How To Get Extraordinary Performance From Ordinary People

According to Dr. Rollin Glaser, a specific formula can be followed to improve employee performance. It affects five basic areas:

1. Goal setting
2. Delegating
3. Training and development
4. Coaching and counseling
5. Performance appraisal interviewing

Having litigated performance issues for the past 15 years, I can tell you that Glaser is right on the money. Let me touch on what he has to say about each of these subjects.

Having a shared sense of direction is paramount to building powerful employment relationships. According to a summary of 110 goal-setting experiments reviewed by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, goal setting results in a median improvement in performance of 16%, with a range of 2% to 58%. In setting goals, it's important to:

1. Focus on measurable results
2. Tie individual goals into organizational goals
3. Put the goals into writing
4. Make sure they're periodically reviewed

When setting goals for an employee, inform them of your organizational goals, and then ask them to prepare four to six goals that they think may be useful.

One of the greatest paradoxes of our time is that the less you control, the more you can do. Basic delegation requires you to understand fully the employee's level of skills and character traits, appreciate the specific nature of the task you're delegating, go through the goal-setting process, provide checks and balances, and show trust and support through the process.

In practice, I find very little difference between training and development. According to business owners and human resources executives across the country, training employees, especially in the new technologies, is one of the greatest challenges they face. To address this issue, try the following approach:

• Prepare a simple list of the job skills and knowledge required to do the job.
• Rate each item on the list in terms of its importance and the employee's ability to perform the task.
• Identify specific training activities necessary to meet the needs.

Training needs can be divided between high tech and high touch. There are excellent computer-based training modules-and soon, online training modules-that can be used to shore up technical skills, but it would be a mistake to stop there. According to research done by Daniel Goldberg (The E.Q. Factor) and others, employees' ability to relate and communicate is as important to their success and your organization's success as their technical skills. This type of training requires instructor-led, team-based interaction. For example, management should do some dry-run scenarios dealing with such matters as handling a sexual-harassment complaint, an employee stealing trade secrets, and so forth.

The first thing Glaser suggests, and I couldn't agree with him more, is to ask 'What is it about the way we manage our employees that can cause unsatisfactory performance?' It may be that someone who didn't have the necessary skills to succeed was hired, there wasn't enough delegation of authority for people to move forward quickly, or other possibilities. This crucial step in analysis is often overlooked by management, exposing the company to business losses and a savvy attack in the courtroom. If you want your managers to ask this question first, create a culture that allows them to do so. Managers are human, too. None of them want to take any blame for what's not going right. It's much easier to pass off the responsibility to a subordinate who can't succeed.

During a face-to-face counseling session with the employee, it's important to get both perspectives out on the table without interference. Often employees aren't aware that their performance is inadequate-and conversely, management isn't aware of impediments to good performance. It's important to get the employee to agree that a performance problem exists. The final stage is to get to a win/win solution.

No one is better at describing the concept of 'win/win' than Stephen Covey. According to Covey, a win/win agreement requires a clear, up-front mutual understanding and commitment in five areas:

1. Desired results (goals)
2. Principles and policies within which results are to be accomplished (for example, you may not use unethical strategies to gain sales)
3. Identification of the human, financial, technical, or organizational support available to accomplish the results
4. Accountability in terms of standards performance, measurement, and feedback
5. Perhaps most important, a specification of the consequences-good, bad, or ugly-that will occur as a result of the follow-up evaluation.

Most companies employ a very poor performance appraisal process. They focus on ranking past performance, generally on a scale of one to five, and do very little to help an employee improve over time.

Unfortunately, because of today's litigious environment, many managers view the performance-appraisal process as an opportunity to memorialize poor performance, so they can cover their rear ends should the need arise to fire the employee. This is not the purpose of performance appraisal. As Glaser states, 'Performance appraisal has its primary purpose as the improvement of the employee's future performance on the job. ... The development of an open, trusting relationship must precede an effective discussion of performance.' In other words, most of the performance-appraisal discussion should focus on the removal of obstacles to an employee's future performance-not a rehash of past mistakes and failures.