
performance that is excellent, performance that is satisfactory and performance that is unsatisfactory. Evidence should be factual and as
comprehensive as possible. That is, it must represent numerous examples of the type of performance the appraisee wishes to present. Appraisees must understand that appraising performance is based upon performance for the
whole period, not just one or two incidents.
3. Document
• why they think their performance was excellent, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Appraisees should sort through the data they have collected on their performance and group it into categories—excellent performance, satisfactory performance and unsatisfactory performance.
Reasons for why they think the performance was at a particular level
should also be documented so that a case can be made during their discussion with the appraiser. Document also any particular circumstances that impacted on the result so that they can be discussed in the appraisal discussion.
• suggestions for improvement of performance. Where appraisees think performance can be improved, they should document these ideas so
they can be discussed. The documentation need not be confined to things that only the appraisee can do. Suggestions for improvement in equipment, procedures or methods can be included here.
• training and development done during the appraisal period. These activities need not be just formal training courses. Appraisees should
think about the things they have learned from others, and about learning that has been achieved on-the-job or by being a member of a project team. This area is designed to capture all the new knowledge and skills that appraisees have amassed since the last performance appraisal. It is likely that more learning will have been achieved through processes other than formal training courses. Appraisees may be surprised at the degree of new learning that has been achieved, when they think about
it. It is important to capture this data for personal reinforcement and motivation, and so that appraisees can discuss their development and progress during the appraisal discussion.
• why performance objectives and standards may need to be renegotiated, if applicable. For many reasons, performance objectives
and standards may need to be renegotiated. Things change all the time and it may be necessary to discuss major alterations to performance standards and objectives that occur as a result of changes in the workplace. Appraisees should ensure that they develop sound arguments for changing objectives and standards, and that the proposed new objectives can be evidenced in the data they have collected.
4. Identify
• problems that were encountered during the performance appraisal period and how they were overcome or how they impacted on performance.
5. Develop
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• suggestions for performance objectives for the next period.
6. Participate
• actively in the discussion. Appraisees should come to the discussion
prepared to have a full, open and honest discussion about the future. They should be ready to voice their opinion and discuss all aspects of their performance.
7. Appraise
• the performance of the appraiser over the appraisal period.
Are there things the appraiser does that make things difficult for the appraisee?
Are there things the appraiser does not do that would makes things easier for the appraisee?
What does the appraisee like about the way the appraiser works,
manages, leads?
What does the appraisee not like about the way the appraiser works, manages, leads?
What things does the appraisee want the appraiser to continue doing?
What things does the appraisee want the appraiser to stop doing?
Stage 3 - The discussion
The performance discussion should not contain any surprises for the appraisee and if appraisers have done their homework there should not be any surprises in the discussion for them either. Most books on performance appraisal say this, but what does it mean? It means that anything dealt with in this formal discussion should already have been dealt with outside the discussion in the
day-to-day management of performance and workplace activities.
A: Set the climate
There are three dimensions to setting the climate of the discussion: the physical, the psychological and the process. They are interdependent - that is, they affect each other - which is why it is necessary to address all three when setting the climate of the interview. Both physical and process factors
will affect the psychological state of the appraisee, so by addressing these two factors first you will be helping the appraisee to cope better with the appraisal discussion. The figure following illustrates the relationship between the dimensions of setting the climate.
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Physical dimension
To facilitate quality discussion, a number of components within the physical dimension need to be
addressed. For example, people will not have honest, open discussions if the environment they are in is not private. You should ensure that the room temperature is comfortable, that seating is arranged in a non-threatening way and is comfortable, and that there is a table to put things on. Preferably, seating should be arranged in a way that allows you to be close, although not next to each other—this would mean you both get sore necks because of looking to the side all the time. Likewise, you should not be directly facing each other because this sets up feelings of
confrontation and will not be conducive to discussion. Try placing the seating on an angle, forming a V-shape. This gives each party their own space but also allows proximity, which is necessary for such specific discussions. Seating and the positioning of a coffee table is indicated in the figure below.
Figure 34: Seating arrangements for the discussion
Option of placing the table at 1 or 2.
Figure 33 : Dimensions of setting the climate
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When people are nervous they sometimes develop a dry mouth, so having water available in the room is necessary to ensure comfort. If you offer water, some people will decline out of politeness, so just pour it out and give it to appraisees so they can place it near them and help themselves if they need it during the
discussion. If you anticipate conflict in the discussion, and maybe tears, it's wise to have tissues at hand on the table so that appraisees can help themselves or you can offer them at an appropriate time. Appraisees may forget to bring writing materials with them, so have pens and paper on the table close by so they can
be used as needed. From your own preparation you will know what references and files might be needed in the discussion. Place these on the table within easy reach.
What is important here is that the appraisee's requirements and need for comfort do not interfere with the running of the discussion. Once you have entered and begun the performance appraisal discussion you should not have to leave the room. If you do, it will destroy the dynamics that have been created up to that stage. You will also lose control of the discussion so that it is handed to the appraisee who
is able to interrupt or sidetrack the discussion with diversions. Process dimension
'Process' means a course of action. It is important to share with appraisees the course of action you intend to take with the discussion so that they know where things are going and what to expect. This will alleviate some of their nervousness about the discussion, especially if this is the first time they have been a part of
the process. It is equally important to reinforce that the process is negotiable by asking appraisees if the framework also meets their requirements. If it does not, negotiate the process so you have something that satisfies everyone's needs.
The psychological dimension
This dimension deals with appraisees as individuals and with their specific thoughts and feelings. It will be different for each of the appraisees you see. Some will be more nervous than others,
some will be more forthright, some will require support, while others will be confident. Consider these issues carefully when choosing the communication strategies you will use. Be sincere in the way you greet each appraisee, in line with the way you would normally communicate. Invite them to take a seat and
ensure they are as comfortable as possible. Try to ensure that you are doing all the right things in terms of positive body language.
It is not appropriate to launch straight-into the reason for being together - 'Right, well, we're here to discuss your performance' - you both know why you are there. Some preliminary talk is desirable with the aim of relaxing the appraisee and starting a communication process that will flow smoothly.
Broad questions about the appraisal may be useful for this purpose: 'How did the preparation process go?' 'Were the instructions I gave you useful?' 'How are you fixed time-wise?' You might also say how much you appreciate the appraisee's effort and investment in the process of performance management within the organisation and your work unit.
Topics such as football, organisational politics and the weather are not really
appropriate unless they are things you normally discuss with the appraisee. Only you will know the most appropriate questions to ask to help put the appraisee at ease and get the conversation going. When you are sure the appraisee is at ease and the communication process is open, discuss the role of performance appraisal in the performance management system of your organisation. This will clearly set up the purpose of your discussion.
Once this is complete, you then discuss the process dimension as detailed
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above. At this stage you will be ready to launch into the main part of the discussion, 'The central discussion'. Figure 35 summarises the components of each dimension of setting the climate.
Figure 35: Components of each dimension of setting the climate
4.4 Monitor and coach individuals with poor performance.
Mentors, coaches and the buddy
Business coaching is everything you do to:
Figure 36:
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The skills required for effective coaching and mentoring are no different from the usual skills which a leader uses every day; there are no special requirements, no ‘trainer’s tricks’ and no particular know-how.
The key ingredients in being able to be either a coach or mentor or to initiate the process are:
• a genuine interest and commitment in supporting your staff. this is not a wishy-washy, unfocused, ‘no problems here’ approach, but a mature and balanced desire to do the best by the team and it’s individuals.
• an ability to maintain and manage planned, work-based relationships in which the usual power element is reduced, if altogether non- existent (very risky for some insecure people!).
• a honed ability to synthesise information on a non-judgmental basis, that is, only reaching an informed conclusion when you have gathered all the
information, and then relating it precisely to what is needed by the individual, the team and the organisation.
Last, but of course not least, outstanding communication skills: listening, asking questions, summarising, giving and receiving feedback, facilitating, sharing information and encouraging others.
Selecting workplace coaches and mentors
The most competent employee doesn’t always make the best coach or mentor. In selecting workplace coaches and mentors, ask the following questions. Do these people?
1. Seek to improve their own performance at work?
2. Like working with others?
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3. Enjoy their jobs?
4. Share things that they have learned?
5. Listen to others?
6. Help without taking charge?
7. Have time, energy and patience to assist others?
8. Keep up-to-date with new equipment and processes?
The benefits of using experienced staff as workplace coaches and mentors
are:
1. They know the business and how it operates
2. They train employees in exactly the way the business operates 3.
They gain satisfaction from passing on their skills and knowledge
4. It builds positive attitudes to training.
What does coaching and mentoring involve?
It involves providing the individual with initial instructions, observing their performance, giving them opportunities to reflect on their skills and offering advice on how they can improve their skills. In some cases, coaching may be very informal and occur in short time spurts. In others, it may be an organised strategy for helping people to learn quite complex skills
In this learners pack, you will find a mentor preparation checklist. Use it each time you begin a new mentoring program.
Who is a mentor and what do they do?
A mentor is defined as "an experienced and trusted adviser or guide; a teacher, a tutor" (The New
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993). Mentors perform a valuable service, selecting employees with potential and delegating tasks and duties to train them for greater levels of responsibility.
If a mentoring program is properly conducted and uses similar guidelines to selection and succession planning, it can be a useful training tool. Mentors
should be selected for the knowledge and skills they can train others in, and their charges should be selected from likely promotion candidates. These
students must be selected on the basis of their abilities, not on other, more subjective criteria. You may have served as a mentor, or been mentored during your career. Mentoring is covered in more detail in frontline management unit four: team work and also unit one: managing yourself. In the previous session, we discussed the buddy system, and also touched on coaching.
Selecting workplace coaches and mentors The most competent employee doesn’t always make the best coach or mentor. In selecting workplace coaches and mentors, ask the following questions.
Do these people?
• seek to improve their own performance at work?
• like working with others?
• enjoy their jobs?
• share things that they have learned?
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• listen to others?
• help without taking charge?
• have time, energy and patience to assist others?
• display a willingness to do extra paper work?
• keep up-to-date with new equipment and processes?
The benefits of using experienced staff as workplace coaches and mentors are:
• they know the business and how it operates
• they train employees in exactly the way the business operates
they gain satisfaction from passing on their skills and knowledge
it builds positive attitudes to training.
What does coaching and mentoring involve?
It involves providing the individual with initial instructions, observing their performance, giving them opportunities to reflect on their skills and offering advice on how they can improve their skills. In some cases, coaching may be very informal and occur in short time spurts. In others, it may be an organised strategy for helping people to learn quite complex skills.
In the appendix, you will find a mentor preparation checklist. Use it each time
you begin a new mentoring program.
B: The central discussion
This part of the appraisal process requires the appraiser to use communication and interpersonal skills in a skilful manner to ensure that the discussion is useful for both parties. These skills are at the micro level of operation. Initially, in this part of the chapter we explore the macro picture, which is the broad framework on which you can map
out your appraisal discussion with the appraisee.
The framework presented here is by no means the only one you can use and, as you become more experienced in conducting performance appraisals, you should feel free to make adjustments or to adopt other frameworks that might work better
for you. However, for the purposes of this book, we will use the framework represented in Figure 37 as a starting point and base for your discussion.
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A problem-solving approach
Facilitating useful and purposeful discussion is not an easy task. It is not just a matter of sitting down and talking. The facilitator must be able to guide and
manage the discussion so that it is productive for both appraiser and appraisee. This means being able to manage success, conflict, lack of cooperation, over enthusiasm, overconfidence, and underperformance and
all the emotions that go with it.
Within the framework in the previous figure a problem-solving approach is adopted for the facilitation of the framework. A problem-solving approach supports the 'equalness' of the two individuals participating in the performance appraisal discussion and reinforces the consultative nature of the process. This approach determines the interpersonal interaction and communication that takes place during the discussion. It should not be an approach where the appraiser constantly asks questions and the appraisee answers, for this would turn the discussion in to an
interview, or even an interrogation. While skilful questioning by the appraiser can open up the
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discussion and facilitate elaboration and the presentation of evidence, questioning is not the only strategy to employ in the appraisal discussion.
A problem-solving approach means that you are both involved as equal
partners in the discussion and that you explore all the issues together, providing input and discussing the material before you. Finally, you arrive at a decision together, rather than the appraiser making the decision and imposing it on the appraisee. This does not mean to say that you will always agree on the decision, or that everyone will be happy with the decision reached. However, this approach ensures that both parties are involved in
the decision-making process, and that matters are dealt with as fully and comprehensively as possible. Cole provides a seven-step problem-solving and decision-making process that is useful.
Step 1. Identify the problem clearly
Step 2. Establish desired outcomes
Step 3. Analyse the problem
Step 4. Generate alternative solutions
Step 5. Evaluate alternatives and select the most suitable
Step 6. Implement the decision
Step 7. Follow up and evaluate results
You will notice many similarities to the process advocated in this book because, in a sense, the performance appraisal process is one large problem-solving activity. You will also notice that each of the seven steps
can be accommodated within the performance discussion framework. The point of this is that problem solving is a process that is methodical in nature and can be applied to facilitate better quality decisions. Hence, using a problem-solving approach in performance discussions helps to generate the best possible solutions to managing performance for the appraisee, the appraiser and the organisation.
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Focus on self-appraisal
The focus of the performance discussion should be on self-appraisal by the appraisee as much as possible. Appraisees should be encouraged to reflect
and comment on their own performance and be willing to express their own concerns and successes. The discussion should flow from what the appraisee says; appraisers should take their cue and manage the discussion on the basis of the reflections and comments provided by the appraisee. This is not a difficult thing to achieve—most people have a very good idea of how they are performing, especially if managers have been doing their job during the
appraisal period. Potential for difficulty lies in cases of unsatisfactory performance and strategies to manage this aspect are dealt with later in this chapter and also in other chapters.
It is against this background that we now explore the performance discussion model presented in Figure 37
Discuss performance generally
To introduce the performance discussion, it is useful to talk about how appraisees see their
performance in a general sense or as an overview of how they have done over the review period. This approach helps appraisees to focus on self- appraisal and sets the tone for the discussion in this direction. It is also the least threatening way to begin the discussion and allows the appraisee to talk freely. When you know that appraisees are not likely to be forthcoming on this topic you will need to prepare some questions to ask to nudge them
along a bit. During this process, be alert to whether appraisees have a realistic understanding of their performance over the review period. This will give you some indication as to how tough the assessment part of the discussion will be and give you time to further plan strategies in your mind if necessary.
The idea of the performance discussion is to have appraisees do most of
the taking. The appraiser needs to be able to frame questions that will keep the appraisee talking, and to elicit responses that will cause the appraisee to think carefully. Under normal circumstances, however, appraisees will
have a realistic understanding of their performance level, especially if appraisers have been doing their job properly during the appraisal period and providing regular, quality feedback to staff on their performance.
Sample questions on general performance
Here are some questions to help you get this early part of the discussion started.
• How have things been over this review period?
• How would you summarise your performance over this period?
• Are there any particular things that stand out during this period?
• What are the major organisational issues that have impacted on you during this review period?
• What effect do you think they have had?
• How do you feel about the job?
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Review the job, accountabilities and responsibilities
From a general discussion of performance, it is logical to move on to talk about the job the appraisee holds. Here, you discuss the job and the job
specification to see if there have been any changes. You are unlikely to agree to changes being made to the job specification at this stage of the discussion—you will probably want to deal with performance issues before making any decisions. It is important for you to discuss with the appraisee any perceived changes in the job, its accountabilities and responsibilities to see if they align with your perceptions. Where they do not, you will need to
seek clarification so that you understand why and how appraisees feel the way they do. This is important if changes in accountabilities or responsibilities are likely to affect the appraisee's ability to achieve performance objectives and standards.
Sample questions on job review
• What may have changed about the job during this period?
• What has been the specific impact of strategic and operational plans on the job during this period?
• What new duties or accountabilities are you expected to perform?
• What, if any, responsibilities have changed during this period?
• How have the responsibilities changed?
• What would you like to change about the job?
• What are your current priorities?
• What do you like best about the job?
Discuss major achievements in the job during review period
At this stage of the discussion, take time to discuss the highlights and major achievements for the appraisee during the review period. Using the evidence and data you collected during the
monitoring and analysis stages of the system base the discussion on facts and provide specific examples to support your statements. You should also
expect that appraisees will base comments on facts and provide specific examples to support their statements. If they do not, ask for supporting examples and other evidence to support their statements.
This section of the discussion is to acknowledge the accomplishments of appraisees, and offers the appraiser a specific opportunity to give positive
feedback for achievements and strengths. It is appropriate to discuss and acknowledge those accomplishments that were particularly difficult to achieve because of the activity or the context in which performance occurred. Here you should also recognise performance that has exceeded expectations, standards or objectives.
Remember that any praise, recognition or acknowledgment must be based in fact and be supported by evidence; otherwise it is too general to be of use
to the appraisee and may sound insincere. For example, 'Great job' is not very useful feedback; nor is 'Wonderful!', 'Excellent', 'Well done'. After a few of these phrases, appraisees begin to switch off. Feedback like this: 'the processes you used to keep that project on track despite the dysfunctional operation of the group allowed you to bring the project in on time and within budget'
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allows appraisees to know exactly what they did well so that they can continue to do it. Finally, ensure that you cover all the appraisee's accomplishments for the whole period of the review, not just one or two recent ones that have occurred.
Sample questions to identify achievements
• What achievements have you accomplished during this review period?
• What were you most pleased with during this review period?
• What were you most proud of during this review period?
• What were the highlights of the period for you?
• What made these things so special or pleasing for you?
Review performance against objectives and negotiate assessment
You will need to discuss every agreed standard of performance and performance objective against how the appraisee performed during the review period. This is different from the step above which seeks more to develop confidence and ensure appropriate recognition of
accomplishments. In this step, appraiser and appraisee are reviewing the specific measures of the performance standards and objectives and how the appraisee performed against them, regardless of whether the performance was unsatisfactory, satisfactory or beyond agreed standards. Remember that not all problems are solvable. Sometimes there needs to be compromise on both sides and sometimes one party will not be happy with
the solution. At other times, it will take all your skills and patience to draw out appraisees and to get them to problem solve. There are also times when the appraiser, by virtue of the position held, has to impose a solution on an individual or team. Although this should be a rare occurrence it should not be discounted. For many reasons, sometimes the discussion can go off the rails at this point, especially where the performance being dealt with is
unsatisfactory. The strategies listed in below will assist you to manage the discussion and guide it to productive ends.
5. Discuss the different views, if they are different, and explore what the differences are, why they exist, and the difference in the evidence presented, if there is a difference.
Figure 38 : Stra tegies for reviewing standards
For each standard or objective, guide the discussion around the following items:
1. Review the objective/standard.
2. Ask the appraisee to comment on the actual performance.
3. Ask the appraisee for evidence to support the claim if it has not been provided in the comments above (this applies equally to satisfactory and unsatisfactory performance).
4. the performance and supply evidence to As appraiser, comment on this applies to satisfactory and equally support your claims (
unsatisfact ory performance).
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6. Together decide on what the assessment of the performance will be. If you cannot obtain an agreement on the assessment you, as the appraiser, will have the final say in the matter.
7. Record the decision.
Strategies for managing the discussion
1. Where an appraisee will not admit there is a difference in perspectives of the level of performance.
• This strategy applies equally where there is a difference in
perspective in relation to satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance.
• Review for a second time the evidence that both parties have presented.
• Clearly link the evidence to measuring the standard. (If this cannot be done the evidence is invalid.) This is a task you would first ask
appraisees to do— only if they are unable to would you then link the evidence yourself.
• Clearly state the differences between the collected evidence. Again, ask the appraisee to do it first.
• If you are still unable to reach agreement about your different
perspectives you will need to restate the standard of performance required and explain the implications of the weight of evidence presented.
• If an agreement is still not forthcoming, on the basis of the evidence presented, you must make a decision.
2. Where the appraisee does not agree that performance is unsatisfactory.
• Restate the standard of performance required.
• Review the evidence presented by both parties.
• Draw conclusions about what the evidence says about the performance against the standard required. Ask appraisees to do this first—only if they are unable to would you then draw the conclusions yourself.
• Clearly and specifically explain where the performance is unsatisfactory.
• If the appraisee is unable to agree, repeat the first four steps.
• If the appraisee still does not agree with the unsatisfactory rating,
make it clear that the final decision is yours and that the performance is unsatisfactory for the specific reasons stated.
• Record the decision.
3. Where an appraisee becomes emotional.
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• You are unlikely to know whether the tears are genuine or 'put on' for effect. Either way, if you react to the tears you will hand over the management of the discussion to the appraisee, and you want to avoid that at all costs.
• Do not react to the tears except to halt the discussion temporarily.
• Pass the waiting box of tissues to the appraisee.
• Wait until the appraisee is composed again and continue the discussion as if nothing has happened.
This strategy works because, if the tears are genuine, appraisees will appreciate the pause to compose themselves and wipe their tears, and your consideration. Nothing is lost except a small amount of time. On the other hand, if the tears are for effect appraisees will feel rather silly after a while as you wait patiently for them to compose themselves. They will soon stop and continue the discussion and, again, only a small amount of time is lost,
not the management of the discussion. Either way, do not be afraid of silence. In such circumstances two minutes can seem like an eternity, but just wait out the process patiently until they are ready to continue.
If the waiting last longer than five minutes, state that you should now be getting on with the discussion and say that you will give them a few seconds
to prepare to go on with the discussion. You must make it perfectly clear that the discussion will continue. Your actions to this time will demonstrate this.
4. Where an appraisee keeps trying to deflect an issue or change the focus of the discussion to avoid an item.
• Summarise where you had reached before the deflection or refocusing by the appraisee.
• Ask a direct question regarding the issue and keep focusing on the topic you wish to discuss.
• If the avoidance continues, point out that the discussion is getting off track and that you need to come back-to it.
• If it continues further, use some reflection on the appraisee such as 'I gather that you are reluctant to discuss this issue because you keep changing the subject or deflecting the discussion. I would like us to explore and understand this issue. Will you agree to discuss
it?' Except in very extreme cases this should regain the attention and focus of the appraisee.
• If the appraisee still does not cooperate or declines to give you the commitment you asked for, consider the issue and decide whether it is critical to the appraisal. If it is, make this clear to the appraisee and
state that you will form an opinion based on the discussion. If appraisees do not wish to engage in the discussion then they will not have an opportunity to put their point of view, or to elaborate the issue with examples. Make it clear that the issue impacts on the
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performance of the appraisee and ask for their cooperation for a last time.
• If cooperation is not forthcoming make your decision and record it.
5. Where the discussion seems to be going round in circles, has become stuck on an issue and appears unable to move forward.
• Summarise the discussion on this point or topic so far.
• Link the point to the framework and the performance issue.
• Invite the appraisee to make any final comment.
• Suggest that you move on to the next point.
Sample questions on assessing performance
• How practical was this standard/objective?
• How do you feel you performed against this standard/objective?
• Why do you hold that view?
• What examples of that performance can you cite?
• What was difficult or unusual about achieving this standard/ objective?
• How did you manage to overcome the difficulties?
• What prevented you from achieving the standard/objective?
• What could you have done differently?
Be careful not to pass judgment with either the words you use or the intonation
of your voice until after the appraisee has explained all facets of the performance to you. Where you feel there is a difference of opinion, ask for more evidence or examples first, rather than say you have a different view. When you are sure you have allowed the appraisee enough time and opportunity to explain all aspects of the performance, you can begin your own comments based on the evidence you have.
When you have both shared your views and discussed them you will need to arrive at an assessment of the performance. Note that, if a standard has been set or an objective is written, an appraisee either attains it or does not. There can be no half-way measure. If appraisees do not meet agreed performance standards, record it as such. However, where there were
extenuating circumstances that prevented attainment of the standard/objective, and these were agreed during the discussion, comment should be made to that effect in the official documentation. Nevertheless, the standard/objective was not attained. Likewise, where there has been performance far beyond the standard/objective, it has been met. Again, there should be some formal comment about performance requirements being
exceeded so that the appraisee receives recognition for the more than satisfactory performance.
Once the assessment of performance has been made, you will need your discussion notes and previously collected data to develop improvement plans with the appraisee.
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4.5 Provide support services where necessary
Develop improvement plans
The development of improvement plans is the rationale for which you conduct the performance appraisal. The idea is to find out how performance can be improved, both generally and specifically. Performance improvement
relates to the areas where the appraisee has not performed to the required standard and also where performance must be improved across the organisation in support of strategic and operational plans for the next review period. It also relates to areas where performance may be satisfactory but where it could be improved. At this stage discussion should focus on these two areas. First, it is logical to work on the areas in which appraisees did not
perform to the required standards/objectives and develop improvement plans as you have just been discussing this with them. Second, it is important to review organisational, divisional, branch and sectional operational plans for the next review period and to incorporate any new skill and knowledge requirements into the improvement plan to assist individual performance.
The philosophy behind this approach is that organisations and the individuals who work within them should be continuously improving performance if they are to be competitive in the current economic climate. The focus on performance improvement is not a negative focus but one of constantly trying to improve the overall standard of individual performance and hence that of the organisation.
You don't need reams of official-looking forms in order to develop and record improvement plans. They can be written up as action plans, formal development objectives or a series of answers to the questions below. The important point is that the development is documented in some way so that both appraisee and appraiser can review progress and check exactly what was agreed on.
It is important that the appraiser does not lead the discussion at this point in the performance discussion. The danger in this is that the appraiser will offer solutions to improving performance. Offering a solution provides appraisees with a very simple way out if they want to move on - all they need do is say 'yes'- In such cases, appraisees may not be committed to the outcomes or the solution to improving their performance. Clearly, it is more
desirable for appraisees to come up with possible solutions to the problem of improving performance. You may guide and counsel them, but providing the answers does not help appraisee development.
The questions below will help you to develop specific, measurable and practical development plans. You may also have questions of your own to add to the list.
Sample questions to guide the creation of a development plan
What needs to be improved?
• What can be improved? • Why does it need to be improved?
• What can be done to improve performance?
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• What skills and knowledge need to be developed to enable performance improvement?
• What resources are required for development?
• What does the appraisee have to do?
• What does the appraiser have to do?
• How might you go about achieving that?
• How realistic is that given the current or future anticipated constraints?
• How would you know when you have achieved it?
• How might you measure that improvement?
• When does it need to be achieved?
Once the development plan has been agreed, it becomes part of the next
stage - the objectives and performance standards for the next review period.
Develop objectives for next period
To develop objectives for the next review period, you will need to take into account the following issues:
• organisational strategic and operational plans
• divisional strategic and operational plans
• branch strategic and operational plans
• section strategic and operational plans
• local work group issues
• the appraisee's development plan
• the key job accountabilities and responsibilities
The new objectives for the next appraisal period should flow naturally from the discussion to this time. You and the appraisee may prefer to identify the
areas in which standards/objectives need to be written, then the appraisee works on them and comes back a few days later to discuss the new objectives. Remember, good objectives take time to develop and it may be a better option to allow time for considerable thought and input to the process. Alternatively, you and the appraisee may wish to develop the new standards/objectives at this stage in the discussion.
Appraise the appraiser
When all the issues have been dealt with so that appraisees do not feel threatened in talking about how you perform you can ask them to comment on your performance as their manager. You should already have some idea of possible problem areas from what your appraisee has said or didn't say. Don't make an issue out of the question as it may unnerve the appraisee. In a quiet and matter-of-
fact way ask appraisees if they have any comments for you that will help you to manage better and work with them more productively. If you have picked up on an issue in the discussion, you may like to say:
‘For example, when you were talking about XYZ objective, we agreed that I was partly responsible for you not achieving that because I didn't give you all the information. In future, I will be more aware of my actions and how they affect other people. That was very useful feedback for me, for my own growth and development.'
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Gently coax comments from the appraisee. It will probably take a number of performance discussions to develop enough trust and credibility in the process for appraisees to comment freely on your performance. Do not be discouraged if you do not get quality comments the first few times. Stick at it
because it will reap results eventually.
Summarise
Finally, you approach the end of the discussion. Both parties should be feeling comfortable with the discussion by this time and be ready to wind up the process. It is not appropriate to say 'okay, that's done. Thanks very much' and end the
discussion. If the performance discussion has been conducted skillfully, a great deal of talking and soul searching will have been done. Ending the discussion abruptly may undo all the motivation and goodwill you have created. Wind up the discussion with care and ensure there is a full understanding of what has happened and what is expected from both parties in the future.
Summarising is a six-stage process that you should work through at a steady pace. The stages are set out below together with the actions associated with each stage.
1. Verify understanding
Both appraiser and appraisee should have a joint understanding of the discussion and a good way to check understanding is to review the
discussion. This does not mean that you start it all over again, or re-argue points already decided. You simply summarise what has been agreed on each of these five points.
• Review the accomplishments
• Review the performance against standards/objectives
• Review the development plan
• Review specific actions agreed to by both parties
• Review the new standards/objectives
If you find there is confusion on either party's behalf as you work through the
summary of points, clear it up immediately so that you are both clear on what has been decided. There may have been times when your appraisee did not agree with you and you had to impose a decision. This summary process does not suggest that you reopen these items for discussion. The review is to check that you both have a similar understanding of what has taken place so that there will be no misunderstandings about what actions and level of
performance are expected during the next review period. 2. Complete any necessary documentation
Fill in any necessary forms. You will be often required to give an overall rating of the appraisee's performance for the review period. This should be done in the presence of appraisees so that they can see what you have written. Where required, you both sign the appropriate areas of the appraisal form and you ensure that appraisees have a copy to take away with them.
3. Agree follow-up actions and dates
Agree and ensure that the follow-up actions and dates for completion of actions are clearly understood. Carefully document who is to do what and make sure that meetings and other important dates and times are entered
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into diaries before you leave the discussion room. 4. Congratulate appraisees on their successes
Use the final moments of the discussion to reinforce the accomplishments of
appraisees. This should motivate them to achieve their agreed standards/objectives for the next period, and also make appraisees feel good about themselves.
5. Encourage appraisees in their development plans
No appraisee will be perfect so, while reinforcing their accomplishments, you must also remind them about their development plans. This, too, is meant to
motivate them. You need to promise support and assistance to help them achieve their objectives, and to reinforce the need for continuous improvement and the satisfaction that comes from seeing the improvement. You do not remind them of their failures or unsatisfactory performance, but reinforce development so that the mood is uplifting and gives appraisees a sense of purpose.
6. Thank appraisees for the effort they put into the process
Finally, thank appraisees for attending the discussion and for putting the required effort into the preparation and the discussion itself. Let them know that you look forward to working with them through the next review period and reinforce the point that you are willing to help whenever they need assistance.
Stage 4—Following up the discussion
This is the final stage of the discussion model and one that is often forgotten by both appraisees and appraisers. Without follow-up there may as well not be a performance discussion, because nothing will change. In this stage, as with many of the other stages, both appraisee and appraiser have responsibilities.
The appraiser needs to manage this process just as effectively as the other stages in ensuring that the performance management system works
effectively. To facilitate this you may also need to make appraisees aware of their responsibilities in the follow-up stage.
Appraiser
1. Do what you said you were going to do. Make sure that you provide
access to resources or time to achieve goals, targets and training if you have promised to do so.
2. Schedule regular follow-ups to see how appraisees are going with their development plans. These do not have to be formal affairs but they do need to be written into your diary so that they are not forgotten. You
should aim to have a semi-formal review midway through the review period. This helps to keep everything on track.
3. Provide adequate and regular feedback on performance so that appraisees know how they are doing. This can be formal or informal.
4. Provide opportunities for appraisees to discuss how they are going if they
feel the need to.
Appraisee
1. Do what you said you were going to do.
2. Take responsibility for your own development and pursue every developmental opportunity you can. You need to organise your developmental activities in line with your development plan.
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3. Ask for regular feedback from your manager. Communicate regularly with your manager about your performance and your standards/objectives.
4. Review your own performance regularly against
your standards/objectives.
Problems in performance appraisal
Performance appraisals are full of potential problems. The processes discussed in this chapter help to reduce some of the problems but you must still be aware of many others that could sabotage your performance
discussion and make things difficult for you and the appraisee. Other problems that you need to watch out for in the performance discussion are listed below.
1. Generalisations. Avoid generalising by using specific evidence and concrete examples of the kind of performance you are talking about.
Generalising will create a lack of trust in the appraisee.
2. Defensive behaviour by appraisees. Using the strategies discussed in previously should prevent this behaviour from occurring. If it does happen to you, pause and rethink the strategy you are using. You may have to deal directly with the defensive behaviour rather than use strategies to work round it. Only you will know the particular circumstances of the
discussion and the best way to proceed.
3. Changing criteria for evaluating performance. Problems occur where the performance standards/objectives have not been set or agreed before the performance appraisal takes place. Each time performance is discussed, the standards seem to change because they are not agreed
or recorded. This makes it difficult for the appraisee to perform at the required standard, because it is constantly changing. To avoid this problem ensure that you set performance standards/objectives with appraisees and record them.
4. Personal bias. When appraising someone's performance there is no place for personal bias whether it's in the form of how you would like to
see the job done, the type of clothes you would prefer to see the appraisee wear, the attitude of the appraisee, or their personal career background. The best way to reduce personal bias in performance appraisals is to prepare well, have specific examples of the performance you wish to discuss and to evaluate the performance of the job, not the individual person holding the job.
5. Loss of credibility. If you do not conduct the discussion professionally and skillfully, you may lose credibility and trust in the eyes of the appraisee. Your best protection against this is to prepare well and practise the skills required as outlined.
6. No preparation for the future. As discussed earlier, a performance
appraisal is based on using the past as a starting point to plan the future. Many appraisals are not successful because they fail to plan for the future and thus motivate the appraisee. Following the steps and the strategies in this chapter will help to avoid this pitfall.
7. Managing conflict. You must be able to manage conflict if it arises in the course of the appraisal discussion; otherwise, the discussion will
degenerate into a nasty situation that will not be helpful to appraiser or appraisee. If you feel that you are not in control of the discussion, suggest to the appraisee that you both have a break and resume later. Or, if
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necessary, allow a couple of days to elapse while you plan a strategy, then resume in a few days. Alternatively, you may have to put that particular issue to the side and deal with it later at another meeting outside of the appraisal discussion.
Adopting a systematic approach to the preparation, conduct and follow-up of a performance discussion is the best way to avoid problems.
4.6 Counsel individuals who continue to perform below expectations and implement the disciplinary process if necessary.
Managing poor performance
The first sign of unsatisfactory performance is likely to come in specific incidents that occur in the workplace; these become the basis for intervention by the manager to redirect performance in accordance with agreed standards or objectives. Often feedback by the manager is all that is required to redirect the employee. This situation has been discussed in earlier chapters under the topic of 'intervention'. If poor performance is repeated, a counselling discussion may be required to
reinforce the seriousness of the situation to the employee and to draw up a plan for improved performance.
If performance does not improve as a result of a counselling discussion and/or there is a failure to achieve the agreed performance improvement as documented in the performance improvement plan, you will have to recognise that there is continued poor performance and you must now
manage it formally The figure below illustrates the broad stages from feedback, through counselling, to written warnings and then termination if necessary.
Using the flow chart
Where a one-off incident occurs it can usually be remedied with feedback and
a brief discussion. This process tends to be informal and should take a constructive approach that presents a problem and the consequences and asks for solutions. Nevertheless, the incident must be documented, including enough
detail to be a reliable record of the event. Here is what should be recorded:
date and time
• people involved
• summary of the situation/circumstances
• what was said during the discussion (in dot point format)
• what was agreed during the discussion the follow-up that was agreed.
The incident itself probably constitutes evidence of performance for the purposes of your data collection for the performance appraisal process. If the incident recurs, or other incidents of unsatisfactory performance are evident, you will need to conduct a number of performance counselling
discussions with the individual or team.
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Figure 39 presents a stepped process from an informal approach to managing one-off incidents, through the more formal approach of counselling discussions combined with written warnings about the unsatisfactory performance, to termination. The figure will guide you in the
use of these tools.
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Counselling discussions
Counselling discussions follow the principles of data collection Even though this process lies outside the performance appraisal procedure, it does not lie outside the performance management system. The difference between a performance
discussion and a counselling discussion is specific and clear.
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Performance discussions are concerned with the total performance of an individual or team for a given period of time and cover the range of performance standards agreed for the job. Counselling discussions are usually about one incident or a number of incidents involving the same performance issue. Figure
39 demonstrates this difference.
Before deciding to hold a discussion, ensure that you have adequate evidence of the performance problem. You may not have as much evidence as you would
collect as part of the appraisal procedure, but you should obtain as much evidence as possible about the incident(s) of unsatisfactory performance. Evidence may take a number of forms: an
account of the unsatisfactory performance, observers' accounts, and results of the unsatisfactory performance on others, the work unit and the organisation. Evidence may also
take the form of management information reports, if suitable, or samples of unsatisfactory reports. Because a counselling discussion takes place immediately after or very close to the incident(s), it does not absolve you from obtaining appropriate evidence to support your case. Remember, you may be required to rely on the evidence in litigation so it must be accurate and clearly demonstrate unsatisfactory performance.
Figure 40: Difference between performance and counselling discussions
Analysis
Once the evidence is collected, you need to analyse it. Analysis ensures that you determine the actual performance problem, realistically understand its importance, and determine the context of the unsatisfactory performance. Analysis also ensures that you explore all the possible causes of unsatisfactory performance. A lack of analysis may place you in a
difficult position should you not understand factors that may have contributed to unsatisfactory performance, especially where you proceed to a formal unsatisfactory performance process. From time to time there will be legitimate mitigating circumstances that will require you to be tolerant, or circumstances where the precipitation of the unsatisfactory performance is beyond the control of the individual.
Analysis also gives the manager an opportunity to cool off, particularly where the unsatisfactory performance triggers emotional reactions. It is more appropriate to speak with a staff member after all emotions have been released to avoid 'emotional claptrap'. Emotional claptrap is a contention that is based in emotions but devoid of tangible, specific things that the parties
Performance discussion
Counselling discussion
Multiple examples of performance for all
performance standards across a range of
situations and daily work activities,
demonstrating all aspects of performance,
both good and bad
Single example, or group of specific
examples, of one issue of unsatisfactory
performance relating to one performance
standard in one situation and/or work
activity
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can do something about. A counselling discussion based on emotional claptrap will not achieve any outcomes.
Appraisal
After you have analysed the collected evidence you need to appraise it to determine possible solutions to the problem. Appraisal will require you to make decisions about the performance and thus possible actions to remedy it. It is unwise to conclude that the only solution to an unsatisfactory performance problem is termination. There are many alternatives to
termination including demotion, formal reprimand, reduction of certain benefits, and closer monitoring. Public sector legislation specifically provides for these options although there is no reason why some of them cannot be
adopted within the private sector, where appropriate. An assumption of termination at this stage will prejudice your actions and if they are transparent will render an assumption indefensible in litigation.
Nor should you reach an immutable decision at this stage until you have heard the staff member's side of the story. You must allow due process to occur and that means you must give staff an opportunity to present their case. It may not be as well prepared as yours, but you must take account of their point of view and seek to understand any evidence they present. There may be issues that you have not uncovered in your analysis and appraisal;
the evidence a staff member presents may be quite valid and provide a perspective you have not considered.
Even at this stage, unsatisfactory performance should not be considered the precursor to termination. Unsatisfactory performance should be seen as an opportunity to help a staff member develop and improve and to refocus their
efforts. Remember, too, that most performance problems are to do with issues of context rather than individual shortcomings. Thus it is vital to get the input of the individual whose performance is in question so that genuine problem solving can occur with the focus on improving performance. This may result in the identification of contextual factors that demand attention by the manager or management group. This must be a priority for management
as contextual factors affecting one individual's performance are likely to have an impact on others' performance. Consequently, departmental and organisation key performance indicators will be affected and organisational performance limited.
Figure 41 illustrates a framework for the counselling discussion.
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The counselling discussion varies from the performance discussion model because it is confined to specific incident(s) and does not require the detailed processes included in that model. You will need to:
• review the evidence
• analyse
• appraise
• discuss the evidence
• draw up a performance improvement plan with the individual.
As the process deals with only one aspect of performance, it is likely to be
reasonably quick and straightforward. It becomes more complicated when performance does not improve after a performance improvement plan has been implemented. Further counselling is required and the addition of a written warning. This is only appropriate when non-performance can be clearly tied to individual issues and the contextual issues have either been addressed or no longer apply. It is claimed that there are only four possible
reasons for poor performance in individuals or teams. These are:
1. the absence of skill or knowledge. The individual is unable to perform the task because they do not know how to do it.
2. the absence of incentive, or improper incentive - where there is no suitable reward for performing satisfactorily, or where non-performance
may be rewarded in some way, whether intentional or non-intentional. 3. the absence of environmental support - where there is insufficient
equipment, tools, forms, work space, materials or access to information for the individual to do their job.
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4. the absence of motivation. Two factors impact on motivation: efficacy and value. Where individuals do not see any worth in investing time and effort in learning how to perform the job well, they are not likely to be motivated to learn or perform. Whether an individual sees any value in the job, or in
the duties of a job, such as the systems that need to be used, the forms that need to be completed or the technology that has to be used, will determine whether they become motivated towards the job.
Performance problems may have a single cause or a number of causes, and the manager should explore all possibilities before discussing the poor performance
with the staff member. During the discussion, the manager should canvass the possible causes of the poor performance with the staff member.
A model for use in counselling discussions is shown in the figure below. This model has three components: set-up, the discussion and documentation.
Document and date the discussion and both parties
sign
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It shows the principles are the same as those described earlier, but the steps are fewer and focused on specific incident(s). The set-up of the discussion remains the same as described previously. The discussion requires you to get the staff member talking. The aim of the discussion is to problem solve together
to find a way forward. Asking suitable questions to engage the staff member is a more useful way of problem solving than presenting your opinion, evidence to support it and asking staff what they are going to do about it. The outputs
you want from a counselling discussion are:
• acknowledgement by the staff member that there is a problem;
• identification of causes of the problem;
• solutions to the problem;
• agreement on the implementation of a solution;
• development of a performance improvement plan.
The outcome you require from a counselling discussion is for the unsatisfactory performance to cease. The manager's role is to facilitate this through the discussion. It is not a communication through which managers Blame or chastise staff but a further opportunity to help develop staff. Where performance improves after a counselling discussion no further action is required. You may discover during the discussion that there are legitimate
reasons for the level of performance. Illness, personal problems or difficulties such as a partner out of work or a family death may be examples of acceptable reasons for temporary poor performance. In such cases you may agree to allow further time for the individual to improve performance, offer assistance and support and note this in a performance improvement plan. Several strategies might be implemented in such circumstances:
• Another member of staff may be designated to assist the individual for a number of hours each day or week.
• Certain duties or specific tasks may be reassigned by negotiation to other staff for a defined period of time.
• You may need to have discussions with other work areas to ensure adequate levels of work flow are maintained.
• Team building may be needed to ensure appropriate cooperation among staff.
• Process and procedures may need to be redesigned or at least reviewed.
• Work flows may need to be reviewed to relieve bottlenecks or double handling or to reduce turnaround times.
• Provide appropriate mentoring, coaching and skills development support for the staff member if required.
Regardless of the reasons for the poor performance, it has occurred and
therefore must be documented. A mistake that managers often make is to let the incident pass without discussion or documentation. Managers must manage human performance. Ignoring or letting poor performance pass because there are 'reasons' for it is not acceptable. If performance deteriorates further you will have to start the documentation from scratch when you take action. While there may well be valid reasons for poor
performance, it must be dealt with and documented, even where no further action will be taken. However, this is not always the case and where
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performance continues to be a problem you will need to follow the unsatisfactory performance process outlined in Figure 39.
Continuing unsatisfactory performance
Where performance continues to be unsatisfactory after a performance improvement plan has been agreed and implemented, you will need to manage the non-performance in a very formal way. From Figure 39 you will see that this involves
another counselling discussion and the first of three formal warnings in writing. Your organisation is also likely to have specific procedures for managing unsatisfactory performance
and these should be melded into the procedure illustrated in Figure 39.
Using the skills of Human Resources
Before moving into an unsatisfactory performance procedure, it would be wise to seek the advice of the Human Resource department to ensure that you go about the process in accordance with all relevant procedures and principles of
natural justice. Because you must be particular and meet the requirements of a number of procedures, legislation and awards, it is better to make sure that you are on solid ground. Human Resources is there to help line managers do their job by providing advice, guidance and assistance. Their experience in the more complex matters of managing people can make your task a lot easier, especially
in times of great stress, which is often the case when possible termination must be considered.
Managers should not hesitate to involve staff in the unsatisfactory performance procedure if circumstances indicate the need to do so. The commencement of such a procedure does not mean that you will terminate a staff member. Indeed, it is hoped that no further action will be required. There are a number of reasons why it is important to invoke an unsatisfactory performance procedure:
1. If managers do not make it clear to staff members that nonperformance is serious, staff are unlikely to take it seriously. If a manager tolerates poor performance by doing nothing about it, staff will receive the message that it is acceptable. Attempts to improve performance will not be taken seriously as staff soon learn that nothing happens if
performance is poor. If you do encounter continued poor performance the formal warning usually conveys the message, and staff in most cases improve their performance, and no further action is required.
2. If individuals are not pulling their weight in the work unit, others are probably doing more than their fair share. While staff may choose to do this for a short while, especially where a colleague is experiencing
difficulties, it will soon lower morale if allowed to continue. This can create performance problems with other staff and will affect the productivity and outputs of the work unit.
3. If the situation becomes so bad that termination must be seriously considered, the organisation will be unable to terminate the staff member
if appropriate processes have not been followed. For example, if a manager has been dealing with continued poor performance for eight months and decides that it is now time to dispense with the staff member's services, the manager must then provide the required number of warnings, development opportunities and discussions before termination can take place. Consequently, a considerable amount of time
elapses before the staff member is terminated. If managers are doing their job, and performance is documented and dealt with appropriately, the process of termination can be quite swift.
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4. If a staff member is prone to poor performance from time to time, and erratic in the quality of their performance overall, a manager may wish to build a case for termination. Unless there is evidence on record that the staff member was placed into an unsatisfactory performance process,
say five times in the last 12 months, it would not be possible to build a case that would be considered fair and equitable.
The written warning
Combined with counselling, written warnings are the basis of any termination process. For
termination to occur as a result of unsatisfactory performance the law generally requires that the employee is warned of the unsatisfactory performance and is given an opportunity to improve performance. As a result of all the legislation and awards that HR has had to deal with over the last decades, it has become convention to give up to three written warnings to staff who are not performing satisfactorily. However, it is not a legal requirement to
give more than one written warning. Good HR practice should dictate that appropriate processes are used and thus it will depend on the nature of the unsatisfactory performance, the specific circumstances and the individuals involved as to how many written warnings you choose to give. Written warnings ensure that there is adequate documentation to record the specific lack of performance, the steps taken to improve it and whether the steps were followed. Written evidence is required if a situation escalates to the Industrial Relations
Commission where you might need irrefutable evidence of your actions. The written warning can be powerful as people attribute more weight to a written communication and it appears to be more official than a verbal communication. A written warning also has a certain amount of shock value that may not be achievable through verbal communication. Often staff who have not acknowledged that a problem exists, do so after receiving a written warning.
Warnings become stronger with each one issued. To be effective they must
be clearly written, the original must be given to the staff member and it is wise to get a signature from the staff member to confirm receipt. Written warnings do not replace discussion. Nor should warnings be sent to a staff member - they should be delivered by hand during a counselling discussion in which you discuss the poor performance and find ways of solving the problem. The first counselling discussion in which you hand over a written
warning ought to achieve the same outputs as those described above, with the additional output of developing a shared understanding of the seriousness of the problem.
Written warnings must include those items listed in Figure 43. The warning must be as precise as possible by clearly stating the agreed performance, the current level of performance and the performance gap. It must also refer
to any previous discussions and performance improvement plans and, where appropriate, any previous written warnings. The warning must also state what the consequences of further unsatisfactory performance will be. You must be accurate about the consequences if you wish to rely on the written warning in litigation.
After the third written warning has been delivered and performance does not improve in
accordance with the agreed improvement plan, termination may take place with
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no further discussion, provided the appropriate amount of time has elapsed as indicated in the improvement plan.
The process of three written warnings and accompanying counselling discussions may seem cumbersome and somewhat long-winded. The actual time taken will depend on the specific unsatisfactory performance. If the poor performance is something like consistently arriving late
for work, the period of time required for improvement may only be a few days or a week. If the poor performance continues, it is likely that termination will occur in as little as three weeks. For more complex matters, which may require time to develop skills or to meet the performance requirements, it can take considerably longer to reach the termination stage.
4.7 Terminate staff in accordance with legal and organisational requirements where serious misconduct occurs or ongoing poorperformance continues.
Termination of employment
Repairing human resources
It is desirable to try to 'repair' a human resource because the cost of replacing one is high. A little time and effort invested in regular maintenance and servicing, with attention to the faults that occur from time to time, will keep the resource in tip-top shape. Unlike any other resource the manager manages, humans are able to think for themselves and act independently. Consequently,
Figure 43 : Contents of a written warning
Written warning
Formal, either letter or memo format
Address to employee by name, position and employee number if possible
Date the correspondence as the same day as the discussion
Include a subject line Unsatisfactory performance: First/Second/Third warning
State the performance required
State the previously agreed performance i mprovement plan
Describe the problem
State that performance is unsatisfactory
State what was agreed at the last counselling discussion and include a copy of the documentation
Direct attention to the new performance improvement plan
State what will happen i f performance does not improve
Sign the correspondence
Have the staff member sign a copy certifying that they have the original correspondence
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managers need a wide range of skills to manage this resource well so that the organisation, the manager and the staff member or team benefit from the experience. Termination is a costly decision, which may balloon if it is handled badly. A fair termination is one in which the individual is not treated in a way that could be considered to be harsh or unjust. This is an easy concept
to grasp. Simply put yourself in the shoes of the staff member who is not performing. Wouldn't you want to be treated in a fair and equitable way?
A decision to terminate
A decision to terminate is one that will gradually become clear as unsatisfactory performance
continues. The exception is where staff members engage in serious misconduct that may endanger their own or others' lives, or commit a serious crime. (Courts have held that some crimes—such as assault on a supervisor—may not be adequate by themselves to justify termination, especially if the assault was provoked and the harm caused was minor.) In such circumstances you should consult your Human Resource department or, if you do not have such a section,
the most senior management in the organisation. You may even need to seek legal advice on the matter. Managers should understand that it is better to delay action for a few hours or even a day if necessary, to ensure that they know and understand the processes they must use to move on such complex matters. If you act without the appropriate advice, using inappropriate processes, the situation can become costly, embarrassing and messy to deal with should things go wrong. As termination is an area most managers do not deal with on a regular
basis, they would be expected to seek assistance and advice on the matter.
The most difficult aspect of managing unsatisfactory performance is the fact that managers are often slow to take appropriate action. By the time they realise there is a serious problem, it has become so complex and difficult to handle that very often nothing is done about it. In such cases it is managers who should be better managed because, clearly, they have not managed
performance effectively. They must also accept the consequences for their failure to manage performance. Managing unsatisfactory performance is an inextricable part of managing the overall performance of the human performance system and the organisation performance system. Thus, where unsatisfactory performance is not managed well the manager's ability must be called into question.
Constructive dismissal
Managers must be aware of the concept of constructive dismissal. While there is no formal
definition of this term in industrial relations legislation, enough precedent is now established within the industrial commissions and courts to develop a solid understanding of the term. In certain circumstances, where an employee has left the employment of the employer, it may be determined by the industrial commissions or courts that a constructive dismissal has taken place and therefore a termination by the employer has occurred. Where such a finding
is held, the employee may seek remedies under appropriate unfair dismissal legislation, if, in the circumstances, the dismissal is found to be harsh or unjust. Essentially, constructive dismissal means that the employer has been found to have constructed, created or made up the dismissal. For example, where an employee may not have been performing satisfactorily, rather than manage the unsatisfactory performance, a manager may choose to 'find' situations which either singly or combined seem to make a case for dismissal. In such
circumstances it is likely that the employer will be held to have constructed the dismissal.
Four criteria can be identified where it has been held that constructive dismissal has occurred:
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1. Where an employee has been forced to resign. This might occur when an employee is given an ultimatum to resign or be fired over one or a number of alleged activities or misconduct. Where there has been no investigation or no right of reply given to the employee, it has sometimes
been held that the employee has been constructively dismissed.
2. Where an employer makes a fundamental, unilateral variation to the terms and conditions of an employee's employment. If this happens to such an extent that a repudiation of the original contract occurs, the employee has a choice to accept or reject the repudiation. Where an
employee accepts the repudiation, it has sometimes been held to constitute a constructive dismissal and therefore a termination by the employer.
3. Where a significant breach of the employment contract has occurred which goes to the root or essence of the contract. A case of constructive dismissal may be found where the employer breaches an essential term
of the contract which strikes at the very root of the contract or which demonstrates that the employer does not intend to continue to be bound by one or more of the essential terms of the contract.
4. Where an employer makes working conditions so unbearable that an employee is forced or is appeared to be left with no alternative but to
resign, this may give rise to a finding of constructive dismissal. This may take the form of unreasonable pressure, bluff, bullying, or unreasonable workloads. As there is an implied duty by an employer to employees not to damage or destroy the relationship of trust and confidence between an employer and an employee, making things difficult for the employee may be seen to be damaging or destroying the employment relationship.
Where dismissal is found to have been constructed by an employer, it will be held that the employer has terminated the employment of the employee and thus it will have occurred at the initiative of the employer. Penalties can be awarded against an employer where it is found that the termination was harsh, unjust and unreasonable. Orders may be made to reinstate the employee and make payment for lost wages. Consequently, managers should ensure that,
where they must invoke termination, it is based on specific evidence and for specific reasons. If in doubt, consult your Human Resource department.
Terminating employment
Even where managers do have appropriate skills and manage unsatisfactory performance well, some situations will become terminal. Once it is clear that the employee's
services are to be terminated, the process must be handled with dignity and sensitivity. It goes without saying that the processes you use must be correct. When you have reached the stage of giving the third written warning and performance still does not improve, you will need to terminate the service of the employee. Before acting, discuss acceptable options with your Human Resource department. These might include offering the employee the
opportunity to resign, rather than be sacked, providing outplacement services and counselling and/or support, or even agreeing on what could be said in a written reference. While a termination discussion is never easy, because the employee often becomes emotional, by trying to make the separation harmonious you will maintain the goodwill of the employee for your organisation in the long term. There will also be situations where it is not possible to make the transition from work to unemployment easy for the employee because of the nature of the
unsatisfactory performance. In such circumstances by guided by the advice of your Human Resource department.
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It is critical to maintain the dignity and esteem of people even in the worst termination situations. People are entitled to common courtesy, respect and fairness no matter what the situation. This is the case even when staff do not demonstrate this respect for you. Remember that you are terminating the
services of the employee, not because they are a bad person but because they have not performed in accordance with the standards to which they have agreed and which the organisation needs. They may very well be successful at something else, in another organisation. You should concentrate on the specific reasons for the termination, do not become engaged in emotional discussions about the reasons why, or the apparent
heartlessness of the organisation in bringing about the termination. Also, the time for discussion of the circumstances that brought about the termination has passed and you should not go over ground you have already covered. In the termination discussion, focus on the termination and the specific reasons for it, keeping it short and to the point.
Performance management and the law
We deal with some legal aspects of the employment relationship because, over the last few decades, the courts have noticed that some employers have acted in an unsatisfactory manner when terminating employees. Legislation and the courts have combined to ensure that employees are given a fair and
equitable chance when dealing with the matter of their employment. Thus the issue of termination is fraught with possible litigation if it is not handled skillfully. The law also influences the whole area of performance management and there are matters that impact on every aspect of a performance
management system. Over time industrial commissions and courts have developed conventions which can be seen in their decisions across a wide range of cases. Generally speaking, the
following points must be taken into account by managers who are engaged in implementing and
maintaining a performance management system: People must be trained in the performance
management system:
- managers must be trained in the right skills to manage people;
- managers must be trained in how to use the system;
- staff must be trained in how to use the system;
- staff must be trained in the skills to participate in the system.
• Performance standards and objectives must be agreed soon after a new employee joins the organisation if the employer intends to rely on these as the basis for performance evaluation.
• There must be agreement between the employee and the employer on the
performance standards and objectives.
• The management of performance is clearly a management responsibility.
• Managers must become familiar with the organisation's HR policies and practices, especially in relation to unsatisfactory performance.
Adhering to these simple guidelines will result in more sustained performance, better relationships with staff and a focus on results. Additionally, and most importantly, following these guidelines will reduce the likelihood of unsatisfactory performance occurring in individuals. To facilitate this, managers must possess core skills in dealing with and managing people. Without these core skills, the procedures, processes and policies
that support any performance management system will not be enough to sustain the required results. Many systems fail—not because the system
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itself is faulty, or the forms are too cumbersome, or there is not enough time—they fail because managers do not possess or do not use the appropriate core soft skills on which any performance management system must be based. Remember, staff don't sabotage performance management
systems, managers do.
Non Performance
Despite the focus of performance management systems on developing people, there are some people who, for various reasons, do not perform.
Even after an appraisal has identified issues supported with evidence, and agreement is reached on a development plan, managers may be disappointed to note that performance has not improved in accordance with agreed targets. Until now this book has focused on how to motivate people to improve through a high level of participation, use of evidence and systematic analysis and appraisal, and development support. Undoubtedly, there will be
times in a manager's career when the performance of a particular individual or team does not improve and appropriate action must be taken. Unsatisfactory performance may result from a single incident or there may be a steady decline in satisfactory performance over a period of time. Unsatisfactory performance may need to be managed as part of the formal appraisal or outside the formal appraisal process. Either way, both situations are part of the performance management system.
Legislation
Managing unsatisfactory performance, which can lead to termination in extreme cases, is influenced by a large number of variables. These include awards and regulations and specific industrial relations legislation on termination contained in State and Federal laws. Other legislation such as Equal Employment Opportunity, Anti-discrimination, Workplace Health and
Safety, and Workers' Compensation also provides specific directions for the management and termination of non-performing individuals. Further,
workplace agreements and specific employment contracts have clauses that deal with the management of unsatisfactory performance. Finally, the determinations of tribunals, commissions and industrial courts have added to the interpretation of legislation, awards, regulations, agreements and contracts, which may qualify or extend the meaning of the original
documents.
The process of managing unsatisfactory performance is complex, but the principles that underpin all the legislative requirements are consistent, which facilitates a systematic management of poor performance. There is anecdotal evidence that managers are reluctant to manage poor
performance because the process is complex and requires considerable effort and time. No more effort is required than the vigour that has been applied to all the other components of managing performance described in this book. Failure to act on poor performance and to do so immediately it is recognisable can make the process longer, more painful for all parties and more complex than it needs to be. The time frame needed to manage
unsatisfactory performance to new levels of satisfactory performance, or termination, can be as little as a few days or as long as several months, depending on the circumstances of the unsatisfactory performance, the quality of the evidence and the particular policies of your organisation.
However, managers also need strong interpersonal skills, the absence of which may reduce their confidence in adopting an active approach to
managing unsatisfactory performance.
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Process
The process of managing unsatisfactory performance is based on the same principles of fairness and equity as the management of people performance.
A situation that compels a manager to deal with performance that is unsatisfactory, and possibly invoke a termination process, does not mean that it cannot be managed as skillfully as other parts of the performance management system. This is not to suggest that the only outcome of unsatisfactory performance is termination. The aim of managing unsatisfactory performance is to improve it. Termination is a final option.
Managing unsatisfactory performance through a well structured performance improvement plan can reignite enthusiasm and motivation and contribute to a person's self-esteem, to say nothing of productivity improvement. Even though managers may not handle these matters with any regularity, provided the basic interpersonal skills are present, and the concept of collecting evidence and a focus on development are used, managers need only apply the processes
already learned in this book. The components of managing unsatisfactory performance are:
collect evidence
analyse the evidence
appraise the evidence
plan improvement.
When an individual fails to improve, you call on a further process that repeats the steps already described, with the additional possible consequence of termination. Thus, the thought of termination for unsatisfactory performance should not be of concern to managers. It is regrettable, but not unfair or harsh if appropriate processes have been used to offer the individual every opportunity to improve performance. Termination is a final option, but not so
final that managers should be afraid to use it. It is the logical consequence of an employee's continued lack of improvement. Continued tolerance of unsatisfactory performance will result in more expense than the trouble it takes to invoke a termination process. Costs in such circumstances may involve wastage of funds, low productivity, low morale, higher stress levels in staff and managers, and safety hazards. Objectivity and proper process
should be the focus of an effective manager.
Legal framework
The termination of employees from organisations is the subject of legislation because the subject is essentially one of industrial relations. It is part of the employee/ employer relationship, involving management interests and employee/union interests. Management is concerned to minimise the loss of productivity that a poorly performing worker can cause the organisation. Employees and unions are concerned with making sure that people are not unfairly dealt with when
performing poorly or when termination occurs. Consequently, there are penalties for wrongfully dismissing a worker—for example, having to reinstate
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them to their original job or paying compensation to the worker to make up for lost wages. Wrongfully dismissing an employee may also demand a large amount of management time in defending the action, large legal costs and union conflicts, which may all result in poor employee morale for the remaining employees, especially where a drawn-out action results in media
coverage and perhaps strikes.
Managers need to be familiar with the appropriate legislation for their enterprise, industry, awards and State. If in doubt, or looking for a starting point, seek assistance from your Human Resource department, unit, branch or section.
When employees cannot be dismissed
The legal framework presented in the Fair Work Act 2009 defines when an employee cannot be dismissed.
It's illegal for an employer to dismiss an employee for a number of reasons. These reasons include:
• a person's race, colour, sex, sexual preference, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family or carer's responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin (some exceptions apply, such as where it's based on the inherent requirements of the job)
• temporary absence from work because of illness or injury
• trade union membership or participation in trade union activities outside working hours or, with the employer's consent, during working hours
• non-membership of a trade union
• seeking office as, or acting as, a representative of employees
• being absent from work during maternity leave or other parental leave
• temporary absence from work to engage in a voluntary emergency management activity
• filing a complaint, or participating in proceedings against an employer.
The final reason relates mostly to circumstances of poor performance or redundancy. Where dismissal may be seen to be unjust or harsh, a commission or court will look at the process employers used to make a decision. If the dismissal is found not to be based on specific evidence, or dealt with in accordance with principles of due process, and for valid reasons,
it may be held to have been wrongful. Once a prima facie case is established the employer must prove that the dismissal was not unlawful.
Decisions about performance that may lead to dismissal must be based on sound evidence and systematically analysed. Processes preceding the dismissal must offer employees opportunities to:
• improve
• be given specific warnings
• facilitate a right of reply
• ensure they are treated no differently to any other employee during the process
as a result of any action taken to improve performance.
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Summary As mentioned earlier, dispersed work tends to “magnify” the impact of every manager’s approach to managing. Effective face-to-face managers, with
consistent and clearly articulated supervisory practices, generally fare pretty well when they move to a dispersed team format. Managers with haphazard approaches to their supervisory duties (which is NOT a rare occurrence!) generally have a great deal of difficulty when they try to manage in a dispersed work situation.
While all of the practices reported in this article would most likely make a positive contribution to managing a face-to-face team, they become increasingly important as the amount of dispersion (number of remote people, frequency of absences from the assigned workplace) in a team increases.
It has been found that many managers take their management skills for
granted, and then are puzzled when their dispersed teams don’t function the way they expected them to. The most frequent response is to try harder with the same managerial procedures that aren’t working, with the hope of different results (this is often referred to as a definition of “madness”). As professionals in a rapidly deploying world, there are many contributions we can make to ensure that dispersed work is as effective as it can be.
Managing unsatisfactory performance is critical in managing the performance of an organisation. Unsatisfactory performance has the potential to inflict much damage on an organisation, not just in monetary terms but also in decreased productivity, low morale, conflict and dysfunctional teams. To minimise the effects of unsatisfactory performance, managers must deal with it immediately it is noticed. Because an individual
who may not be performing satisfactorily may also be poorly managed, or even discriminated against, legislation exists to protect staff and ensure they are fairly and equitably treated while managers and supervisors work with them to improve performance. Similarly, legislation combined with the legal infrastructure acts to ensure that people are not dismissed in situations that may be considered harsh or unjust.
The model of managing unsatisfactory performance presented in this section is designed to help managers manage unsatisfactory performance through a process that uses the skills and knowledge from other chapters in the book and which serves the interests of both manager and staff member. Most incidents of unsatisfactory performance can be managed with appropriate
feedback near the time of the specific incident. This is preferable to termination which is a costly solution to unsatisfactory performance. Repeated unsatisfactory performance may require a counselling discussion and more serious transgressions will necessitate a written warning of unsatisfactory performance. If managers do not manage unsatisfactory performance in the appropriate manner from the outset, dealing with the
unsatisfactory performance later becomes very difficult; it is impossible to take termination action until the appropriate processes have been implemented.
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References Allee, V. (2000). Knowledge Networks and Communities of Practice. OD Practitioner. 32 (4).
Curran, K. & Williams, G. (1997). Manual of Remote Working. New York: Gower Publishing Company.
Duarte, D.L. & Snyder, N.T. (1999). Mastering Virtual Teams. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lipnack, J. & Stamps, J. (1997). Virtual Teams: Working Across Space, Time, and Organizations. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
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