Effective performance management is essential to leading more successful and productive organizations. Too often performance management is viewed negatively and primarily seen as a process for reviewing employee performance, justify salary adjustments, or to document and manage under- performance. In reality performance excellence is a goal in its own right and performance management is key to effective leadership. Managers who are effective at it have been shown to produce outstanding results compared with those who do not. Done right, performance management produces higher levels of engagement, retention, and organization performance. As a tool performance management should help employees accomplish work, develop talent and help organizations retain employees.
To drive performance results requires: setting clear expectations for employees so they can deliver their best work; helping employees find solutions to problems; playing to your employees strengths rather than their weaknesses in work assignments; recognizing and acknowledging employee’s strengths while addressing development needs and lastly, providing regular, informal feedback. This suggests that it is important to build a high performance culture at each level of the organization. Leaders must have high performance values and behaviors, know what it takes to succeed and be committed to supporting performance excellence in others.
To do this, the leader can help employees focus on performance, results, and quality excellence, and best practices. The leader must become a good coach and be effective at coaching individuals and coaching teams. This does not mean micro managing. This means encouraging a performance mindset, and helping each employee understand how what they do contributes to the overall mission. This can occur by fostering employee empowerment through communication, continuous learning and establishing a safe, supportive, challenging environment.
The manager as coach requires that the manager develop coaching skills. By acting as a performance coach you can promote the employee’s self-discovery of their performance strengths and improvement areas. Knowing when to coach and when to manage is important. As a coach it is about facilitating the learning process, focusing on development and setting up accountability structures for action and outcomes. While managing may be about directing, setting clear expectations, and pursuing certain outcomes, coaching requires exploring, facilitating, partnership enabling change and inspiring a high performance. In business you must be both a coach and a manager. By developing more of a coach mindset you become a good people developer and model the kinds of skills and practices that are essential to fostering a high performance culture.
“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people But to elicit the greatness that is already there” John Buchan
