Quality Goal Setting

Performance year has started. As a manager, you need to go about setting goals for your team members.

You think ‘what all are goes into a quality goal setting process? Who are stakeholders and what are their roles?’

A quality goal setting process should ensure alignment of individual, team, and organization goals, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Relevant, and Time Bound) goals, and ownership of goals from employee.

It is important for stakeholders to understand their roles in order to ensure these objectives are achieved.

·        Manager – ensures linkage between organization and team/individual goals; plays a large role in ensuring conditions that enables employees to own their goals; ensures balance in workload across team members; and ensures synchronicity between work of different team members.

·        Employees- play a role in charting out milestone based execution plans for goals, identifying additional individual goals that further team’s work, and understanding how they need to support each other to achieve team’s goals.

What are the conditions that ensure ownership of goals from employees?  A feeling of ‘these are my goals’ might help here. Such a feeling will be an outcome of active participation in entire goal setting process.

So managers also have to ensure platforms that enable active participation of employees in goal setting process – both at a team level and at an individual level.

 

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Sourav

 

Why do we need a performance management system?

This month I continue with my series of articles, aimed at grassroots organizations, on need for and basic structures of different HR processes.

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Two common terms used in organizations are 'Performance based cultures' and 'Performance management system'.

What do these terms mean? How are they relevant for your organization? Does your organization need an 'off the shelf' or a 'customized' solution?

I will draw an analogy with a business planning exercise, where we decide firm’s objectives and lay out periodic milestones.

Similarly, a performance management system ensures such an objective and milestone setting exercise at team and individual level.

Outcomes of business planning exercise are cascaded down to performance management system. Objective setting is an important but not only key component of a performance management system. Periodic reviews and linkage to rewards are other two key components.

If you refer to motivation theories you will find that these 3 components cover 4 important individual motivation aspects:

1) We need 'goal clarity'

2) We need periodic feedback

3) We need to feel differentiated

4) We need money to sustain our hygiene needs.

What kind of a performance management system does your organization need? What are choices you want to make for each of 4 motivational aspects mentioned above?

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Sourav

White Spaces and Industry Veterans

A few months back I was in the middle of a discussion with an industry veteran. He had spent 24 years in the same company –his first company. He made an interesting observation during our conversation- his observation has stayed with me.

He said, and I quote “There was a time when I found it difficult to keep myself motivated at work. I had donned most of the roles an employee in this company could don. I could not see new challenges for me in the horizon. It was through these struggles that I came with up a solution that has withstood the test of times. Every year, thenceforth, I venture out into the unknown. I take up something which I know would challenge me/I am not comfortable about. I usually would not have a clue on how to go about it at the beginning. But then I manage to find my way through. This ensures both that I stay engaged on the job and my team has enough space to work (I don’t overstep onto their feet).”

Industry veterans can be an asset or a liability depending on the situation or the way they approach their work. When they use institutional knowledge to thwart creativity and refuse to give up their old responsibilities/power, they are a liability. But when they consciously venture out into the unknown and use their institutional knowledge as a reserve pool (to be used for references) they can be assets -a positive driving force for change.

I had read somewhere about ‘White Spaces’ in the context of new projects. These are about going into previously unchartered landscapes. ‘White Spaces’ can be of two types: doing something completely different from what you are doing today; doing something which is an extension of what you are doing today. The essence of ‘White Spaces’ is that it is an ‘Unknown space’. You would not know what might emerge there. People who are high on learnability are probably more likely to succeed in these white spaces.

We usually talk of importance of a Learning organization. But I also see a subtle difference between an organization which decides to learn reactively (in response to the environment) or pro-actively (by venturing out into white spaces).

To pro-actively shape our destiny in the future, a question we need to ask ourselves, our teams, and our organization is ‘What are the white spaces we would want to work on this year?’. These white spaces need to be defined and worked on, every year, at all 3 units of performance – individual, teams, and organization.

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Sourav