Manage Performance
Even in crisis, especially in crisis, you have to manage performance if you want to maintain any continuity across your routine business operations. We are running lean and pulled in different directions, but:
If outcomes matter, you have to manage
If talent matters, you have to manage
If quality, safety and delivery of service or product matter, you have to manage performance.
If culture matters…
Preoccupation with Failure: Recognizes that big threats usually start as small problems.
There is nothing more important than aligning your employees, resources, and systems to meet the new reality.
Employees are likely to be the single biggest determinant in how fast and how well an organization recovers from a crisis. How you manage performance, goals, expectations and talent during the crisis will have a direct impact on your ability to move forward.
Putting people first now, protects the future.
Reluctance to Oversimplify: Look to simply the solutions do not oversimplify the threat.
Maintaining the normal functions feels normal. Which is a comfort for most people when everything is not normal.
Uniting your employees around the common goal of doing their best to run “business as usual” is a relief to people during a crisis.
Sensitivity to Operations: More can always be done to improve the function of an organization in real time.
More can always be done to improve the function of an organization in real time if you know what needs to be done. Managing performance provides leaders with a certain sense of what needs to be done.
Commitment to Resiliency: Organizations ability to adapt under stressful circumstances.
The way that you work undoubtedly changed.
It’s very likely that your traditional approach or understanding of performance management may need to be deconstructed and re-conceptualized.
You just need an abbreviated approach to managing that focuses on setting new goals and new measures …with a heavy emphasis on coaching and feedback that moves people forward.
People learn faster through feedback.
Deference to Expertise: In high reliability organizing, every individual in any and every role should be trained and encouraged to see themselves as an expert in that particular operation.
This is the time to encourage initiative and empower people at all levels of the organization.
Experts are born during crisis.
I’ll give you an example…You have teams and individual performers who are problem-solving their way out of challenges every day. You want to know who they are- you want to recognize their roles. Some of them will surprise you. You want to invest in those that are invaluable to the organization.
Another way to cultivate expertise is to invest in expertise. If you have the resources and the capacity, you should be invested in developing talent at every layer right now. You can’t know who needs what unless you are managing performance.