It is often difficult to be specific, when asked what management or personal effectiveness training we would like. Often we don’t know, what we don’t know or can sometimes be a bit blind to our weaker areas! It’s sometimes easier to instead ask yourself a number of questions as these can help identify skills gaps.
How are you doing with the following questions? Read the rest of this entry »
Three members of your team have not been performing for over a month. Your boss is asking you what you are going to do. You know you must help them get back on track. You request informal one-to-one meetings. At the meetings you smile, you are supportive, you ask them if there is anything up. You explain that they must, at least, meet minimum standards in activity levels. You are encouraging, you say they can come to you anytime, you tell them you believe in them and that they can do it! You tell them it’s not personal.
Consultant #1 is a new trainee and coming up to the end of their probation period. They are not achieving the required standards. You had high hopes when you recruited them, as you saw great potential but they are not living up to your expectations. They have had a full induction training programme and lots of coaching. They just don’t seem to ‘get it’ even though they seem very keen to do well. Their activities increase a little over the next two weeks but you are still not confident about ‘passing’ them through probation.
Consultant #2, Read the rest of this entry »
Speaking on organisational change the BBC’s director of people, Lucy Adams pointed out that performance management is a key issue in challenging times. She said: “We can’t afford to avoid performance issues any more. We don’t have the time or money to allow people to perform at mediocre levels. When an employee spends 10 years just being ‘okay’, that’s immoral. But we shouldn’t use redundancy as a performance management tool, we need to reward the really great people and help the people who aren’t succeeding for us to go and succeed somewhere else.”
I agree and have always hated the expression ‘performance management’ as it always implies a negative that will end in dismissal for the employee! Mediocrity creates a lot of apathy and avoidance by managers in organisations as managers are happy to accept what their best people do but only confront the terrible performers at the last minute – often with legal consequences. The middle ground, the mediocre people just survive without any conversations around performance.
I have always trained and applied these principles: Read the rest of this entry »
