My last two posts have been about managing performance through The Accountability Principle. It would be helpful - but not absolutely necessary - to read them before this post: Accountability - The Key to Performance Management posted April 29th and The Accountability Principle and Engagement posted April 30th.The antithesis of The Accountability Principle is The No-Nonsense School of Accountability. No-Nonsenseers have advocated performance management as it has been practiced at least since the 1960s. Managers give clear expectations up front, a thorough performance appraisal at the end, and regular feedback, maybe even some coaching, in between. If someone’s really off track, managers confront that right away. For top performers, there are rewards and recognition along the way. For poor performers, there is progressive discipline. For the rest, well, they have their pay checks and get to keep their jobs. What could be clearer and fairer and more motivating? The reality is that performance management is a fiction for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of businesses.

The beginning of the process - clear expectations or objectives and measures - often never happens except in general terms. When it does, it is seldom sustained because it is too difficult and time consuming to resolve all the questions that more systematic approaches call for:

Are these the right things to do to make the strategy successful? What’s actually being measured? Is that the right thing to measure? How accurate are the measures? How timely are the measures? Is the goal even achievable? What if unexpected forces make the goal either too easy or unattainable? What about all the things people do that are not measured but are critical to keeping everything running, how are these accounted for?

The middle of the process - performance feedback, and maybe coaching - seldom gets done because of the complexities of the business and the environment in which it operates.

Ambiguity delays judgment. Communication struggles with interpretation, completeness, and timeliness. Collaboration falters under the pressure of adversarial motives and contending views. New knowledge emerges that changes the playing field. Priorities change frequently and occasionally radically. Resources are reduced or diverted to meet new objectives. The measures chosen turn out not to achieve the real goal. Important aspects of the business are neglected to the detriment of the business in order to “make the numbers”.

The one piece of the process that eventually does get done is the performance review. But, this is usually viewed by both parties as an administrative requirement. There is very little accountability in this annual event because the beginning and middle parts of the process either have never happened or were pro forma or occasional at best.

Often expectations or objectives are written down for the first time when the performance review is due, and the past year is recollected from whatever reports or memory is available. Some organizations have feedback collected from people affected by an individual’s performance. But the biases of memory and the power of emotion and personal perspective make useful, accurate evaluation rare. Managers regularly pick the “rating” they “feel” is right and write the narrative to support the rating. In any case, the best that this process produces is a point-in-time judgement that usually has some marginal effect on the expected rewards.

The reality of managing a business is that there are no clear beginnings or endings. We estimate various measures and the forces that will impact them; but none of this is science, and all of it is affected by new knowledge that regularly is discovered about the past, present, and future. Priorities change, resources are redirected. We arbitrarily evaluate results quarterly and annually. But the goals we project, the measures we set, and the data we collect are very often not in one-to-one alignment and have only an approximate relationship to one another. While goals are essential to frame expectations, develop plans, and calibrate the actions we need to take, few, if any, bear a readily assessable relationship to the clear meting out of rewards and punishments the No-Nonsense School of accountability advocates as the driver of performance.

No-Nonsense performance management is a relic of industrial organization and a command-and-control system of management. No-Nonsense performance management should be replaced by The Accountability Principle.

State Parkway Partners recommends the following companies to enhance services and strategies:

• Q2 Learning provides speed-to-proficiency solutions for high value learning initiatives to corporations using our collaborative learning platform, the xPERT eCampus.
• KnowledgeAdvisors is the global leader in Human Capital Analytics. They help organizations measure, communicate and improve the impact of their learning and development investments.
• LearnShare was founded in 1996 by Fortune 500 companies who were seeking to join together to transform the way their companies research, design, purchase, package and communicate career development and skill enhancement. This visionary group, the Owners, included General Motors, 3M, Motorola, Owens Corning, Deere & Co., O-I, Eaton, Northwest Airlines, Pfizer Inc, Pilkington, UnitedHealth Group, and Chevron. Since that time, the owners have been joined by more than 30 of the largest, most diverse corporations in the world representing more than 2.5 million employees around the globe.
• Bersin & Associates is an organization of senior analysts and consultants with extensive experience in corporate learning, e-learning, performance management, leadership development, talent management, and enterprise systems.  Their WhatWorks® research methodology allows them to identify unique and powerful business solutions which enable learning and HR managers to drive dramatic improvements in their organizations.
• NIIT Cognitive Arts is a leading Global Talent Development Corporation, building skilled manpower pool for global industry requirements. The company which was set up in 1981, to help the nascent IT industry overcome its human resource challenges, has today grown to be amongst world’s leading talent development companies offering learning solutions to Individuals, Enterprises and Institutions across 40 countries.  

Tom Hilgart

Partner, State Parkway Partners

Tom Hilgart offers 35 years of business leadership experience as a line manager delivering operational improvement in insurance operations, as an internal consultant in process innovation and quality management, and as a nationally recognized leader in corporate learning and development.From 2000 through 2007, Tom served as Vice President of the Knowledge & Learning Group at CNA.CNA was recognized in 2004 by Corporate Executive Board research as a benchmark company for its approach to aligning learning investments to business strategy.In 2005, CNA was acknowledged by Bersin & Associates research as a best practice company both for its alignment of learning investments to business strategy and for the effectiveness of its balanced centralized/decentralized governance structure.Prior to that Tom was

• an internal consultant in quality management, benchmarking, and process redesign
• director of management development
• director of insurance operations

Tom earned a BA in philosophy from St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein IL and completed extensive graduate studies in philosophy, education, and social sciences at Loyola University and Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL.

Shirley Kitzmann

Partner, State Parkway Partners

Shirley Kitzmann offers a wealth of business acumen resulting from over 25 years of extensive consulting, human resources, communications, and operations management experience for entrepreneurial, professional services, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies.In her work as a management consultant and Human Resources executive, Ms. Kitzmann has helped organizations achieve their strategic objectives by focusing on human resources processes, investments in support of organization development, and culture change. She is skilled in designing and implementing total rewards programs, organizational and job design, organizational effectiveness processes, performance management, learning and development strategies and programs, succession planning processes, and communication strategies.Ms. Kitzmann has lectured for Loyola University’s (Chicago) Human Resources and Industrial Relations Institute’s graduate program, and has served as an Adjunct Professor for Washington University’s (St. Louis) Human Resources graduate program. She earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and an MBA from the University of Minnesota.

Manage Learning Strategically

We will show you how to move away from a demand-driven service and how to become a value-driven strategic partner. We will guide you as you build your:

• Annual Learning Plan and budget in a way that is aligned to business strategies and managed as a portfolio of prioritized investments.
• Measurement Plan aligned to the human capital performance objectives required by your business strategies and operating plans.
• L&D Strategy Assessment and Roadmap: your organization structure and staff roles; decisions about selective insourcing and outsourcing of roles; learning technologies and vendor selection; learning design methods for different delivery media; and your use of performance support.

Managing Learning Strategically (Open in Notes view to see narration)

Managing Performance Strategically

For decades, the major emphases in performance management have been performance objectives and performance assessment. Important as these are, they only become strategically important when they are integrated into a coaching culture, development opportunities, recognition, and rewards that increase workforce competencies, engagement, and retention. We will help you build your:

• Annual Talent Engagement and retention Plan focused on developing a “talent as an asset” mindset in your leaders at all levels and managing their adoption of practices which evidence that mindset.
• Measurement plan focused on increased competency in the workforce, on selected measures of engagement, commitment, and retention, and on the adoption of “talent as a mindset” practices.
• Assessment of and Roadmap for your “people leadership” capabilities.

Managing Performance Strategically (Open in Notes view to see narrative)

Managing Talent Strategically

Strategic talent management is about taking a systemic view of your business strategies, identifying the key roles in those strategies, and ensuring that you will have enough of the right people with the right competencies to make the business successful year after year. We will help you build your:

• Annual Integrated Workforce Plan in which you take a holistic view of the entire talent management process for each line of business and identify near term and longer term initiatives. Within the context of business strategies, your planning process will address workforce planning, talent acquisition, on-boarding, learning and development, performance management, and rewards and recognition. The result will be a coordinated, comprehensive plan.
• Succession Planning Process to address leadership roles, pivotal positions, and key positions challenged by competitive and demographic forces.
• Assessment of and Roadmap for your talent management capabilities including core issues such as data integration, process coordination, and technology support.

Managing Talent Strategically (Notes view with narrative will be available 12/08/11)