The key to Performance Management is 'Conversation' and not 'Censure'.

 In my two decades of career in HR and business consulting I have, more than often, observed the following conversations taking place between the line manager and his appraisee just before the corporate HR team releases the increment/ bonus letters:

Conversation type One:

Line Manager (LM) – So as per your performance your rating is 3 and the increment letters will reach to you from the corporate HR within two days.

Employee (E)- But why 3 Sir? I have met all my targets in this year.

LM- That you have to ask the HR because this rating has been communicated to us by the HR.

E- But Sir, you know that how hard I have worked this year despite problems with my father’s health and the conditions in my home.

LM- I know, but this is the rating given by HR. You need to speak to the HR.

Conversation type Two:

LM- What is your expectation about your rating?

E- Sir, I have achieved all the targets this year, and I have worked really very hard despite the challenges I am facing in my personal life.

LM- OK I agree with you on meeting your targets but that’s not good enough. Hence, your rating is 3. You should receive your increment letter this week from the HR department.

E- Sir, what does 3 mean? This is my first appraisal in this company so I am asking.

LM- Oh sure! 3 means ‘meeting expectations. A rating of 4 means exceeding expectations and 5 stands for ‘excellent’.

E- But Sir, if I have achieved all my targets then why 3 and why not 4 or 5?

LM- Because you have ‘just’ achieved your targets and not exceeded your targets.

E- But Sir, the targets were very-very difficult to achieve in this economic climate, and you have also agreed to this while you were in the monthly review with the regional head. In our region no one has exceeded his target.

LM- and that’s why this region is not at the top because of average and easily contended employees like you. I don’t want to waste my time on this topic anymore. If you have any other question about your rating then you can go to the regional head or the regional HR.

These two conversations show the lack of accountability of line managers towards their teams and a dismal state of culture in the company. These conversations are only the artifact of a culture that will soon kill engagement (if there is any) and eventually performance. Also, they reflect the callousness of the HR function in its apathy towards institutionalizing developmental orientation in the line managers. 

Getting rid of ‘forced rating’ and/or a normal distribution curve is an improvisation in the process of PMS, and it is a welcome step but it does not, by itself, lead to a system that is credible enough to foster engagement, productivity and performance. To emulate ‘best practices’ has been in vogue for HR for few decades now, and it is not something that deserves opprobrium, but without building a deeper level of understanding and implementing it seamlessly across the organization, this imitation remains superficial with no assurance of the fecundity of the emulated ‘best practise’ in an organization’s context.

A human being’s performance is an outcome of the linear relationship that exists between his thinking, emotions and behaviour such that one leads to another culminating in a good or bad performance. Till few years ago in the name of Performance Appraisal/Review System (PMS) organizations have been blindly following the ‘once in a year’ conversation between the line manager and his appraisee, his team member, and it is evident that this approach has failed miserably.

I have been an ardent advocate of regular ‘check-ins’ in place of once-a-year conversations, and it behoves me to explicate this in simpler terms. As mentioned earlier, a human being’s level or quality of performance originates from his thinking, and it is critical that the connection between the two is understood with certitude. It is possible to improve people’s performance by altering the way they think. This alteration is important because people’s internal realities do not change with the speed that the external realities do.

In the second conversation mentioned above, the fact that no one else in the region has exceeded his targets has become an internal reality for this employee. When presented with any new data, this employee will try to compare this new data with existing mental maps and when the new data does not tally with existing mental maps then there will be a confrontation within the employee resulting in disengagement and denial leading to an abysmal fall in performance. All this is a result of the habit of perceiving the world as we are, and the only way to overcome this is to create a new habit instead of trying to change an embedded habit. Fortunately, we, as human beings, have an incredible ability to change.

While leading an integration, after the merger was complete, between two organizations that were radically opposite to each other a few years ago, I, serendipitously, came across an opportunity that taught me how to create new thinking. I was based out of Mumbai, and the epicentre of this merger (yes it appeared like an earthquake for initial few months) was Bangalore (now Bengaluru). I had stationed one of my Senior Managers (SM) in Bangalore, while I used to travel twice in a month to Bangalore from Mumbai.

In the light of non-cooperation and a subtle hostile behaviour from the senior management of this company that was getting merged into ours, the SM had developed a staunch belief about the current reality, and this belief had the potential to jeopardize the integration. I had to decide between two plausible alternatives that I could think of – either explore the thinking of my SM or the issue at hand. It turned out that I decided to explore the thinking of my SM with a hope that he may step back from his own thinking and notice its nature. A candid admittance- I was relying on the GROW model of Coaching by Sir John Whitmore, but I, on hindsight, realized few years later that I had adopted the principles of David Rock instead.

Though I cannot reveal here the questions that I asked my SM, who is a Head HR himself, but I can suggest few questions that can be helpful in enabling people to become scientists of their own thinking:

·       What are you feeling when you are discussing this topic?

·       What’s the thought getting created in your mind?

·       How important is this issue to you on a scale of 1 to 10?

·       How committed are you on changing this issue on a scale of 1 to 10?

·       What are some possible routes we can take from here?

·       How do you think we might move this insight forward?

·       What are the different ways we could tackle this?

Questions like these help an individual in looking at the context/issue from a frame of detachment, and this unleashes a positive energy, which should, ideally, be followed by creating deadlines because it is here at this stage that people are most likely to commit. This does not imply agreeing on numbers; it implies handholding a person towards an action-oriented thinking through question such as what specifically would you do in this situation? or how will you make this happen?

In the preceding few paragraphs, I have delineated the significance of conversations that, in form of questions, can help a person in creating new thinking. In terms of project life-cycle this kind of change in thinking is of utmost importance in the generation of insights that can generate clarity and avoid conflicts. In digital transformation, for example, every new project is derived out of the particular need of an organization. For example, in service-intensive industries the transformation may be aimed at creating differentiation through great customer experience, whereas in an operation-intensive industry the aim may be to control process uptime or keep unit costs low. In such a scenario, a team, at a consulting firm, responsible for digital transformation for clients from myriad industries may find it difficult to change its orientation while switching from one client in a particular industry to another in a different industry. At this stage, how does a manager mobilize insight in his team is crucial for managing performance in terms of successful execution of the project. Few helpful questions in this regard can be:

·       What is your level of clarity on this issue on a scale of 1 to 10?

·       Compared to where you were few days ago in terms of way forward, where are you now?

·       What questions are yet unanswered in this issue?

·       What actions you can take to execute this project?

According to behavioural sciences such as psychology, an insight is born out of the conscious awareness of dilemma, and it leads to clarity of thought fostering motivation and commitment. The problem with line managers is that in the name of ‘insight’ they give directions; the challenge with ‘directions’ is that they do not resolve the dilemma, which inhibits a person from being motivated and committed. Rather, the line manager should anchor a conversation in a manner that defines the current state of thought/action and the way to move to the desired state of thought/action. This anchoring can lead to different people thinking about a similar issue from similar perspectives.

In addition to above, there are few common problems with the way line managers check-in with their subordinates. These problems undermine the potency of the conversations or regular check-ins in building/transforming performance. The first one is the deficiency in listening. Most of the times when we listen to people, we listen to prove our existing theories about this person(filter) or listening for how we can sound more important (agenda) or both. The agenda puts self before the person we are listening to and the filter puts the person into our predetermined boxes for him restricting us from helping this person to be, what he could be. Thus, it is important that line managers should start listening for the way-forward, and this requires removing the filters or the agendas behind meaningful listening.

A second common problem in conversations is the inexorable focus on problems rather than solutions. This problem gets compounded when the line manager inadvertently gets lost in the data surrounding the issue rather than the core of the issue. In my first job in HR my first assignment was to hire telecom engineers with a specialised skillset who were a rare breed in the telecom ecosystem. In my weekly reviews my manager used to spend most of his time in analysing data such as the number of profiles sourced from different sources, average experience of the candidates etc. His opening question used to be, ‘‘why didn’t you meet your targets”? followed by,’’ why isn’t this working”? His intentions were not bad, but his approach to managing performance was not up to the mark. I had a new manager when he moved into a new role in another vertical. This new manager did not believe in weekly reviews; she practiced small yet daily conversations. Her typical questions used to be,’ what do you need to do next time to meet your targets’? “How can you develop strengths in this area”? Rather than getting lost in a maze of data, she used to attack the core of the issue/challenge, which most of the times resulted in lateral thinking. Only through such conversations I realised one day that the biggest source of profiles were the ones who had already joined us, and that rummaging through the job sites was akin to finding the needle in the haystack. Also, a distinct element of our conversations was the presence of validation and recognition of my efforts on a daily basis, and this element gave me the confidence to be forthcoming about my challenges without the fear of censure. An open, honest and a mature one-to-one conversation can have significant impact on the performance of an individual.

Galileo Galilei once said,” one cannot teach a man anything. One can only enable him to learn from within himself”. Marshall Goldsmith said,” Instead of discussing on the issue that didn’t work well in the past, we discuss what we would like to change in the future, and explore ways to make this possible”. I think these two statements are at the core of how to transform performance while keeping the morale and the engagement high in today’s organizations. It is up to the organizations as to how they institutionalize a performance-oriented culture that is nurtured through reorientation of a line manager’s role in developing their teams at all levels in these organizations.