For another example of where less is more in performance management, I'll go to a high school story very quickly. My high school graduating class was 1,500 kids, and for some reason after you graduate they take you all up and they parade you on the bleachers. And they take one big panoramic picture. You all know what I am talking about, and you get it after you graduate. Now it’s a bunch of dots.
But the very first thing you look for when you get it is which is me? That's why we measure too much. Everybody in the organization believes they don't see themselves. If I don't see me directly in the scorecard, I must not be important, and that's just not the case.
That's not the case. Because if you get the right measures, folks, and tie them to the right services, there’s an infinite right way you can assess how you are performing. Based on that, less is more, less is more, less is more.
I don't have a lot of time to spend on these other two things. We try to integrate our measures too quickly and too many times, its tied to the budget, its tied to the personal performance evaluation. Have you all seen this? And everybody loses touch with why we are doing this because we are linking it to too many things too quickly.
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Don't Make Too Many Course Corrections
Then this is an important one, we attempt too many course corrections to try to influence performance. I have a 20 point action plan on how we are going to improve our performance on time. Have you ever seen this? Watch as we get close to the presidential election. I have got a 10 point action plan on how we are going to turn around social security.
What's wrong with the model? Of those 10 things how are you going to know what worked? How are you going to know what didn’t work? If you really want to influence performance, I am going to give you example in a little bit, folks. Pick one or two things. One or two things. You guys ever go grocery shopping? I used to hate it. My partner would beg me to go. I am like, no, I hate it.
About a year I made a discovery, you can eat in grocery stores. You know what I am talking about. Those little tasting booths, I love them. I go every time now can we go shopping, honey, but here’s the deal. If I get 20 hot sauces, by the time I get to the fifth hot sauce, I can't tell the difference. If I am tasting jellies, and I have got three, can I choose which one I like? Can I tell you why I like it? You bet. Less is more.
Less is more, and I'll send these slides to you. I wish I had more time to talk about. Any question about this. You’ve got to simplify the number of measures. You've got to simplify how you are measuring it , and you’ve got to simplify. Folks, the questions that you are asking of it.
All right, this is an important one. We don't engage the workforce. I am here to tell you sometimes changing your perspective can change your life. Why am I telling you this? Here’s one of the mistakes we make in this thing its called performance management folks.
The elite group of us create the measures, and then an elite group of us, usually the budget office, are the ones who are looking at the measures. There’s a problem with that. What do you think it is? Exactly. It is one perspective, and it's almost always an incorrect perspective. Listen to this, folks. Who knows better how to measure what you are doing than the people who are doing what you are doing?
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Workforce Perspective On Performance Management
The workforce are the people who bring a very valuable, a very rich, a very important perspective to the conversation on how we should be measuring performance in this area, whatever that area is? How should we improve performance in this area, whatever that area is? And then, folks, what’s the plan of action? And finally once we do influence performance, how are we going to talk about it. A successful performance management effort, folks, has got to be what I call 50-50 push-pull, push-pull, push-pull between your management team and your workforce.
It’s an ongoing conversation, an ongoing dialogue between you and the people who are actually doing the work. How are we doing? What's your perspective? By the way folks another good book for you is called Wisdom of Crowds. Anybody ever heard of it? It challenges this whole notion of expertise, and it argues very compellingly that groups of managers over time began to think alike and began to act alike.
Did you know that in time we can even begin to look alike? Right? We start over time narrowing, narrowing, narrowing our perspective, and when we’re not engaging with the workforce and we are doing all the thinking for them, the thinking will almost always be wrong.