Recently, Goldman Sachs again
made the headlines in the business news, but this time for something different
than the usual financial news about the company. It has decided to move away
from its 9-point system for performance evaluations to providing employees with
more timely and frequent performance feedback. It will still keep its
360-degree feedback process as well as have managers rate employees as
outstanding, good, or needs improvement. However, it will create an online
platform whereby employees can get feedback at any time. Dozens of other
companies, such as Apple, Netflix, Accenture and even GE, have been moving away
from these annual evaluations and rankings in favor of providing more timely
and more frequent feedback.
Over the years, there has been
considerable research on performance management; despite all this research,
managers and employees, as well as HR professionals, continue to be
dissatisfied with its failure to achieve the goal of actually improving
performance. I will not go into all the reasons why performance management is
broken (see Pulakos and O’Leary, 2011 for a comprehensive review), but would
like to focus on the specific issue of how to improve individual performance.
In organizations where I have
been involved in revising and helping to implement new performance management
systems, I continue to be surprised at the intense attention paid to the forms
and the rating systems that will be used, despite the fact that one of the
greatest pay-offs from performance reviews is with the coaching and feedback
that the employee receives. Of course, I have to remind myself that since these
ratings are often used to allocate rewards, such scrutiny is understandable.
Many critics of performance management
systems identify organizational or managerial issues as root causes for their
failures. For example, Pulakos et al. (2015), in their excellent review
article, ask: what can organizations do or not do to fix performance management?
In their earlier article they summarized research that indicates that the
quality of the manager-employee relationship is a key driver for maximizing
performance management. There is no doubt that managers’ behaviors,
particularly their coaching and listening skills, are important.
But what I find missing in much
of these discussions is the role of the appraisee, or the employee. To be fair,
Pulakos and O’Leary do mention that “Depending on employees’ personalities,
they will be more or less open to feedback and more or less willing to accept it.”
(p. 158) I believe that most individuals working in organizations want to
improve their performance, whether they are CEOs of the company or brand new
workers who have just joined the company. Even those who have many years of
experience working in a discipline - such as a surgeon, a truck driver, a
professional athlete, a musician, or a jeweler – recognize that they always
have something more to learn (except for an arrogant few, of course).
So one could reframe this issue
of fixing performance management by asking instead, what can individuals do to
improve their performance? I am adapting a concept from Marshall Goldsmith who
wrote, in his recent book Triggers,
that companies tend to ask passive questions when addressing the issue of
employee engagement. Here’s how Goldsmith describes this:
“When people are asked passive
questions they almost invariably provide ‘environmental’ answers. Thus, if an
employee answers ‘no’ when asked, ‘Do you have clear goals?’ the reasons are
attributed to external factors such as ‘My manager can’t make up his mind’ or
‘The company changes strategy every month.’ The employee seldom looks within to
take responsibility and say, ‘It’s my fault.’” (pp. 192-193)
Anders Ericsson
is a professor who has done considerable research about what it takes to
improve performance. Most of his research has been with surgeons, musicians,
athletes, chess players, and other individuals who want to improve their
specific skills (e.g., memorizing strings of digits). In his new book Peak (Ericsson and Pool, 2016),
Professor Ericsson writes about three myths regarding performance improvement.
One is a belief that our abilities are limited by our inherited or genetic
characteristics. The second is that doing the same thing over and over will
make us better. The third is if we try hard enough, we will get better. Ericsson and his colleagues have studied the
differences between those who are the best in their field (e.g., musicians,
chess players) and those who are good but not outstanding. One variable that
was not a differentiator was the number of hours spent practicing. Gladwell
(2008) has suggested the 10,000-hour rule – that for someone to be an expert,
one has to practice for about 10,000 hours. There has been quite a bit of debate
about the 10,000-hour rule and the role of aptitude or natural ability. There
is no question that to be good or expert at something, you have to practice and
put in the time. The 10,000-hour rule is an average so there will be some
variability depending on a number of factors, including the natural ability of
the person and the nature of the endeavor. Someone who already has an aptitude
for math will more than likely spend fewer than 10,000 hours reaching a certain
level than someone who does not have the same aptitude.
However, according to Ericsson,
the key to improving performance lies in deliberate practice, which he and his
colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993) refer to as “activities defined … for the
sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”
And an important element in deliberate practice is mental representation, which
is “a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of
information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking
about.” (p. 58). Ericsson claims that much of deliberate practice involves
developing efficient mental representations. His examples include expert chess masters
with their skill in seeing the board many moves ahead and surgeons who
conceptualize complex contingency plans before going into surgery.
Here are three
specific strategies that you can use to improve your performance. First, periodically
conduct an in-depth self-assessment. This is not always easy for we have a
tendency to hold a cognitive bias called the “better-than-average-effect.” For
example, over 90 percent of drivers believe that they are in the top 50 percent
in driving ability. In his workshops, management consultant Marshall Goldsmith
(Goldsmith 2007) sometimes asks people in the audience (most of whom are
managers and executives) to raise their hands if they believe they are in the
top 10 percent of performers in their company.
Typically, over 50 percent of the audience raises their hands (of
course, it is possible that Goldsmith’s audience is not a random sample, and
that it is likely that his audience may indeed be among the top performers in
their organization). In a study of prisoners, even this population rated
themselves better than the average inmate and better than the non-prison
community on a number of traits, such as being moral, trustworthy, honest, and
compassionate (Sedikides et al. 2014).
We need to
acknowledge that we all have this tendency to view ourselves in a more
favorable light than we should. While such a tendency may be good for our
self-confidence it may prevent us from doing what we need to do to improve
ourselves, especially if we start believing that we are better than average and
therefore don’t really need to change. It is important therefore to seek
feedback from others. You want to be able to approach someone who has your best
interests at heart, and who does not have a personal agenda. According to Stone
and Stone (2002), those who seek critical feedback tend to get higher
performance ratings. They point to at least two reasons for this. One, when
you’re getting feedback, you find out what you need to do better. You can ask
questions that will help your understanding, and you can start to work on how
to get better at something. Two, you send a message that you are not only
interested in what others have to say but that you are humble enough to listen
to critical feedback. This can influence others’ perceptions of you as someone
who is open to change and willing to listen to others. Goldsmith and Morgan’s (2004) research involving
more than 11,000 leaders and 86,000 of their co-workers from eight major
corporations concluded that leaders who ask, listen, learn and consistently
follow up are seen as more effective leaders.
Second, and this is what Ericsson
emphasizes, is to focus on a specific skill. He says that you have to be
engaged and focused in what you are doing. Don’t just go through the motions;
you have to concentrate, and this is hard work. “If your mind is wandering or
you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.” (p. 151). Also,
you try to do something you cannot do and practice it over and over. The author
says: “As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve a skill in
a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can
be done with full concentration.” (p. 169) Newport
(2012) describes this well: (Deliberate practice) is “… where you deliberately
stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive
ruthless feedback on your performance.” (p. 101)
Many years ago, I visited the
Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago on a weekend after spending
several days working with several Chilean executives. The museum had a special
exhibit on Picasso’s works. One of his most famous paintings is Guernica, and it was indeed magnificent,
seen close up. But what impressed me were the hundreds of small sketches alongside
this enormous painting. They were sketches of different characters in the
painting, and showed the hard work that Picasso did to perfect the final
product. I had assumed that Picasso was a genius who could paint something from
scratch without much effort. As Ericsson states: “… research on the most
successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that
creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus
over long stretches of time.” (p. 205)
In an article about Serena
Williams, the sportswriter Jason Gay (2016) watched her one hot afternoon in
New York in 2015 as she hit serves for an hour and a half with her coach in a
practice court. For a while, there were quite a few spectators but they soon
got bored. Serena kept hitting and hitting “… until she felt she’d gotten it
right.” Gay has observed that the greatest athletes work the hardest, and that
Serena has a reputation as being one of the hardest workers in the sport. He
quotes her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou: “The number of hours is one thing, but
(more) impressive is the effort.”
What
about improving your performance as a manager? For example, Rosenzweig (2014)
points out that deliberate practice may be more suited to some types of
activities, like hitting a tennis ball with your forehand or playing a short
musical piece on the piano. When the activity is of short duration, when
feedback is immediate, when the order of the tasks in the activity is
sequential (versus concurrent), and when performance is absolute (versus relative),
then deliberate practice tends to be more useful than not. Rosenzweig gives the
example of a cosmetics salesperson going door to door, where deliberate
practice would help because these conditions are present.
On the
surface, deliberate practice might not apply to improving your performance as a
manager. After all, the duration is long, the feedback is slow, activities can
be concurrent, and a manager’s performance is almost certainly always being
compared to others’. Nonetheless, it is
important to identify those specific leadership skills you want to improve,
rather than simply having a goal to become a better leader. By breaking a manager’s tasks and activities and
focusing on specific sets of activities, global managers could benefit from
deliberate practice. Take Youseff, a global manager I was coaching who wanted
to improve his ability to lead global meetings (an important set of tasks for
global leaders). We broke down his
overall goal into specific sub-tasks, such as developing clear agendas and
running meetings effectively. He identified the specific meetings where he
wanted to practice his meeting skills, and solicited feedback from the team
both during the meeting and after the meeting (in one-on-one discussions). We
designed a short checklist of questions for him to ask team members about their
satisfaction with the meetings, and so he was able to measure short-term
performance. Over time, Youseff was able to pinpoint areas where he could
improve, and through coaching and practice, was able to improve his meeting
skills. While deliberate practice may have its limitations, setting aside the
time to practice, along with getting feedback, will help you improve your
global leadership.
Third, push yourself out of
your comfort zone and try to do things that are not easy for you. Ericsson
recommends getting a teacher. For managers, I would recommend getting a coach
or a mentor (more on this in a subsequent blog post). Of course the organizational
context matters, as does your relationship with your manager. But there are
things you can do independent of these factors that can make a difference to
your own performance as a manager. As Ericsson has pointed out: “In the long
run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some
initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.” (p. 233)
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