The New Performance Environment - Negativity Island
The Island of Negativity is where negative people go to thrive. And if not dealt with quickly and in a positive way, just one negative person can destroy an entire performance environment, so we need to be prepared to respond.
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The Island of Negativity is where negative people go to thrive. And if not dealt with quickly and in a positive way, just one negative person can destroy an entire performance environment. Their attempts to expand their island’s territorial boundaries by recruiting negative converts to join them become successful and the islands population begins to grow exponentially. These negative individuals and their eventual island mates are the ones who are always sitting around, letting things happen to them. They are the victims. They have made making excuses, placing blame, and justifying failure a core competency.
Negativity is one of the great detractors to anyone or any organization's path to success, so we need to be prepared to respond when we begin to hear statements like "That will never work.", "It's not my fault." and "That's just the way it is." We do this first by keeping focused on making things happen, no matter what. Once we have our self-discipline we begin to respond to those negative statements with positive ones such as "How can I help?", "What can we do to make this situation better?" and "Let's figure out some options." By responding with statements like this we don't give the negative individual what they want most, a friend on their island.
This individual, through our positive actions, will eventually have to make a choice as the island begins to gets lonelier and lonelier. Either leave the island or go to another organization that allows for Negativity Island to grow. And this is the exact outcome we want. Either the individual will change their behaviors and become a positive force within our organization or they can go and be disruptive in another.
As an individual we always need to remember: We control what we can control, influence what we can influence and when we can't control or influence, we keep moving and making things happen.
Join us next week as we discover the cure for the dreaded annual review cycle - Performance Connections.
And for more detailed information about how to lead your own performance be sure to check out our Lead Where You Are book or online training! Both have greater insights and give you an actual plan to begin leading where you are.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
The New Performance Environment - How to Own Your Own Performance
The true measure of any organization and its people are the consistent results they deliver and how those results are achieved. It creates an opportunity to shift the old performance model to one where we are leading our own performance. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control.
Subscribe to the Lead Where You Are Podcast on all your favorite streaming outlets! Simply click one of the buttons below.
The true measure of any organization and its people are the consistent results they deliver and how those results are achieved. It creates an opportunity to shift the old performance model to one where we are leading our own performance. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control. Shifting to proactively accepting more responsibility, actively pursuing personal and team performance, and taking control of performance activities and results may not completely eliminate surprises, but it certainly allows you to lead the conversation, control the development activities, and take more ownership of the results.
Making the shift to leading your own performance versus performance that is leader managed or just annually reviewed sounds great, but how do we get there? By proactively leading where you are and developing a personal blueprint for your personal performance actions and behaviors that are aligned to your team’s and organization’s culture, direction and priorities.
This blueprint starts with establishing a foundation of greater awareness by creating and cultivating enhanced organization, situational and self-awareness. From there, you create a framework for focused development that assists in enhancing your professional eligibility (your required job and technical skills), suitability (your natural behavioral traits and characteristics matched to your position) and viability (the actual impact of both your eligibility and suitability combined). Then, ongoing reinforcement and continual enhancements allow you to reach your full potential while increasing your organizational value and relevance.
Once the foundation, framework, and enhancements have been set, establishing an ongoing “performance connection” is the key to evolving and shifting the performance model from leader-directed, mid-year and end-of-year performance reviews to employee-led performance connections that pursue performance. We'll discuss this in much more detail in a few weeks.
If you follow your performance blueprint, by the end of the year there will be no need for managing performance. You will have been enabling and leading your performance all year long. It is your performance, your impact, and your career in your control.
Join us next week as we discuss Negativity Island and the effect just one negative person can have on an organization.
And for more detailed information about how to lead your own performance be sure to check out our Lead Where You Are book or online training! Both have greater insights and give you an actual plan to begin leading where you are.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lead Where You Are - Pursuing Your Own Performance
In this excerpt from our new ebook, Lead Where You Are, due to be released January 2020, we highlight a model for pursuing your own performance, not having it managed.
2020 Performance Clarity
How is my performance management process working to enhance my personal performance? Many, many, MANY employee often ask that same question.
Have you or anyone you’ve known ever been surprised at your end of year performance review rating? In your performance review meetings or coaching sessions, who does most of the talking? You? Your manager?
In our new eBook, Lead Where Are, due to be released in just a few short weeks, has a chapter on leading performance. As you look to your 2020 (and beyond) performance aspirations don’t have your performance managed any longer! Turn performance management in a personal performance pursuit. Step up and take control of YOUR performance and YOUR career. Here is an except from the Leading Performance chapter that will assist in taking control of your performance success.
THE TRUE MEASURE
The true measure of any organization and its people are the consistent results they deliver and how those results are achieved. It creates an opportunity to shift the old performance model to one where we are leading our own performance. It is your performance, your impact, your career, in your control. Shifting to proactively accepting more responsibility, actively pursuing personal and team performance, and taking control of performance activities and results may not completely eliminate surprises, but it certainly allows you to lead the conversation, control the development activities, and take more ownership of the results.
Making the shift to leading your own performance versus performance that is leader managed or just annually reviewed sounds great, but how do we get there? By proactively leading where you are and developing a personal blueprint for your personal performance actions and behaviors that are aligned to your team’s and organization’s culture, direction and priorities.
This blueprint starts with establishing a foundation of greater personal and organizational awareness. From there, you create a framework for focused development that assists in enhancing your professional eligibility, suitability and viability. Then ongoing reinforcement and continual enhancements allow you to reach your full potential while increasing your organizational value and relevance.
Once the foundation, framework, and enhancements have been set, establishing an ongoing “performance connection” is the key to evolving and shifting the performance model from leader-directed, mid-year and end-of-year performance reviews to employee-led performance connections that pursue performance.
These regularly scheduled connections are designed to establish clarity and alignment to the department’s and organization’s purpose and priorities as well as establish personal accountability for goals, activities and behaviors through an environment that you create of constant feedback and development.
Your monthly performance connections will set the ongoing performance environment and feedback loop to personally grow and develop the skills and behaviors that lead to delivering consistent and sustainable top-tier results with no performance surprises. Your performance, your career, are now in your control.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lessons From The Best: Leading Performance - Adobe
Adobe has continually led the way in reinventing traditional HR and HR practices. They took a look at how inefficient and ineffective the traditional performance review process was and changed it.
As we prepare for the release of our new eBook Lead Where You Are which will be coming out right after the first of the year, we will be exploring how organizations rated as a Best Place to Work create dynamic, highly engaged workforces delivering sustained results by leveraging many of the concepts we highlight in the book.
Week 1 (Oct. 10) - Leading with Purpose
Week 2 (Oct. 17) - Leading Change
Week 3 (Oct. 24) - Leading Accountability
Week 4 (Oct. 31) - Leading Performance
Leading Performance - Adobe
Over that last three weeks we have highlighted lessons we can learn from some the best organizations in the world. We culminate our Lessons from the Best series with Adobe Corporation - The future of performance management, now.
Adobe has continually led the way in reinventing traditional HR and HR practices. Guided by the vision and leadership of Donna Morris, Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice President of Employee Experience, Adobe took a look at how inefficient and ineffective the traditional performance review process was and changed it.
Adobe managers were spending an average of 17 hours per employee completing annual performance reviews. Today, with their Check-in performance model, the company has saved an estimated 100,000+ on their performance process. With that type of transformation Adobe has positioned itself as a top leader in continuous performance feedback and development. As Donna once stated, “Ratings and rankings are a buzzkill for productivity and performance.” Adobe quickly realized that driving high performance and engagement requires an ongoing dialogue between managers and employees: if something’s not going to work out, people want to know what’s going on right away, not just once a year.
With Check-in, managers and employees have frequent conversations (check-ins) about expectations tied to corporate priorities, ongoing feedback and career and personal development. Employees are empowered to actively participate in their own success and drive the performance discussion.
By enabling every employee to own their success, performance shifts from being managed and reviewed to being developed and pursued. Adobe has shown us the future and serves as a proof source for performance success. It’s time to evolve traditional performance management. Stop wasting precious time and resources on ineffective and outdated performance review processes.
Take Adobe’s lead and transform your organizations performance.
Need help? We can show you the way.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Reimagining the Performance Model - Employee Engaged
Employee-Engaged performance is the key to shifting performance results from management driven to employee owned, supported by formal leaders and enabled by the organization.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
The Subaru Legacy was first built in 1989, and over 4 million have been built to date and is Subaru’s flagship car.
And while this car has remained stedfast in the market, it has had many changes done to it. Just like how our performance management legacy should be viewed as well, a great legacy but changes are always needed.
In traditional performance management models, much of the role and responsibility for ensuring performance results, conducting performance feedback, developing accountability and providing effective change management resides with formal people leaders in the organization. In addition, training focused on developing core leadership skills, activities and behaviors is generally reserved for these formal leaders.
This legacy performance model unfortunately limits true performance ownership, and by reserving leadership skill development for a select few, we limit the immense potential and impact of having everyone no matter what their title or position lead from where they are.
Employee-Engaged performance is the key to shifting performance results from management driven to employee owned, supported by formal leaders and enabled by the organization. As a foundation, it is important for an organization to create a baseline of expected leadership skills, activities and behaviors that everyone from senior leadership to entry level individual contributors understand, value, exhibit and are held accountable to. This creates a foundation of common leadership expectations and a “language” of leadership that defines your organization.
Of course, roles and responsibilities are different, and the level of leadership impact will change as you move up the organization, but developing a core set of leadership competencies in everyone is critical to tapping into, and leveraging the value of every employee leading where they are.
Where to Start –
Create awareness and set an expectation that everyone is a leader
Provide baseline leadership development, starting with 4-5 core leadership competencies that provide a competitive differentiation for your organization
Support developing the leader in everyone with coaching and training
Reward and recognize employee-led success
Continue to add to and build upon the core leadership competencies.
Expect everyone to lead, give them the tools and training to lead, support them like leaders, and they will lead!
Next week – Leader Support – Evolving the leadership model to meet the leadership challenges of the future.
An Evolution, Not a Revolution - Performance Management Today
There is no question the current state of most performance management processes need to change. However, a rush to change can have a devastating impact on morale and productivity and, in the end, not produce the sustained performance every organization is looking for.
There is no question the current state of most performance management processes need to change. However, a rush to change can have a devastating impact on morale and productivity and, in the end, not produce the sustained performance every organization is looking for.
It is true, performance models, like current day forced ranking systems, tend to produce more negative morale issues than enhancing personal and team performance. And just think of the millions of collective hours spent reviewing, discussing, and justifying (often arguing) performance in those HR/Department “talent calibration sessions”. If those same hours were redirected to developing, training, and enabling performance versus “calibrating” it, think of the impact that would have. And what if a leader’s time shifted from managing, directing, and reviewing performance to facilitating, developing, and pursing performance?
And furthermore, what if the money currently spent on customizing, implementing, and maintaining very expensive and complex performance management modules in HRIS systems, that rarely deliver results as designed and end up documenting performance instead of developing it, was used to cultivate an employee-led, leader supported culture with targeted development activities and experiences?
The opportunity to reimagine and redesign performance management as we know it is here. However, it takes long-range vision rather than succumbing to the ground swell for rapid and sometimes radical change in the short run. As with most change, the pendulum tends to swing too far but will eventually find the right rhythm. To that end, there is a tidal wave of quick fix feedback and coaching app’s rolling out every day claiming to be the next tool that facilitates performance success.
And while constant and real time feedback is a key to future performance success, an organization must prepare and cultivate an environment through training and practice to enhance an individual’s capability and capacity to self-assess, be accountable for personal and team performance, turn feedback into change, and how and when to provide good, objective, and most importantly, actionable peer assessment and feedback.
Organizations must enable a culture that values performance development over performance documentation by assisting all people leaders in making the shift in their leadership style and competencies from managing performance activities and conducting performance reviews to developing and cultivating the leader in everyone by facilitating, not directing, ongoing performance connections.
Performance management can and should evolve, but care and caution should be taken to implement it properly. Enable organizational performance success with the proper clarity, alignment, and resources. Support it with leadership that inspires and energizes, not directs and manages, and create a powerful employee-led culture that takes ownership and leads both personal and team performance. Remember, it is an evolution, not a revolution.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is toassist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
