Managing performance is an essential skill for leaders to develop, if they want to get the best from their teams.
A performance management process should drive success, but inappropriately used, it can become a vehicle for workplace bullying.
Rachel Kline interviewed Dr. Jason Price for his expert insights into this topic. The full interview was originally published in Authority Magazine.
You'll find the key highlights in this post.
Watch the five tips video
Five tips summary
- Get a 360 degree view of feeback - from above, below, inside and outside
- Ensure fairness and transparency
- Evaluate with objectivity and impartiality
- Improvement focused, tailored to the individual
- Open to continuous improvement
Let's look at why these matter, and explore each of these five tips.
Why is performance management so tricky to get right?
Because you’re dealing with people, and they’re human beings — not “human resources”.
Everyone has their own life experience, their own values and differing personal goals and objectives. Performance management has to balance the needs of an organisation, its culture and values, with something that supports each individual in their own personal and professional path.
Organisations won’t succeed without people being motivated in their personal goals and supported where they are struggling.
Where do organisations go wrong?
Performance management can contribute to organisations inadvertently reinforcing a toxic workplace culture. Too often though, performance management is used as a punitive tool against people who’ve had the terrible experience of being bullied in the workplace. Being bullied is not the victim’s fault.Research studies of bullying incidents clearly show that use of performance management is a tactic which bullies (supported by organisation HR departments) adopt to silence and remove their targets.
More worryingly, the psychological effects of stress caused by bullying are shown to lead to cognitive impairments that cause people to underperform.
So in effect, bullying leads to performance failure, and a performance improvement process is then applied punitively — re-victimising someone who’s already suffering from workplace bullying.That’s not right, so it’s vital that an organisation’s performance management process is transparent, reasonable and focused on positive improvement using clearly defined, realistic objectives. Fairness in representation and taking people’s circumstances into account during the process mitigates against bullies abusing the performance process.
On the other side of the coin, there are, of course, examples where people who are justifiably being taken through a performance improvement process may claim this is bullying.
In many jurisdictions, guidance on bullying clearly states that reasonable and valid performance management is not considered bullying.
But the key words here are “reasonable and valid.”
Managers and organisations must ensure their performance management process is fair, balanced, transparent and impartial.
This helps them prevent vexatious bullying complaints by people who are trying to avoid accountability and valid performance management.
To be fair and transparent, your performance improvement process must be evaluated from the perspectives of the people it is being applied to — not just from the viewpoint of your legal team or HR department.Tip one: 360 degree feedback
The value of a 360 degree feedback process can’t be understated. 360 degree feedback means gathering views of your performance from a representative range of people that you’ve interacted with whilst doing your job. This goes well beyond your line manager, and it should include:- your customers (internal or external)
- your peers
- and (most importantly for leaders), people who report to you.
You can combine this feedback with a self-analysis of your own performance. This gives you a real opportunity to identify your strengths and development areas, and set some challenging and realistic goals for your future development.
It goes a long way to supporting the fairness, transparency and objectivity required of an effective performance management process.
Tip two: Fairness and transparency
For people to have confidence in a performance management system, they have to believe it is fairly applied — to them, and across the whole of your organisation.
People need to know what method is used for measuring performance, how it works, and that it’s been properly calibrated.
Fairness applies to both the organisation and to the individual. The organisation has to be able to manage employee performance, so it can achieve its business objectives. Individuals are looking to their employer for support in their career growth and skills development.
Now let’s consider the performance improvement situation.
This is an area where it’s absolutely vital to have fairness and transparency and it’s really important in cases involving workplace bullying and harassment.
Performance improvement cannot, ethically, be used as a punitive mechanism to “manage people out” without first giving them clear, realistic improvement goals that they have a genuine chance of meeting by improving or developing their skills.
Research has identified patterns of behaviour, where perpetrators of bullying use their management position — supported by HR departments — to target and remove people who’ve made complaints against them, by using the performance improvement process against them.
If your performance improvement process lacks fairness and transparency, it’s open to being “weaponised” for retribution against complainants. This is just one of the things that allows bullies to create and sustain a toxic workplace culture and it’s never acceptable.Tip three: Objectivity and impartiality
You can’t evaluate performance if you’re starting from a position of bias and pre-conception.
The Dunning-Kruger effect (in which an individual may over-estimate their abilities in an area as a result of their limited competence or knowledge) is something both evaluators and recipients of performance management need to take into account.
People may self-assess their performance as better than actual — either in an attempt to ‘present a good picture’, through optimism bias, or just a desire to ensure their evaluation (and associated remuneration) is advantageous.
In cases of workplace bullying and harassment, many people find themselves in the awful position of being performance reviewed by a manager who’s been bullying them.
That kind of bias leads to unfair results, and it has implications for psychological safety, and people’s physical and mental health.
Performance management must always be objective and impartial. The best example of this I’ve experienced was an organisation where an individual’s performance reviews were not carried out by the line manager, but by a mentor who supported them in their career development. This ensured objectivity and impartiality, with 360 degree feedback from their line manager and others used as the basis for the review. It goes without saying that people’s performance objectives (or improvement targets) must always be realistic and achievable. Setting people up to fail is another example in the list of known workplace bullying behaviours.Tip four: Focused on improvement
A performance management process should drive success. An organisation can only achieve its objectives when the people working within it are achieving their personal results.
As individuals, we all have our own aspirations and goals. We bring our own experiences, culture and desires to our jobs.
Some people might want to climb the career ladder, others may just want to do a great job and go home to their family. Let’s be honest, some people are there because they have to be — and work is just a means to an end.
That’s how you can get the best out of people. Allow them to grow in their own career journey and support their goals with realistic and personalised performance objectives. “One-size-fits-all” performance management, forcing everyone to hit a target without regard for their personal experience, skill or competence is a recipe for demotivation and increased attrition amongst your people.A performance management process should ensure people’s individual development goals are supported — and link their contribution to the organisation’s outcomes.
Tip five: Open to continuous improvement
Like all your business processes, performance management needs to be open to continuous improvement, based on feedback from participants and independent reviews. If your process isn’t serving the needs of your people, if it’s not supporting their development or it’s not helping your organisation deliver its business objectives, then it’s flawed — and you need to do something about that. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and leave it to next year — do something about it! I’ve also talked about how performance management can be used by bullies as a weapon against their targets. If there’s any inkling that people involved in raising bullying complaints are subsequently being targeted by performance management action, that should raise a very big red flag with the organisation’s senior leadership and Board.It requires immediate action.
How do you measure and improve a performance management process?
As well as obvious quantitative indicators like timeliness, completion percentages and organisational performance, a key feature of continuous improvement must be qualitative feedback from participants. Managers should be able to feed back the extent to which the performance process supports them in helping to develop and grow people in their teams. Equally, employees should be able to provide feedback on the way the performance process works for them and how it supports their own development goals. Measures such as employee satisfaction with the process and the extent to which the performance process contributes to employees’ sense of organisational loyalty are just two examples that can provide useful insights. The last point to make on measurement and improvement is about impartiality and objectivity.Consider using an impartial business area (like an internal audit function) or engage an external specialist assessor to conduct a genuinely impartial feedback survey, if you want to give people trust in the process and get to the truth. Don’t forget to do something with all the feedback you receive as well. If you don’t act, or select only feedback you like, people will see through you like a window and you’ll find employee participation, engagement and trust heading out the door.People won’t be keen to provide open and honest feedback if the corporate owners of a poor performance management process are conducting the survey!
References and links
- Credit: Image by Waewkidja on Freepik