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I have recently been asked by a couple of PMN members whether I can issue certification of attendance on PMN training programmes for them to include in the CPD records.
This is certainly something I could do. Let me know whether you think it is a good idea. Also what information would you want the certificates to contain to make them most useful to you.
Would it be enough for me to e-mail a pdf of a certificate – or would ‘the real thing’ be more worthwhile?
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Great managers know what matters.
They know both what matters to the organisation (vision, values, goals, behaviours, strategy in action) and what matters to individual employees. Their families’ names. Who is terrified of flying. Their favourite hobbies and interests. Who has expressed interest in a leadership role.
They take every opportunity to recognise and appreciate what matters to the organisation and to recognise and respect what matters most to the individual. They help to connect the dots between what matters to people personally and what matters to the organisation.
In my work with Progressive Managers often the largest challenge is that of recognising the good stuff. Often managers do not see enough of what people do to be able to observe (even less recognise) it. And if they are in a position to observe it, often the subtleties go un-noticed and un-acknowledged.
The best managers know what they expect to see an employee doing to support vision, values and goals. They look for it – and when they see it they acknowledge it. If they don’t see it then they will ask questions:
‘Is there anything more that you could do to put our values into practice?’
‘Are there any opportunities that you can see to help reach the goals we have set?’
Good managers know their stuff. They know excellent work when they see it – and they know that they MUST appreciate it. Lesser managers struggle to distinguish excellence from mediocrity – and unwittingly establish a standard that says mediocrity will do.
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Currently ‘Skills’ within the workplace is high on the government agenda. Funds are filtering down into regional ‘pots’ that have been allocated to support the up-skilling of the nation’s workforce. David Lammy, Skills Minister commented, ‘Yorkshire and Humber has the highest proportion of low skilled workers in the country because its traditional manufacturing industry could rely on low skilled workers.’
In the past two decades the region has suffered from the decline of traditional industries with massive job losses in coal mining, steel, engineering and textiles. These have been partly offset by growth in financial, legal and telephone-based services. Were these really low skilled jobs that were lost? Just because the skills did not show up on the national qualifications database does not mean that these were unskilled workers! Was a miner really less skilled than a telephone worker with an NVQ Level 2 in Call Centre Operations?
The skills that your business needs should not be determined by Mr Lammy and the agendas and prejudices promoted by an army of skills brokers. The skills that your business needs will be determined by your customers, by your markets, by your suppliers by your competitors and by your decisions. It is likely that the skills needs will change quickly and significantly – so the real premium will go to those that learn – continually.
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‘What Gets Measured Gets Done’ gets my vote for the single, most dangerous, least accurate, management ‘truism’ of them all!
Suppose we changed the expression to ‘What Gets Recognised Gets Done’. What difference would that make to the way we do our business?
First of all managers and leaders would have to think about what they want to recognise in their organisation. This is a big question. It speaks to values, performance and ethos. Recognition encourages consideration of many things that cannot be easily ‘measured’.
If Enron had ‘recognised’ more than short term financial performance would things have turned out differently? What are Goldman Sachs ‘recognising’ as they pay out £8.4 billion in performance related bonuses to their staff (UK employees of the bank average £320 000 in Performance Related Pay)? Is financial performance the only thing that matters for Goldman Sachs or do they provide equally strong ‘recognition’ for other things that might matter like ‘ethics’ or ‘long term customer relationships’?
Secondly managers and leaders would have to consider how are they going to recognise it? What does excellence look like, sound like, feel like? You can’t just rely on the numbers. You might have to go and observe people doing the work:
Feedback becomes a primary tool for recognising what works and what doesn’t. It also becomes a primary tool for reward as people start to get recognition and validation for the good stuff that they do.
So the next time someone says ‘What gets measured gets done’ perhaps you should ask them if they really believe what they say.
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Many of the managers I know hate this time of year. Because it is not just Christmas that is coming into season.
It is also that time of the year when thoughts turn to performance reviews and annual appraisals. For most managers and staff this is a painful and seemingly pointless and unfair process largely driven by HRs obsessive need to have the paperwork completed and correctly filed.
In many organisations, the annual performance appraisal is a phenomenally stressful exercise with little discernible impact on results. If we’re going to manage and lead high performing organisations, we can’t afford to have performance appraisal “systems” that don’t affect performance.
Writing performance reviews for many of us is a memory feat of Derren Brown like proportions. Our intuition throws up a grading for an individual and then we trawl the recesses of our minds for incidents to justify it. And too often because our memory fails us we just play it safe with a ‘satisfactory’.
And if we do rate one of our reports as performing poorly then aren’t we just shooting ourselves in the foot? As the manager we are paid to manage performance – not just to report on it at the year end.
For many managers the difficulties of preparing and conducting effective performance reviews stems from two major causes:
But all is not lost. There are things that you can do to make the preparation and delivery of performance reviews less stressful and more effective.
Through December and into the New Year PMN is running half day workshops in Leeds, Harrogate and Hull designed to help make the process of writing and delivering performance reviews more effective and less painful! Packed full of practical tips and useful tricks to make the process work more effectively and efficiently these workshops will help to make the performance review process much less of a headache.
You can find out more about the workshops here and can book your place on-line here