Performance Assurance
Wikipedia's definition correctly establishes that:
"Performance management includes activities which ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, employee, or even the processes to build a product or service, as well as many other areas."
This definition still stands today, but as Bjarte Bogsnes correctly points out, the term itself has become too closely associated with the 20th century management mindset and this negatively influences our cognitive processes. To break the “If we want good performance, we must manage you” mindset, you need to change the terminology first.
But make no mistake about it, we're still talking about performance, and as Peter Drucker first taught us in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (1974):
"performance is the consistent ability to produce results over prolonged periods of time an in variety of assignments. A performance record must include mistakes, it must include failures, it must reveal a persons limitations as well as strengths. Management must define performance as a balance of success and failure over a period of time."
As a first step, I propose renaming Performance Management to Performance Assurance, as a way to break free from the notion that performance can be micromanaged.
The next challenge is to effectively tailor Performance Assurance so it serves to boost individual, team, and organization performance in this new century of knowledge work.
At the organizational level, Performance Assurance first ensures the organization obtain a clear understanding of its "Theory of Business", a concept first proposed by Peter Drucker. By doing so, it will become intimately familiar with its strengths and weaknesses, its values, assumptions, culture, and the unique characteristics of its supply and demand chains. The clarity of this understanding should be reflected in the organization's mission statement.
Performance Assurance also ensures commitment to a set of meaningful results and tailors the strategic planning process to effectively link the organization's "Theory of Business" to these results.
Performance Assurance seeks to sustain performance by looking past economic results alone. It includes the external factors of society and environment and internal factors of innovation, development of people, quality, productivity, financial results and market standing (Drucker) into its measures for success.
Performance Assurance also promotes agility in planning and budgeting cycles so new opportunities can be pursued "just-in-time" rather than "just in case".
Performance Assurance acknowledges the characteristics and differences that seperate the work of a leader (looks outward at competition and customers) from those of a manager (looks inward at people and processes) and ensures it has the right people doing both.
Performance Assurance is backed by a multi-faceted and team-oriented evaluation process that is fed by the right channels of quality information, for example, feedback coming from peers and customers throughout the year.
At the team and individual level, Performance Assurance promotes adoption of management practices that value an individual's intrinsic motivation and strengths, while also acknowledging the harm command-and-control hierarchies have on a worker's efficiency and effectiveness; especially in organizations where specialized knowledge resides in its lower echelons.
Performance Assurance promotes driving solutions first and foremost from the needs of customers. It promotes the skills, technology and practices to "weave" the needs and intricacies of the problem domain into a set of valid, unambiguous requirements in the solution domain. This is where project/product quality is born.
Continue reading below for a grassroots approach to help get Performance Assurance implemented in your organization.
For Performance Assurance to gain traction at the grassroots level, teams and individuals should take the following approaches.
At the individual level, take time to become familiar with the mindset and practices that are required for Performance Assurance. Read Steven Denning's The Leaders Guide to Radical Management, Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0, and Buckingham and Coffman's First Break all the Rules. Promote these and related books to colleagues. You can do this through your organization's microblogging (e.g. Yammer) platform. If your organization has not yet adopted a microblogging service, suggest they do (there's no cost). Link to this article to justify the benefits.
Individuals should also consider taking the Strengths Test or StandOut assessment to help them better understand how to adjust their work so they perform according to their strengths.
At the project level, identify those projects where delivering immediate value is absolutely necessary for the project to succeed. For these projects promote the delivery of customer value through project iterations. Dividing a project into short iterations will also generate the feedback to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the next iteration. You can see examples of this in Agile Software Development.
At the team level, Performance Assurance ensures that once team members have been informed of the problem and what needs to be done, they are allowed to self-organize (across departmental boundaries) towards the delivery of the required results. This can only succeed when team members trust one another and when individual performance goals are designed to depend on the success of the team as well. Team members should also practice 40 hour work weeks to avoid burnout.