There is a regular pattern which happens after each review. As soon as the review is over or during review breaks most managers call up their teams on the areas where they found their teams to be lacking and immediately give a set of instructions to take performance measurement numbers from x to y. Some people use mails, some use messages, but this is a common method used after every review. I often call this as the Post Office effect. Whatever came across from your superior during a review gets cascaded down to your team.
Would there be a better and structured way to help manage performance on a regular basis which is likely to lead to better and more systematic performance rather than the Post Office effect which hardly leads to any tangible results in most cases.
- Ability
The abilities required for benchmarking you as the best for each role are varied. If we introspect honestly, we will find there are skills which we need to work on and at times which we do not have at all. But there is nothing to lose heart about. Every skill can be learned, and the skill grows as we practice more and more of what we have learned.
The starting step is to access the skills needed not only for your present role but also for the immediate next role for which you are aspiring. Skills can be learned by
- Doing courses which are available for free on the internet
- Listening to talks by senior professionals where they share their life experiences on how they learned and went about doing certain things and what skills and other things helped them in achieving each of the results
- Observing your bosses and subordinates and understanding by observation what makes them do those things better than you.
- Accessing yourself on key interaction and the process followed by yourself and what would the key changes that you would need to incorporate.
The same would apply when we are doing the same for our teams. So, if we were to put a definition to Ability from a team members perspective it would run something like this.
Ability is the inherent capability of your team members for the role they are essaying in your team. The higher the capability of your team member that are directly applicable to their role and daily activities the higher is their chance of better performance. Someone who is outgoing, positive, never gives up, charismatic and has good convincing capability is likely to naturally do better in sales.
While observing particularly your sub ordinates please do so with an open mind to learn and not with an objective to justify your actions by condemning what the other person is doing
- Motivation and Commitment
Motivation is about the morale, energy and commitment brought to the job by each one of us. The more motivated each one of us are the on doing anything the more focused and driven and committed we will be towards completing the same which will lead to not only better results but also lead to identification of the gaps if any that are there which also leads to better output and performance.
Even if a person is highly capable but if he lacks the required commitment towards a particular job it will lead to lower performance. A person who has lesser ability but has extremely higher commitment very often ends up doing a job better than someone with much higher ability but lesser commitment.
So, try your best to allocate the right roles to your team members and also find ways and means to help them grow and blossom.
- Opportunity
During my career I have met and interacted closely with several entrepreneurs who have built up huge and successful business. Unless someone told you about their lack of formal education you would never be able to infer the same about them. They were knowledgeable on various fields of their interest in addition to general market and technological trends. They were apt at managing funds and in understanding and interpreting people and always willing to understand and learn newer and newer things.
We would have seen the same happen in our work lives and during meet up with old school mates who were today totally different from who they were in school or in the initial stages of work when we had met them. Some would have grown and developed to levels we would never have imagined seeing them in the initial days. Some who would have shown great promise and would have been the darling of everyone in those days would have not really reached the levels all of us had thought they would.
Some of the ways in which we can ensure this for our teams is by
- Ensuring every member of the team gets the same and equal opportunity
- Ensure every member gets the best role, attention, and resources as per their capability
- Key Focus Areas
We need to keep providing the right areas to focus on to the team as at times they would go off direction or at times start giving more focus on certain parameters or goals or activities and would need to guide back on track
- Consistency
One of the biggest challenges that teams must overcome in today’s world is to stay consistent with the key goals and not get distracted from all the distractions and noise that keep coming along. As leaders it’s the team leader’s responsibility to help the team stay consistent with each of the goals, by first staying consistent himself.
- Review and Handholding
Am remembering this oft repeated quote “What gets measured and tracked gets done” …
To stay on course, it’s crucial that there are regular reviews and handholding that needs to be done to ensure that the team stays on course when bottlenecks come up. What usually happens with reviews is they just become fault finding exercises which like the post office effect will not really lead to any real benefit. Leaders will have to go the extra mile to help the team resolve and manage issues which they aren’t able to do at their level. It not only helps the team overcome the immediate obstacles and prevents some members who are expert story tellers to build reasons which aren’t true but also helps build a wider acceptance for the leader.
To error and fall is humane. To run into tough situations is a part of life. But like they say a normal person learns from his mistakes, but a clever person learns from someone else’s mistakes.
Follow the above 6 golden rules to avoid the post office effect and stop getting caught on the wrong foot in team reviews.
Feel free to add to the list from your experience and to continue reading more such articles do subscribe to my new LinkedIn newsletter Rejo’s Biz Bytes and visit my website www.rejofrancis.com
