- Performance management offers us the opportunity
to continually improve in our work.
But there are several ways that the process
can go completely off the rails
and actually make it more difficult
to achieve our goals.
In other words,
there's a dark side to performance management.
Stress is the first dark aspect of performance management.
Psychologists point to the difference between
good stress, the light pressure that can go
to perform one or two steps
beyond what we think we can do.
And corrosive stress.
The heavy pressure that affects our feelings
about ourselves, and about our work.
Corrosive stress can lead to
all sorts of negative behavior toward others,
like anger and aggressiveness.
And negative behavior toward ourselves
leading to everything from health issues
to drug and other dependencies.
Another dark aspect of performance management
is measurement.
Or, more to the point,
an obsession with measurement.
Organizational cultures that prize performance
measurement above all else,
can create a climate of fear when workers
inevitably fall below their expected deliverables.
For example, believe it or not, there are
organizations that tag workers in the bottom
15% of the workforce as underperforming.
And then regularly terminate them.
The third dark aspect is dehumanization.
The more we instrumentize
and mechanize performance management
the more we risk making a machine process
and not a human process.
Managers with many workers to manage
can easily fall into that kind of trap because
the sheer scale of coordinating the work
of so many people can seem absolutely daunting
without the help of technology.
Now, some managers may say,
these are the inevitable risks
of a focus on performance.
After all, you can't make an omelet
without breaking eggs.
But these aren't eggs they're people.
And they need to be nurtured as people.
How can you help them mitigate the dark side
of performance manager?
I'm going to give you three ideas.
First, the organization needs to provide support
for performance.
Simply requiring workers to perform isn't enough.
Workers need training
to increase their skills and knowledges.
They need reinforcement courses
and practices like yoga and mindfulness.
And they need self-inventory tools and support
to help them to gain continual insights
into ways they can continue to improve.
But the most important support
comes from trained managers.
It's especially problematic in Silicon Valley.
Where rapid growth companies often make
battlefield promotions of recently hired employees.
And the inevitable result is a (mumbling)
of people in management positions
who've never been given the specific training
for developing workers.
Second, the organization needs to have
the mechanisms in place to detect
that someone is potentially going off the rails.
Every worker, managers and those who don't manage anyone
need to be trained to recognize what can happen
when a worker is having performance related challenges.
And to know what they can do to help.
Some workers can deeply internalize
the difficulties that they're having
related to performance
and they may only be identified
if others see some of those challenging signs.
It's especially likely in our organizations
that have automated much of the
performance management process.
Remember, that process always needs to be
in the context of a positive approach
helping the worker to shore up weaknesses
and to build on their strengths.
And third, workers need to be encouraged
to be the leaders of their own performance management.
Remember that the more self-driven the performance
management process, the better the outcomes are going to be.
For the worker, for the team,
and for the entire organization.
Tracking on the dark side of performance management
is even more critical
in times of rapid change.
The rules for what constitutes performance
may be extremely fluid.
And constant change alone
can create stress and other challenges for some workers.
Inevitably,
most of the responsibility falls
on the shoulders of individual managers.
Managers become the focal point
for most performance management systems.
And the result is that managers
need the greatest training,
the greatest awareness,
and the greatest sensitivity
to the potential dark side
of performance management.