- If you're a manager, you may find
that not all of your team will be able
to be initially proactive enough to generate
their own performance goals and metrics on their own.
Some people need a little more structure
in their approach to adaptive performance management.
If you're a manager and you find a team member needs
a defined performance management process,
I want to introduce you to a new way of thinking
about performance management at an individual level.
It's called Adaptive Performance Design.
Now design thinking treats problem solving
as a creative journey by following a set of creative steps.
It's possible to come up with completely different results
than if you had approached planning
in a very linear fashion.
By treating performance management as
a collaborative design process, you'll approach
the process in a completely different way.
Now I'm not going to teach you design thinking.
Instead I'm going to walk you briefly
through the design steps for a performance
management agreement.
Now in the first step, empathy.
It's critical to understand the skills
and other attributes of the worker.
If they've done their own self inventory,
they can tell you the work they love doing the most.
If they haven't done it, you need to find it out.
There are plenty of self inventory tools out there
from eparachute.com to the full self-inventory process
in the book What Color is Your Parachute.
The more complete understanding you have
of a worker's unique capabilities,
and the better understanding they have as well,
the better the performance design process will be.
If you've been faithful to the empathy phase
when both you and the worker have a good grasp
of what makes them special, you'll understand
the kind of work they're most motivated to do.
Now step two is Define.
For performance management, this is essentially
a mission statement.
What is it that the worker needs to be
most focused on accomplishing?
In a directional sense.
It's not about defining the specific steps
they'll take to get there.
It's about establishing a vision
for what it will feel like for the worker
when they're doing their best work.
The worker needs to know the mission statement
for your team, for your division,
and for your entire organization.
So they can ensure that mission statement
for their personal goals is in alignment.
Step three is Ideate.
Remember when we talked about the building blocks of work?
Skills, tasks, problems, and results.
Depending upon the kind of work
that the worker's being asked to do,
as a manager you'll need to help them ideate
about which of these is the most critical
for their particular work.
For very process intensive work,
the tasks they perform and how well
they perform them will be what's most important.
For more creative or variable work,
defining the problems to be solved will be more critical.
And for work where it's less important
when tasks the worker performs or problems they're solving,
performance design needs to focus on the results
the worker will generate.
The main goal for this phase is getting a set
of important tasks, problems, and or results
out on the table.
Some people like using post-it notes
and a whiteboard for this process
because it allows the worker to move things around
and reassemble components to get a clear picture
of what a job looks like.
Now next in the design process comes a prototype
that is a definition of what success could look like.
This forms the basis of the agreement
between the two of you about how the work can be done.
What problem should be solved in a month?
Three months?
What results should have been achieved by then?
How should the worker have improved
at performing specific tasks at that time?
Some organizations call these KPIs
or Key Performance Indicators.
Metrics that will indicate that progress is being made
towards a set of goals.
So how do you know when you're done
with a design process up to this point?
When you and the worker are able to look
at what's agreed to so far and know the answer
to one very simple question.
What does success look like for this role?
Now there's one more step, step five,
which is to test.
There's a working idea of what needs to be done.
The worker now jumps in and starts performing it.
Together you track what's working and what isn't.
And as time goes on, the worker returns to the ideate phase
to suggest ways to rejigger things based
on any new understandings.
Now suppose your HR department has
an entirely different performance management process
with forms to be completed and a structured
process to be followed.
The answer is simple.
Do the adaptive performance design process first
then plug in the results into whatever
your HR department requires.
You'll have followed a collaborative process
with your team members, but you'll also
be delivering what your organization requires.