Organisational Performance
What Does Good Actually Look Like?
People are sometimes expected to meet standards that have never been properly articulated because those standards exist primarily in the mind of their manager.
Take several people with the same job title and ask each of them what someone needs to do particularly well to be excellent in that role.
Then ask their managers the same question.
In many organisations, the answers will be surprisingly different.
We have seen this repeatedly in our work, and it points towards a fairly fundamental performance issue. People are sometimes expected to meet standards that have never been properly articulated because those standards exist primarily in the mind of their manager.
A job description doesn't tell the whole story
Most organisations have job descriptions and they serve an important purpose, but they tend to describe responsibilities at a relatively broad level.
A manager might be expected to lead their team, maintain operational standards, develop customer relationships and support business growth.
The interesting questions sit underneath those statements.
What does leading the team well actually involve? What should the person know? What decisions should they be capable of making? Which behaviours matter? What would distinguish excellent performance from somebody who is simply completing the basic requirements of the job?
Those questions move the conversation from what somebody is responsible for towards what good performance actually looks like.
Nobody should discover an expectation by failing it
Problems arise when the manager has a clear expectation that hasn't been made equally clear to the employee.
The employee approaches the role according to their understanding of what is required, while the manager assesses them against another set of expectations. The difference may not become apparent until a performance conversation or appraisal.
From the manager's perspective, the employee hasn't met the required standard. From the employee's perspective, they have just discovered a standard they didn't know existed.
Neither is particularly helpful.
Better clarity creates better conversations
When expectations are more explicit, managers and employees have something more useful to discuss.
Rather than telling somebody that they need to improve their leadership, the conversation can focus on the particular behaviours or capabilities that need developing.
Instead of telling an employee they are not quite ready for progression, a manager can discuss where capability has already been demonstrated and what still needs to be developed or evidenced.
That doesn't remove managerial judgement. It gives the judgement a clearer foundation.
Confidence and competence aren't the same thing
There is another reason clarity matters.
People aren't always particularly accurate judges of their own capability. Some employees are highly confident about things they cannot yet demonstrate consistently, while others underestimate capabilities they use every day.
A useful understanding of competence therefore needs to go further than simply asking somebody whether they think they can do something.
What examples can they provide? Can they explain how they would approach it? Has it been demonstrated in the workplace? What has their manager actually observed?
Once expectations are clearer, those questions become much easier to answer.
The benefits reach beyond performance management
Defining what good looks like can influence recruitment because the organisation has a clearer idea of what it is recruiting for. It can improve onboarding because new employees understand expectations earlier and development becomes more focused because capability gaps are easier to identify.
It also helps with progression and succession because conversations about readiness can be based on something more meaningful than job titles and time served.
Perhaps most importantly, it gives managers and employees a more consistent starting point for conversations about performance.
Where technology can help
Our involvement in developing Calibrate Technology has allowed us to explore how some of these principles can be supported digitally.
Technology can make expectations more visible, help people consider their own capability, capture evidence and support more regular conversations between employees and managers.
What technology cannot do is compensate for an organisation that hasn't thought carefully enough about what it expects from its people in the first place.
The thinking still has to come first.
Our perspective
Organisations spend considerable time trying to measure performance, but there is a question that logically comes before measurement.
“Have we defined clearly enough what good performance actually looks like?”
If employees and managers are working with different interpretations, inconsistency is almost inevitable.
Making expectations clearer gives managers a better foundation for judgement and employees a fairer opportunity to understand what is required, demonstrate what they can already do and develop where they need to improve.