The Performance Improvement Blog

Performance Reviews Are Bad for Learning

A survey of SHRM members conducted in August indicates that although most organizations say that a performance management system is important to them, few think that their companies are doing a good job managing performance.  Given that having annual and semi-annual formal performance reviews is a key aspect of performance management in nearly all of these organizations, it’s no wonder that HR leaders don’t rate their organizations highly in this regard.

If these organizations want to improve their performance management systems, they need to eliminate formal performance reviews and have managers develop a learning alliance with their direct reports. The formal performance review, whether annual or more often, has failed as a tool for improving performance.

UCLA management professor Samuel Culbert has been very direct about the failure of performance reviews. Talking about performance reviews in an interview for NPR, he said:

They’re fraudulent, bogus and dishonest. And second, they’re indicative of and they support bad management…for employees, they don’t like getting them, and for managers, they don’t like giving them.

It’s amazing the staying power of this tool. I think executives are afraid to eliminate performance reviews.  They give managers a sense that they are in control, especially when they are responsible for a large number of direct reports that they rarely see in action. Doing performance reviews makes HR feel like it’s helping to identify the stars and weed out the low performers, which is their charge from management.

Performance reviews should be about learning and performance improvement. Otherwise, there is no reason to do formal performance reviews. However, making performance reviews an effective learning tool is very difficult. Since learning is better when it is timely, waiting for a formal performance review is usually too late. Feedback needs to be at the moment of success or failure in order to have the greatest impact. And we know from research that positive feedback is more powerful than negative feedback, so if the intent of a performance review is to tell someone what’s wrong with what they’ve been doing, that won’t have as much impact on behavior as more frequent comments about what they are doing right and what they can learn from their successes.

Rather than doing performance reviews because that’s what you’ve always done, or because that’s what most other organizations do, or because you’re afraid of losing control, make frequent contacts between managers and their direct reports the source of feedback. Encourage them to learn together from their successes and from their failures. Make performance improvement an ongoing process, not an annual event.

What's a Thought Leader?

Readers of this blog know that I like to define terms that have become over-used to the point of meaninglessness. “Thought leader” is one of those terms. The designation has been applied to long-established experts as well as overnight, social media sensations. What do we mean when we say someone is a thought leader?

First use of the term is attributed to Joel Kurtzman who, in 1994, used it in marketing to refer to companies that were intentionally positioned to become known as authorities on a particular product or service. It has taken on additional meanings since then.

Something close to Kurtzman's definition is the Wikipedia definition: …an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.

Russ Alan Prince and Bruce Rogers writing for Forbes, "Becoming a thought leader is about making money and making history."

Lauren Hockenson, writing for Mashable, makes the label a little harder to come by when she suggests that a thought leader is someone deserving of our admiration. She writes:

The term thought leader is the highest of compliments, and arguably the hardest moniker to achieve. It’s not enough to be good at what you do; a thought leader is meant to be the greatest form of praise, geared towards someone who is on the absolute cutting edge of their industry or making big enough moves to warrant the distinction.

However, Alex Ivanovs, a contributor to HuffPost, argues that social media popularity makes someone a thought leader and he goes as far as to say, “We're all thought leaders in our own way, we just have to accept that.” With social media and the opportunity to “go viral”, a new kind of thought leader can emerge almost in an instant.

As a former academic, I always considered a thought leader to be an individual or organization that has earned the distinction through years of experience combined with research, publications, public speaking, teaching, inventions, and, possibly, awards. It’s an individual or organization that has shaped our thinking and practice. When it comes to leadership, it's people like Ken Blanchard, Tom Peters, and Jim Collins. When it comes to organizational learning, it's people like Peter Senge, David Garvin, and Edgar Schein. When it comes to teamwork, it's people like Jon Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith, and David Sibbet.

Maybe some people are all over Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, but that’s not what makes them thought leaders. I reserve that accolade for people and firms that truly lead while the rest of us follow. We look to them for the latest and greatest thinking on a particular topic and they are credible because of what they know and what they have accomplished. Fame might be part of it but it's not the whole picture.

How to Get the Most from Temporary Workers

This holiday season temporary hires in the U.S. are expected to surpass 800,000, the most since 1999 and two and a half times the 2008 numbers. This is according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a leading outplacement consulting firm. They observe that as the economy improves, retail sales go up and our dependency on temporary workers increases.

The increase in temporary hires presents an opportunity for companies to help these new workers, in a very short time, become valued contributors to the workplace. This is not an easy task and the beliefs and worries of managers often get in the way of this happening. Managers say to themselves:

• "Temps are a necessary evil. They aren’t reliable and they can’t be trusted but we need the bodies."
• "We don’t have the staff to train temps, especially now, when we are so busy."
• "I don’t want to give them too much. They will leave and take the information and skills to a competitor."

The attitudes reflected in these statements are setting up these workers for failure. And that will be a waste of resources that no organization can afford. Temps, as well as independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers, are often the face of the company to its customers. Especially if they are selling products and services, their effectiveness on the job can make the difference between being profitable or not.

Contingent workers who are not trained and supported by their managers will create a negative atmosphere in the workplace. If they are not happy and not engaged, if they are angry and complaining, this will affect the attitudes of all employees. Also, temporary workers are a great source of future employees, so you want to give them every opportunity to learn and succeed.

Unfortunately, temps have not been contributing as much as they could to the overall success of business. They are not allowed to apply their knowledge and skills fully to the work of the organization. They are marginalized and ignored by full-time employees. They aren’t given the training they need to be safe and successful on the job. They aren’t encouraged to become engaged in their work and the organization.

If you want temporary employees to have the best interests of the company in mind, effectively complete essential tasks, some which require substantial knowledge and skill, and strive to do their best, then these workers need to be given every opportunity to do their best work for the good of the organization.

Here’s 5 things you can do (adapted from 5As Framework) to get the most from your temporary workers:

1. Alignment – help them understand how doing their job contributes to the success of the team and the organization as a whole
2. Anticipation – clearly state your expectations for them; have high but reasonable expectations; and make sure they have reasonable expectations for themselves
3. Alliance – engage their managers in helping them be successful; give those managers a role in the learning and performance improvement of temporary workers
4. Application – provide immediate opportunities for temps to practice and apply newly learned knowledge and skills
5. Accountability – measure performance to temps and give them constructive feedback on how they are doing and how they can improve

Companies can’t afford any longer to have workers, even if only temporary, who are not engaged in their jobs, who are not properly trained, and who don’t understand the mission and goals of the company. Rather, they need contingent workers who are excited about being there and will give their best effort.

Some people do temp work for the money, some for experience, some want to learn about that business, and some just want something to do over the holidays. Regardless of their motivation, they should be treated with dignity and respect and given the opportunity to learn and to contribute value to the organization.

The Secret to Bold and Gutsy Leadership is Learning

I don’t know if John Baldoni intended his latest leadership book to be about learning, but that’s exactly what it is about. Through other leaders’ stories and through his own experiences, Baldoni describes what outstanding leaders learn in order to be effective. He has an acronym for it: MOXIE. Putting this in terms of learning, here’s how I would define the elements of MOXIE:

• Mindfulness - learning deeply about yourself; becoming aware of what you value and what motivates you; reflecting on and learning from your own experiences
• Opportunity - learning to recognize needs in your environment and how to develop solutions to those needs
• X-Factor - discovering what makes you unique and your special contribution to the success of your organization
• Innovation - developing the ability to embrace the new, to take risks, to learn from your successes and your failures, and to persevere
• Engagement - creating opportunities for others to learn and contribute to the success of the organization

Having MOXIE is having the ability to continually learn from your own experiences, from your interactions with the people around you, and from attending to the present while keeping an eye on the future.  The great leaders, as Baldoni suggests in his book, are not about command and control, as the popular wisdom about leadership would have us believe, but, instead, are learners who continually take in information from their environment and then, with courage and conviction, shape their behavior to fit the circumstances.

Temps Need Training and Development

As I wrote in my last blog post titled, Temps Are People, Too, temporary and contract workers have become an essential segment of our economy, relied on heavily by business, government, and nonprofits to do work on an as-needed basis. From assembly line to executive and from unskilled to professional, these workers are contributing significantly to the work of organizations everywhere. Yet they are often not integrated into the culture of these organizations and this poses serious risks to the organization and to the worker.

One type of risk can be emotional. A temporary work situation can be very unsettling for someone even if it is by choice. A 2009 article in BusinessWeek makes this point:

Workers hired for temporary or contract work face a higher risk of developing mental health problems like depression, according to research presented in 2009 by Amélie Quesnel-Vallée of McGill University. A lack of job security and health-care benefits, as well as social ties to the rest of the workforce, increase stress levels for temps and contractors. A survey conducted in September by the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that people who experienced a forced change in their employment during the last year were twice as likely to report symptoms consistent with severe mental illness as individuals who hadn't experienced one.

And there is evidence that temps experience work accidents at a much higher rate than regular employees. Temps’ rate of accidents is probably attributable, in part, to their anxiety about being in such uncertain situations and to the failure of companies to adequately prepare, train, and support anyone who is in a risky job.

I wonder what other kinds of problems are created by this failure to train and support temps. Could it be that they don’t take it upon themselves to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be effective? Could it be that they don’t become strong team members? Could it be that they don’t communicate clearly and regularly with co-workers and managers? Could it be that they don’t engage in their work and therefore don’t do all they can to help organizations be successful? Could it be that they talk negatively about the company in conversation with people outside of the organization? All of this could be the case when organizations don’t create an environment in which workers, temporary as well as regular, are treated with the respect and attention that they deserve.