Performance and career

Performance management can make staff bristle and not all managers are that keen on it either. By Kate Kearins.

PERFORMANCE Improvement? Performance Management? Or plain performance? Whatever you call it, in my experience it can make staff bristle. And many managers don’t thrill to it either.

It is an open- ended process about development and opportunities – not merely about bringing to the surface issues of poor performance.

We all have performance potential which is worth paying attention to, spending time discussing, cultivating and aligning with organisational goals and values.

If, as I heard recently, the average tenure of a 26-year old is as little as 28 months and still coming down, then it’s best we start performance discussions early.

I also heard about jobs as serial monogamy – the notion that ‘ I’m only here while it works for us both’. The other partner in ‘ both’ is the line manager. There is work to do in working out what ‘ it’ is in this conversation. Bottom line, ‘ it’ is about performance in the job. More compellingly ‘ it’ is about achieving what the psychologists call ‘ flow’, but in the interests of the organisation as well as for self.

If we take seriously the theory about the latest generation of workers and the rise of portfolio careers, then performance discussions need a collaborative rather than a command- and- control approach.

Performance discussions are increasingly advocated as regular and frequent occurrences rather than annual form completion exercises. For me, personally, a few of these discussions have been career- changing. They have provided some of the key advice around how to be and succeed in my field. Some of this advice I occasionally share with others who seek it, years later even.

But there are other elements of our work that emerge and evolve, for which we may well not be trained or prepared. Things change. A top- down annual performance process tied to rigid cascading goal f lows is unlikely to be responsive enough to cope with what comes up. Team- centric, aligned and local goals and ongoing check-ins are more in order.

And if we are going for automated tools to record performance agreements and progress on goals, then these need to be easy to use and meaningful for those they are designed to assist. And that means employees as well as managers.

Let’s learn from our visits to some medics who seem to spend most of their time turned towards the computer. Employees will likely feel more motivated if managers actually attend to them.

Part of the manager’s role is to help people have great careers (at … insert name of organisation they work in now). Then there is the beyond. Again, in my experience good career discussions will allow managers to understand why employees sometimes want to move on. Those discussions are certainly wider than performance – and they involve trust. Kate Kearins is professor of management and currently Acting Dean at Auckland University of Technology’s Faculty of Business, Economics and Law.