Management By Objectives (MBO) was popular not long ago, and has been updated to include a different perspective. It’s not about managing people anymore. It’s about managing the agreements for “performance” in a network designed to achieve a goal. Find out more about “performance” right here.
Good management practices are a path to better organization performance. One important practice is getting feedback on the success of a team’s products, services and communications to others inside the organization and outside it too. Feedback is a valuable performance resource: how else will we know if our groups are performing well?
I’ve been clearing out – very slowly – the client files from my career as a management consultant. I found some notes on what one workshop leader – I’ll call him Alex – said about “how to be a good manager”, and as you’ll see below, I didn’t agree with him on several of his […]
What is “performance management”? Tracking how many hours people are at work? Or tracking the results they produce? Hmmm. It’s easier to watch the clock than do the real work of managing performance.
Procrastinating on our unfinished chores and projects is natural. Maintaining an effective “Results Wanted” list – and doing the work to check things off that list – isn’t hard either. But we sometimes forget that’s what it takes to get some things done.
Do team meetings “develop people” as well as 1-on-1 meetings? Opinions differ, as different managers approach “performance management” in their own way.
Private conversations are useful in the workplace for some things, like hiring or re-positioning someone. But performance conversations – agreements for what people will deliver – are best done by the group. It builds teams, increases integrity, and improves “delivery performance”.
People pay attention to people – and make lots of assessments and judgments. That’s natural. But it maybe not the best way for a manager to support high performance or reach an organization’s goals.
Don’t just assume your Boss(es) want one kind of work from you. Three kinds of performance – Doing, Done, and Delivered – deserve to be clarified.
One manager in a recent MBA class was provoked by a discussion about the importance of using schedules, and offered her opinion on the difference between leaders and managers. “I want to be a leader,” she said, “not a manager. What does scheduling have to do with leadership?” Good question, actually. We were talking about […]
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