Individual performance management maybe working against your collective goals
Individual performance management maybe working against your collective goals
Individual performance management is often treated like a load-bearing wall i.e. hard to move or change. But what if it actively undermines the collective goals of the organisation?
I’ve worked in a number of organisations where there have been many teams operating with clear goals and also who have shared goals across teams and we’ve still detected friction which is pulling people in different directions.
There can be many reasons for such friction, it’s something to manage not to eliminate entirely, but one recurring reason that we uncovered came down to individual performance management and associated incentives. More specifically the goals for the individual put them in conflict with the team goals.
Many organisations use a mix of individual goals and either values or behaviours as the two dimensions for assessing individual performance. If I recall correctly this structure along with the performance rating table can be traced back to recommendations which originated from Bain & Company1 and which have proliferated across most industries.
I have views on individual performance management in general but to do justice to the complicated issues at play is beyond the scope of this post and publication. So we might leave that for another day... except maybe to say that my feelings on the matter might be best expressed by this scene from Contact (1997):
Whatever your views on chairs individual performance management, if individual performance management exists in a way that’s similar to the classic ratings on goals & values/behaviours model then you need to consider how this is interacting with team goals and goals shared across teams.
As I cover in an earlier post, decisions (and I mean decisions at all levels) within organisations are influenced by hard and soft incentives. Individual performance management can be an example of both as they are commonly linked to financial incentives and also have softer reputational and self-actualisation influences as well.
Working in an organisation and looking at it with a systems thinking lens is to look at the system of work and consider how incentives are acting like gravity or magnetism attracting and repelling behaviours.
H/T to Ian H Main and Cansel Sörgens for the inspiration and encouragement to follow my post on Truthiness in organisations with some discussion of individual performance management which well may be another prime example:
What are your experiences with use of team and shared goals and how they intersect with individual performance management? Chime in, in the comments below.
This was shared with me anecdotally by a colleague some years back along with some evidence I have since lost - if anyone has a reference they can point me to that would be appreciated