Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management and Development

We provide full service talent management and talent development consulting services. Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research.

  • Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

    Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

    I recently asked a room full of managers representing dozens of organizations if they actually liked their own company’s performance management system. What do you think they said? 

    Some of us may think of Performance Management as a rubber stamp on an annual review. We often don’t think of it as a living, breathing, system. Others of us may think of Performance Management as monitoring what we’re doing wrong. We may not think of it as monitoring and developing what we’re doing right. 

    When an organization thoughtfully designs, implements, and continuously improves a performance management system, it should look like the graphic below, representing a continuous, living cycle. 

     

    OBJECTIVE

    Company objectives should be driven by the organization’s vision, mission, and values, and these objectives should cascade and influence manager and individual contributor objectives. Read more from Mary Ila on 6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values. 

    How are you writing company, department, and individual objectives? 

    MONITOR

    Progress towards objectives should be monitored regularly, and “regularly” should be a customized cadence that works for your organization. 

    For the context of this post, let’s assume that formal performance reviews are held annually. We recommend formal and informal monitoring in addition to the annual review. This may look like an informal monthly one-on-one and a formal mid-year review with your direct supervisor. 

    How are you effectively and regularly monitoring progress towards objectives? 

    COACH

    If there’s anything you take away from this light reading, I hope it’s that everyone needs coaching. High performers, low performers, and everyone in between. 

    Coaching is critical to successful performance management systems. This is where we catch potential issues and allow time for correction before a formal review period ends. This is also where we acknowledge and reinforce positive behaviors and results in real-time instead of waiting for the formal review. 

    How often are you coaching your direct reports? How often are you receiving coaching from a supervisor? Is the coaching meaningful? 

    EVALUATE

    The formal evaluation is an important element of any performance management system. It often drives rewards (stay tuned), succession planning, and development opportunities. All organizations should have a structured performance evaluation process that gauges the successful completion of objectives (or lack thereof) and sets the foundation for future objectives.

    One of the most critical components of evaluation is that team members be made aware of the evaluation methods and criteria at the start of the evaluation period. In other words, if my performance is evaluated from January to December and my annual review is in December, I need to know by January at the latest what my objectives and expectations are for the upcoming year. I need to know what I’m going to be evaluated on. What chance do I have of performing well if I don’t know what I’m expected to do? 

    When and how are you letting people know what methods and criteria will be used in their formal evaluations? 

    REWARD

    This is where we put our money where our mouths are. In order for a performance review to be effective, the rewards or incentives need to be clear, relevant, and meaningful. Employees want to know: “Why should I work hard to achieve goals? Why does it matter whether I score low or high on a review?” 

    Do your policies clearly outline the rewards structure, including how rewards are determined? Are rewards actually relevant and meaningful to your employees? 

     

    When I asked a room of nearly 50 managers if they truly liked their own organization’s performance management system, only 3 people said yes. What are you doing to help your own managers answer “Yes!” to that question? 

  • Repost! Career Development as Performance Management

    Repost! Career Development as Performance Management

    Career Development is becoming even more relevant in the workforce arena these days. Career Development as Performance Management is a great tool to attract and retain employees. 

    Revisit this blog post from 2021 for ideas on how to use Career Development as a Performance Management (& retention!) tool.

     

    I will be presenting at BSHRM on May 11 on this topic. We would love to see you there!

    Check out where else we will be in the coming weeks here.

  • 3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    With the great resignation still continuing and baby boomers, who many feel delayed retiring, now retired or retiring in large numbers due to the pandemic, succession planning has never been more important. 

    But as we’ve seen through many of our clients (and ourselves!), the need to get something done and getting it done are two different things.  When it comes to succession planning, I think the key challenge is not knowing where to start and the steps to take once started.  Overall, you need to:

    1. Know your current talent state.  This involves several sub-steps of determining: 

    a. What’s your talent funnel? This means mapping how people progress through the organizational hierarchy, determining the number of people needed at each level of hierarchy, realizing how turnover affects each level, and getting a good picture of the number of people needed to fill key vacancies. 

    b. What are your performance standards? This should be mapped out through your mission, vision, and values as an organization and connected to the KSAOS of each position. 

    c. And how do you measure them? A performance evaluation tool should be used, and in the case of succession planning especially, a way to measure performance potential should be deployed. 

    d. How is each person performing towards your company’s performance standards? Your measurement tools give you the way to determine how people are performing towards standards.  In this step, it’s critical that leaders deploying the tools should be trained on how to use them effectively and given the bandwidth to execute this process effectively. 

    e. And what do they want out of your career? Understanding what individuals want and expect out of their career progression is imperative to this process.  If you don’t know what people want, you may plan for progression that ends up being sabotaged because it doesn’t meet people’s needs or expectations.  For more on this, read about our Leaders as Career Agents Process (Taylor is also speaking about this at the Birmingham SHRM meeting in May if you want to learn more!)

    2. Know what you need to fill talent gaps both in terms of the number of people as well as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOS) needed for each position vacancy.  This should consider not only what is needed to fill key vacancies in the current state, but also what will be needed to facilitate organizational growth.  It also includes an accounting of what training and development are needed to equip people to fill the gaps.  

    3. Execute a talent management and development system and plan to meet the needs found in your gaps.  Again, to execute effectively it is essential that leaders deploying the process are 1) trained to deploy it and 2) are given the bandwidth and support to deploy it well.  In addition, it is critical that there be a calibration process done through collaboration to work across department lines to facilitate effective succession planning. 

    Want to learn more about this process through a real-life case study?  Mary Ila is speaking at ALSHRM 2022 today (May 3, 2022) about this, but you can also catch her at Florida SHRM speaking on the topic in August 2022. 

    How do you successfully execute succession planning for your organization? 

  • Is Your Organization In the Learning Zone?

    Is Your Organization In the Learning Zone?

    Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with a lot of organizations about the importance of psychological safety. A 2012 study by Google showed that psychological safety is far and away the most important factor of a team’s success, yet many organizations lack the psychological safety required to be successful. 

    A few years ago, I worked with a client that was going through some major changes and employee morale was at rock bottom. As I began speaking with employees one theme stood out, employees didn’t feel safe speaking up. There were a number of reasons for this, including the fact that they felt their voices weren’t heard, their ideas were shot down or ignored, their requests for improvements fell on deaf ears, and yet they were expected to increase performance, meet tough deadlines, and help get the company out of the red. They were working in an organization that fell into the Anxiety Zone. There was low psychological safety but high accountability.

    Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, is the top authority on psychological safety. She has spent the past thirty years studying the effects of psychological safety on work teams and has found that there are four zones that organizations fall into.

    The zones are defined by the level of psychological safety and motivation (keep in mind motivation can be negative or positive) and accountability the team has. The zones are described as follows: 

    Learning zone: In a learning zone, team members experience high accountability and high psychological safety. This is the ideal learning environment for innovation and growth because even though members are responsible for their actions, their team offers continuous support.

    Comfort zone: Team members have high psychological safety and low accountability. While this zone is more relaxed, almost like a vacation, there is no push for creativity and growth.

    Apathy zone: With low psychological safety and low accountability, team members fall into the apathy zone. There are no repercussions for mistakes, teams lack adequate communication and support, and individuals struggle to care about their work.  

    Anxiety zone: Team members experience low psychological safety and high accountability. Communication breaks down and when mistakes are made, people are often too scared of punishment or humiliation to take responsibility. Opportunities for learning and innovation are scarce. 

    Which zone is your team in and if you’re not in the learning zone, how can you help your organization get there? 

     

  • Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…Unless the Team is Dysfunctional

    Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…Unless the Team is Dysfunctional

    This week, I had the great pleasure of facilitating in-person training with a group of junior managers who are working diligently to improve team and unit dynamics among their direct reports. They quickly identified the teams they lead that are functional vs. dysfunctional, and we had some deep discussion about why some teams work and some don’t. 

    Patrick Lencioni is a subject matter expert on organizational health and team dynamics, and his model of the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” is embedded in most training about how and why teams work or don’t. The foundation for the model is Trust, followed by Healthy Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. 

    Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

     

    Trust must come first, and trust isn’t always easy to establish. Effective team leaders build trust through psychological safety, which in turn creates an environment where healthy conflict can sprout. 

    Our instinct when we hear Conflict is to physically cringe (unless you’re someone who is wired for it), but Healthy Conflict is simply the open sharing and ideas – allowing space for innovation and continuous improvement through challenging and questioning. Without it, a team will never achieve cohesion and commitment. 

    Another way to think about Commitment in teams is buy-in – are all team members bought-in to the shared purpose and goals? Without buy-in, the team will lack internal accountability. 

    When team members are not comfortable holding each other accountable to shared purpose and goals, any results achieved maybe by happenstance, not by clear and cohesive teamwork. Results improve exponentially when all members of the team hold themselves and each other accountable. 

    If teams have Trust, Conflict, Commitment, and Accountability, but struggle to value collective team success over individual achievement, they will ultimately reach some level of dysfunction. A team of people who are focused on their own independent successes are really just a group. There’s a difference!

     

    So, take a minute to evaluate a team you’re a part of. How many of the critical pillars of functional teams do you have? Is your team stuck in one of the dysfunctions? What insights can you take from Lencioni’s model back to your organization?