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Get Rid of Performance Appraisals!!! Performance Appraisals are incompatible with the Agile mindset!!!
Hi guys, in my last post, I explained what a performance review is, and why it fails. In this post, I am going a bit further. I explain how performance appraisals are incompatible with the new way of leading people, this is the second post of a series of three.
In modern companies that embrace Agile mindset, it is expected to focus on team work, but in reality individual performance appraisals focus on us as individuals not on the team itself. When we forget ourselves and focus on the team, problems such as the ones that were referred, here will arise. Another possibility is the other extreme that is referred in Abolishing Performance Appraisals refer: “Yes, work in teams, but remember, take credit for yourself, get recognised, watch your back because you are accountable for you, and that’s what goes in your file, not the team stuff”. I do not see value in any of the situations.
During the past years, several books were published about the importance of unleashing intrinsic motivation on people during their working time. Companies keep focusing on practices that reinforce the behaviour “do this and you get that”, and this is exactly what performance appraisals mean. My friend Vasco Duarte says that performance appraisals are a hidden whip from your boss, it transmits the idea of: “Do what I want or there is no bonus or career advancement for you”.
Another interesting characteristic of modern management is the fact that we want to respect diversities. Like Tom and Mary say: We want to manage for diversity and capitalising on the differences in people, instead with performance appraisals we create an approach “one-size-fits-all”, treating everyone in the same way forcing using the same process over and over again.”
New managers understood they need to shift a focus away from inspecting people to examining and understanding processes, instead they rely on people inspection and Management by Objectives. Processes should focus on JIT (Just in Time) way of working. Performance appraisals cause supervisors to stockpile and rework feedback, guidance and development triggered by calendar rather than offering help just on the right time.
Modern management already understood that a system is not the sum of its parts, it´s the sum of parts plus the interaction of all parts. So why companies care only with the parts (this is what performance review does) instead of focusing on improving the whole system.
Below there is a picture I took from the book Abolishing Performance Appraisals by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins. This picture is a fantastic summary of why performance appraisals are incompatible with new ways of management.
This blog post is part of my new book that you can find here. If you are interested in being a beta reader and provide me valuable feedback, please subscribe the newsletter below. I will keep you updated with the latest status and the first drafts of new chapters.
Get Rid of Performance Appraisals!!!
Hi guys, last week I wrote a post that was quite polemic and got a lot of attention. I wrote about an elimination of managers in our organisations performing an usual old management style. The old management style is obsolete and we need to think about new ways to help our colleagues and employees. The previous post can be found here.
This week I want to continue this discussion and explain why we should abolish performance appraisals, this will be the first post out of a series of three posts that I will write on this topic. I have been reading several books about the topic and I wanted to leave some ideas that I collected from the book: ““Abolishing Performance Appraisals””
Our world is changing, our mode of working is shifting to empowerment, collaboration and teams. This means that each company will need to shift from managing people to help people managing themselves and the business. Many companies think that helping individuals to get better is the recipe for the organisation to improve as a whole but often they fail. Substantial organisation improvement can only be achieved by improving the whole as a complex system. Naturally, individual improvements efforts are beneficial and often necessary but too much emphasis is placed here.
What is “Performance Appraisals”?
Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins define Performance Review in their book as: “The process of evaluating or judging the way in which someone is functioning”. It is even more interesting as in most cases managers do not have any contact with our daily work. So can you explain how they can actually evaluate or judge our work? If you know how to explain, please contact me, I am eager to learn :) :)
I think I am not alone thinking about this issue. A survey performed by the Society for Human Resources management found that 90% of performance review systems were not successful. So why do we hang onto a process that does not work? Because people and organisations think that no performance appraisals means no feedback, no special help on career development and performance issues. They think their salary increases and their career development will be decided arbitrary without any input. Another important part is that people think they need performance appraisals to tell them where they stand. They believe that an evaluative system will recognise it and reward them.
Why performance appraisals fail?
The problem with performance appraisals is beneath the surface in the form of underlying assumptions, i.e, the basic premises and beliefs upon which the performance appraisals are built. Below you can find two tables from the same book where the authors list several assumptions and identify the problems with the same assumptions.
On the next post I will explain the clash of performance appraisals with our new way of thinking in modern companies. To see the next post press here.
This blog post is part of my new book that you can find here. If you are interested in being a beta reader and provide me valuable feedback, please subscribe the newsletter below. I will keep you updated with the latest status and the first drafts of new chapters.
Get rid of Managers!!!
Hi guys, this blog post is the result of a chat that I had with a friend of mine today. He called me asking for an advice about team leaders within scrum teams. Right after we booked a dinner, I understood that this is a very interesting topic that cannot be discussed over the phone :D :D
As soon as we met, he told me that his company decided to insert Team Leaders in his teams. I just smiled because I knew what was coming. So I asked:
“What is the biggest reason behind this? Why did you think about this strategy?”
He explained they feel they spend too much time with 1:1′s and performance reviews not allowing them to focus on their jobs. Afterwards I asked: “Ah, so you think that getting people to do what you do not want to do is a better way to improve the company as a whole?”
He seemed a bit embarrassed and continued:
“No, it´s not about us, this is a better way to give more attention to people and help them to improve themselves and their career development plan”. I reacted to this as following:
“What factors do you have in your possession that lead you to think that a manager knows better what a person needs for his improvement than the person itself?” He did not really know what I meant so I explained:
“Managers think they know the best what people need in order to develop their skills, but in reality is the person that knows where are her/his strengths and where to ask for a support, not other way around!” Then he said:
“Yes but we need to have a person within the team that has an overview how people perform because HR demands to have an annual performance review”. My immediately thought was:
“Ah, it comes from HR! Performance Reviews Of course!!!!” I just told him that perhaps it is time to rethink their way of management. I asked if he really believes that annual performance reviews bring any value to employees !!! He replied:
“I do not think it brings much of the value but we need to know how people perform in order to distribute bonus, salary increases and all perks. So I replied:
“Ok makes sense, but if you are trying to empower teams to be independent, why not delegate that to them?” Naturally, he was shocked! :)
“Let me explain: you, as a manager, you have your budget, you know how much money you can spend on salary increase, why don’t you talk with the team and give the constraints to them.” For example:
“Tell them that you have 10% of budget increase to be distributed within the team. Ask them who deserves what and allow team to decide that. They are the ones knowing who performed the best! We do not need any manager or HR person saying what percentage they deserve! In our companies, we are trying to reward a success as a team but what you do is destroying a team spirit.” Take this example:
“Imagine that you, as line manager, set objectives for a developer to develop his JAVA skills. Imagine that during the development process ,the team needs his strong skills in scripting to solve some problems they have. The team as a whole was able to deliver fantastic results but you will rate this guy as a poor performer because he did not developed any skills in JAVA!!!! Do you see where am I going?” He replied:
“Uh, you are so right! I cannot imagine the face of the poor guy that will get a really crappy review whereas in reality he did a fantastic job to help the team”.
“Exactly!!! You should empower the team to take their own decisions. The same applies for training and bonus. Ask the team what perks does each team member deserves. This is a complete radical approach, so I am not asking you to do it in whole organisation, instead, try it in a small team and see the results. Learn, change and adapt. The old way of management is outdated and obsolete. One of the big problems is that we are implementing agile in our organisations but we forget other part of the organisation still uses old policies that ruin the work that we are trying to achieve”. He was completely surprised with the outcome of our conversation. I guess he expected something else but I think I succeeded because he promised that he would give it a thought about it.
In a conclusion, the title of my post does not mean that we should get rid of managers. Instead, we should get rid of managers´ job role. We are dealing with super intelligent people that do not need some random person telling them how they need to do their jobs and most importantly, suggesting what they need to improve as professionals.
If you want to know more about companies that are adopting a NoManager approach take a look here and here. Do you know any other organizations that are doing the same? Share with me.
“We need more leaders in our companies and less managers!”
Target Conditions - A way to move towards your “Company Vision”
Hi guys, some weeks ago I spoke about the importance of having a vision for a company, that post can be found here. In this post I will explain a possible way how companies can educate their employees to work towards their “Company Vision”. This blog post is inspired by the book “Toyota Kata” written by Rother. All pictures are taken from the book.
If your company is a small start up, I believe it´s easier to understand what they need to do in order to work towards a company´s vision. But how can you do the same if your company has thousands of stakeholders? This is what we will discuss in this post.
A Vision is something blurry, vague and very distant. The path is unclear and cannot be know in advance. So how do we find and stay on the path? The answer is to create “Target Conditions”.
Across an organisation, people should work towards a vision using successive target conditions. A target condition typically represents a step closer to the vision and a challenge that is not achievable with a current setup within a company. As Rother wrote in his book: “You can think of a target condition like a much shorter-term desired state that is more clearly defined than the distant vision. ” Likewise the vision, a target condition is not a financial or an accounting target, instead is a description of a condition. When a target condition is reached, another one is created.
When a target condition is defined, it is not optional nor easily changeable. A tutor gives all freedom to a responsible person who figures out “how” to achieve the condition, this is where Toyota is really good: People Empowerment. Humans are good at solving problems and arranging new ways to achieve new levels of performance and that´s why Toyota gives a power to people to come up with their own solutions. The picture below summarises what was discussed in this post. This blog post is a brief introduction, during the next weeks I will continue explaining “target conditions” more into detail .
What do you think about it? Do you think the concept can be useful for your company/organization? These and other topics will be discussed in our MeetUp “Creating High Performing Organizations in Munich” if you want to join us do it here.
Coaching Dojo
Hi guys, some weeks ago I discussed the “Coding Dojo” topic, the post can be found here. This week I want to explain how you can apply the same concept to coaching. This is something that I have been thinking of organizing in Munich.
A coaching dojo is an activity where coaches gather together to practice their coaching skills. These sessions are a great way for coaches to improve their skills. It´s an opportunity for them to apply the “Arc of coaching” or to be aware aboutwhat are their thoughts while coaching.
Everything starts with a pre-selection of a problem selected by a coachee. The dojo runs with two people working in a pair in front of an audience, one of the persons acts as coachee, the other as a coach. The coach tries to help the coachee with a problem. The topic should be professional topic, here you can find the reason why you should not take chose a personal topic. During this time the audience observes how the pair is conducting the coaching session.
A session takes between ten to fifteen minutes, after that the audience is invited to provide feedback about how the coaching was conducted. When the session is over, a person from the audience switches with one of the pairs. The remaining person changes the role in order to be a coach and a coachee. For the first session you might want to keep the same pair and ask them to change positions after the session in order to enable both persons to try different roles. This will allow everyone in the room to participate in this activity.
I believe this is a great way to help coaches to practice outside of their professional environment.
Becoming a high performing team
Hi guys, some time ago I discussed how important it is for a company to have a vision, here you can find more about it. In this post I would like to discuss about the same topic but on a team level.
Currently I work as a Coach for teams that are performing really well and they are delivering a great business value, yet I think we could do better. I have been thinking in several ways how to help them to a next step and how can I help them as a coach to make this happen…
This post covers examples of what I want to try with teams and I would like to get your opinion on this topic. These team members know what they need to do as a team which sounds great, but as a coach, I believe I can help them to achieve more… I feel they the team doesn´t have a vision nor a purpose, they do their daily job without knowing where they want/should go. My job is to help them to become a high performing team. What I want to try has three parts:
1) Set the Product Vision
In my humble opinion, the first thing that we must ensure in order to have a successful team is to establish a common goal for all team members. In my case, I am referring to a development team, therefore I believe the common goal is to deliver a high quality product to a customer. In this situation, a Product Owner has a key role as a master of the product vision and a responsibility for sharing that vision as well as making sure that everyone understands how product should be built. I am going a bit further by saying that the Product Owner is ultimately responsible for creating the common goal for the team.
“Vision without action is just a dream.
Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.”
by Joel A. Barker
A possible exercise would be to ask the Product Owner to prepare a press release and then to present it to the team. With this exercise, the team will be able to see a big picture and understand WHY they should work in the team and WHAT they need to accomplish as a team, but be careful PO should not define HOW the team should work, that is team’s reponsability. In my opinion, this exercise is important because of two reasons: on the one hand, if everyone in the team knows what they need to do, the exercise is reaffirming the common goal, while on the other, if the team members do not have a clear idea what their common goal is, having this exercise will help them to create the necessary common goal.
2) Help a team to define their definition of awesomeness
It´s extremely important to help the team to find their own definition of awesomeness, help them to create a “dream team”. To do that start a brainstorming session asking everyone what is the meaning of “awesomeness”. If they think about an “awesome team” what that represents for them… You might want to break the topic into smaller pieces, for example:
- Technical awesomeness: Being able to release in every check in, 100% test coverage, 0% manual testing, ATTD Gurus, etc.
- People awesomeness: The best group of individuals in the world, the team that have more fun, the team that helps each other at every moment of the day, etc.
- Innovativeness awesomeness: The most innovative team in the world, the team always come up with new cool ideas, etc.
There are more other examples, I´m sure you will have plenty of ideas. Be DEMANDING with yourself.
After this exercise, you will have plenty of ideas about what an awesomeness team means. Help the team to create their final version of their “Awesome Team”.
3) Help a team to select their values
I believe everyone acts based on their values, therefore defining team values is an extremely important activity. This is a powerful exercise that brings people together. Defining values is a way to select a behaviour of people in some circumstances. For example, if you define a humour as one of your values (one of my previous teams did it) it means they want have fun during working time. Every time things were getting boring they referred to this value reminding them that something was missing and they would have needed to do something about it in order to bring some fun into a daily work. This is just a small example, you can come up with thousands more.
In my opinion, if your team is a Scrum team you should remember Scrum Values:
Focus: Because we focus on few things at a time, we work together well and produce excellent work. We deliver valuable items faster.
Courage: Because we are not alone, we feel supported and have more resources at our disposal. This gives us the courage to undertake greater challenges.
Openness: As we work together, we practice expressing how we’re doing and what’s in our way. We learn that it is good to express concerns so that they can be addressed.
Commitment: Because we have great control over our own destiny, we become more committed to success.
Respect: As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.
The team does not need to adopt Scrum values but adopting and referring to them frequently helps to improve a scrum team. On top of these values I would select two or three more to help the team to create their own identity. Here you can find a big list of values to serve as input.
Go and Try it
I am thinking of doing this with several of my teams. I do not know what an outcome will be but I am quite excited to see how they will react. What do you think about it? Any cool ideas to help here?
Show me the direction, I will find the way!!!
Hi guys, lately I have talked a lot with some of my friends from various companies and industries, and I have found a common trait: People spend too much time in fire fighting mode!!! I have been thinking about this topic, and I guess this is time for me to express my ideas and get your feedback.
I believe there are several reasons that force people to spend most of their energy on fight firing mode. Nevertheless, the one that I believe is one of the most important one causing the biggest problem, is the absence of a strong vision. People must feel connected to something bigger, greater, something that makes sense to them but this is not enough… They must know what is an ultimate vision, otherwise they will be lost within their daily activities.
So what can we do in order to improve this situation?
Define Vision:
First, we must define a simple vision/mission. Something that is so simple that even a 6 year old kid can understand. Let´s take a look into Toyota’s example: “Produce cars using a process that is 100% efficient without any waste”. Simple but powerful.The company knows that this vision is impossible to reach but keeping this vision in mind allows all employees to follow a direction. Employees know that their job is to improve the process continuously until they reach 100% efficiency, this will never happen, yet it´s a good way to keep a continuous improvement culture.
Give Small steps towards the Vision:
In the book “Drive” written by Daniel Pink, the author refers that SMART goals might have a negative impact on people’s performance. When we create SMART goals, human brain tends to do just what is necessary to reach that goal. Most of the time we could achieve much better results, but because the goal states a “Specific” part, we put just enough effort to reach that part, not doing any effort to go further. If you want to know more about this topic check my previous blog here. A second trap from SMART goals is the fact that often these goals are imposed by a management, instead of being created by people who perform a job without creating an ownership feeling.
Because of previous reasons, I believe Toyota´s approach is more adequate. Toyota uses a different approach: “Target Conditions”. These conditions are small increments that are defined by employees in order to pursue a big vision. These are not goals imposed by managers, these are experiments created by employees. Since the approach was created by them and not imposed by someone else, they will have a stronger ownership feeling allowing them to perform better. When a current target condition is achieved, they will create a new target condition to pursue a big vision. This is a fantastic way allowing people to work on their own solutions. Many people are extremely smart, they do not need to have managers telling them what to do, they just need to have someone showing the direction. “Show me the direction, I will find the way!”.
Conclusion:
Naturally, this is not enough to change a company or an organization, but with a help of this post I hope to create an awareness of the topic. When people do not have a vision and do not perform small steps towards that vision, I believe, that it will be extremely difficult to go out from the fire fight mode within a company. I am looking for volunteers that are able to try my ideas in their own companies. I would love to know if you are able to implement a bit of this idea at your company :) If not at your organization, maybe in a department where you work.
What do you think guys? I would love to hear more from you.
D5 Creation