Prime
How to manage performance
Caroline Mboijana, Managing Director, The Leadership Team (U).
What you need to know:
- The use of data will mitigate bias and subjectivity, so make sure you have the structures and systems that support the data collection mechanism.
I recently joined the management team as head of the department. I have worked my way through the ranks, and on this journey, the biggest challenge I have observed is that my now new colleagues have struggled to manage poor performance. I want to make a difference, yet the team I inherited has some poor performers who have never been dealt with. I know I have to deal with it now, yet some have been my colleagues. What is the best approach to dealing with this? Mathew
Hello Mathew, welcome to senior leadership and congratulations on your achievement. Let me first advise that a crucial aspect of your new role is to implement the tough decisions. There is no shying away from this area of accountability, and it’s a responsibility that you must carry with utmost seriousness. Remember, these tough decisions are what will define your leadership and the success of your team.
As you start this new role, you may want to tread carefully, but that does not mean you don’t deal with the issues.
As you step into your new role, it’s crucial to deeply understand your team’s dynamics, including their strengths and areas for growth. Even those who are perceived as ‘poor performers’ have valuable contributions to make. The key is to identify these contributions and weigh them against the costs of their poor performance. This understanding will help you connect with your team on a deeper level and approach their performance issues with empathy.
You may want to spend some time reviewing each team member, how they were recruited, their performance record, and what evidence is in place that validates their performance – positive and negative. If you find through the review process that there have been gaps in the process management – either they were never given performance contracts, or there were gaps in the contracts, or their goals and KPIs were not clearly defined, you may want to start from a compassionate point of view. If this is the case, be prepared to do the hard work in “starting again”. This would entail setting goals and KPIs and ensuring they are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. It will also require you to walk them through their role and specifically look at their JD. I should add that the JD has a critical role, and often, the roles on the ground change, yet the JD is never updated.
Make sure your JD is up to date, and it is written. Be sure that your JD content speaks to the delivery of results – outcomes as opposed to activities that talk to output. You will also need to ensure clarity on how the reviews will be managed and the frequency. Please do not wait for the “annual review”- that is too far away. As a guide when leading and engaging your teams, ensure they understand that any moment you talk about targets and goals is a performance-related activity. It would be best to document any conversation about what you have BOTH agreed to achieve and accomplish.
Remember, the purpose of managing performance is to support your team members to do well, and it’s a continuous process- we don’t start and stop. As the leader, you will automatically become the coach and mentor, so the way you manage the relationship will also determine the success of the process.
Your continuous coaching and mentoring will not only build capability but also drive employee motivation and engagement. The aspect of data collection is equally important. The use of data will mitigate bias and subjectivity, so make sure you have the structures and systems that support the data collection mechanism.
Caroline Mboijana,
MD, The Leadership Team (U) [email protected]
