If you Google performance management, the search throws up more than 102 million results in less than a tenth of a minute. A book search on Amazon on the same topic provides thousands of options. Such is the fascination with the subject.
Almost everyone recognises performance as a critical catalyst to success in a competitive environment. But it has become even more critical in the current economic environment, where after years of boom, a downturn has suddenly hit every business worth its name. As growing enterprises struggle to withstand the shock, they realise this is the time to hunker down and focus on delivering high performance.
One person or a few top leaders in an organisation cannot drive high performance. To deliver consistent high performance, the best-performing companies develop their own performance culture that pervades the entire organisation.
Creating a culture of high performance is not easy. Tomes have been written about how to create such a culture. Several management gurus talk about the importance of vision and strategy, others say skills and execution are critical. Still others refer to values and motivation, while innovation and leadership are the new buzzwords in driving performance.
A review of the various theories suggests that there are three critical drivers in creating a culture of high performance.
First and foremost, employees in an organisation need to be aligned around a common vision and values. The vision sets an overall goal for the organisation and where it is strategically headed. The values set the culture and norms for interaction and behaviour. Both the vision and values need to be deeply ingrained in the individuals who work across the organisation. This requires strong and inspirational leadership at the top. A leader needs to articulate where the company is headed, how it intends to get there and then align people around that vision. They need to foster a shared understanding of the organisational values. And, most importantly, they need to walk the talk and inspire others to follow. This is the starting point of high performance.
The second critical driver of high performance is the ability to execute. Once there is alignment around vision, direction and values, the next logical aspect of driving performance is “getting it done”. But how do you create a culture of getting things done?
There are four elements that seem to drive great execution: a) skills and capabilities — without the right skills and capabilities one cannot execute or build competitive advantage; b) role clarity and accountability — everyone knows what is expected of them and takes responsibility for their results; c) motivation — urging the employees through financial and non-financial incentives to do more; and d) measurement and evaluation — having the right systems and processes in place to continuously monitor and measure outcomes and evaluate performance. Again, this way of understanding execution is very intuitive. Once you know where you are headed and how, and have people with the right capabilities in place, make sure they know what is expected of them, ensure they are motivated, and then measure and evaluate their performance.
Between the two drivers described above, performance can be managed very effectively. However, this framework is incomplete without the ability to change or constantly renew the organisation.
Without this, a company cannot sustain itself, leave alone build a culture of high performance.
The ability to change and renew will come from being innovative and externally focused as opposed to constantly dealing with internal problems.
The best performing companies obviously build a culture of innovation across the organisation and also constantly learn from competitors, customers and suppliers to set new benchmarks in performance for themselves. The combination of innovation and learning from others generates a flow of ideas and change such that the company can sustain itself, survive and/or grow over time.
Critical to making all this come together is leadership. Again, the leaders have to not only put all of these pieces in place but also show the way. While this may seem obvious, it is important to emphasise that ultimately leadership — both of the people at the top as also across the organisation — is the single most important driver of high performance.
Another important aspect to keep in mind is that working on the three drivers, outlined above, in piecemeal fashion does not work. As explained above, they are all interlinked and have to be implemented concurrently through an iterative process to get the best results.
A typical organisation has many parts to it and has a complex set of issues that have to be resolved in driving to a culture of high-performance. Getting alignment around vision and values, executing well, and the ability to change and renew the organisation are a complex set of concepts that need to be put in place and sustained. However, with this hard work comes a huge upside in terms of a significant uptick in performance. The fortune favours only the brave!
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We asked Tavant and Consim, rated highly for their HR management policies, what they thought about creating a performance culture.
Q) To boost performance, firms should clarify their vision to employees and ensure that they perform in alignment with this vision. There is another line of thought that believes it is more important to focus on tasks at hand rather than a holistic vision. What is your view?
Krishnan PP, Chief Delivery Officer, Tavant: We believe in the first school of thought. Employees at all levels are able to contribute more effectively to the organisation’s goals once they know how their work fits into the larger picture. Any organisation is made up of individuals and when their aspirations and goals can be aligned with the overall vision and strategy of the company, you have a high-performing set up.
A. Subramaniam, Vice-President, HR, Consim: To some extent, letting your employees know about your company’s vision is important as it makes them aware of the long-term perspective. I personally see vision as more of an engagement and retention tool, and not something that links to performance directly. What do I mean by engagement? Productivity is an outcome of engagement. This implies that an employee likes the job and wants to stay on. Thus, it is important for an employee to know the brief. Since 80% of employees work on mainly execution, on a day-to-day basis, we set clear targets for them to achieve. And as we want all productive employees to remain with the firm, we need to ensure that the vision is in rhythm with the tasks. We hold monthly town hall meetings to update employees on our business performance and how much we have progressed in pursuit of our vision. This is strong bonding tool.
Q) To create a culture of high performance, companies need robust accountability systems. But does that carry the risk of skewing incentives and making teamwork less attractive?
Krishnan PP, Chief Delivery Officer, Tavant: We have defined a set of values that strongly inculcates a sense of accountability as well as teamwork. We do not believe these are counter-intuitive, in fact, each will strengthen the other. The nature of the IT industry requires people to work in a collaborative fashion. In any project, multiple people would be accountable for the end result. In fact, we have always found that the high sense of accountability drives strong teamwork and vice-versa.
A. Subramaniam, Vice-President, HR, Consim: Teamwork is important. Using the Balanced Scorecard approach, with the four pillars of financials, customers, internal processes and learning and development, is one of the most potent tools to foster teamwork and we are strongly considering this for our organisation. We also need to ensure that individual accountability is always defined and we have been doing this by setting up cross-functional teams for anchoring critical business agendas. Since accountability is linked to contribution, we have gone a step further and broken down this accountability into tasks and actionables, so that each member of a team knows exactly what is expected of him or her.
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