Shownote

'Performance Vocabulary' is it just jargon? Or does it serve a purpose?

The pandemic has forever transformed how we live and work, it has already thrown out of the window traditional wisdom that workers need to be in the workplace to be productive. The only certainty in today's world is the uncertainty. In this uncertain environment, businesses are having to rethink ways to being able to deliver effectively on their financial goals, have a highly motivated workforce, happy customers and also meet broader societal expectations. All this while navigating a world in a constant state of flux. 

The reality is that across the world many employers are also getting ready to get back to in-person work; but all employees are not. We are all trying to process new ways of working and also evaluating our relationship with work. It also does not make it easy that different countries are at different stages of the risk mitigation journey i.e. their vaccine programme; rates of infection; government advisory etc. The expectation of employers and employees also differs from country to country and across generational divide. There are no homogenous groups that are for in-person or those against. 

This may lead to different levels of engagement or dis-engagement or productivity or lack of if, which in turn is likely to impact motivation/morale and ultimately bottomline. In such scenarios what can organisations do to build a cohesive culture of performance - at the individual employee level but also at the broader organisational level? 

In the 38th episode of #TheElephantintheRoom podcast I spoke with Maya Sadasivan a leadership coach about the evolving role of managers and teams within an organisations and also performance vocabulary.

👉🏾 What can organisations do to ensure that individuals and teams are able to still deliver and be productive?

👉🏾 Performance vocabulary, what it means in practice

👉🏾 Building a team or organisation wide performance vocabulary

👉🏾 Is it a competitive advantage?

👉🏾 Should the C-Suite be championing it? Who owns it?

👉🏾 Performance vocabulary and it's role in defining culture

#motivation #culture #productivity #ownership #performancepsychology

Listen here Listen here 👇🏾👇🏾

https://lnkd.in/d-t2dbyh

Memorable passages from the podcast

👉🏾 Hi Sudha. As usual, it's a pleasure and a privilege to be able to share my thoughts and talk with you. 

👉🏾 Yes, I know, I was just thinking, where do I start? The role of managers has literally transitioned from maybe, the first or the second gear to the fourth gear, and it has simultaneously redefined a lot of workplace, structures and strategies. And it's almost as if the managers, without warning, were thrown into the deep end and nobody's asking, "do you know how to swim?" They not only have to swim themselves, they have to ensure that the team also swims. In fact, it is a point to be noted that the managers have often realised that from individual contributor, when they started handling teams, they moved from doing things, to getting it done. But in today's virtual world where you have team members distributed across geographies, across time zones, across multiple domains which need to be coordinated. Suddenly you find it's not as simple as just getting it done. And the managers that I have interacted with have often realised that it is no longer about technical competence alone.

👉🏾 The managers now are under pressure to bring in an element of character competence. In fact, Sudha I have seen an amazing rise in the number of critical programs or the life skills programs that we call you know, how we refer to in our company. And it is very heartening that managers have realised that technical competence alone won't do, character competence needs to be built. And I think that is one of the major changes that the managers are adapting to, in this virtual world, which the pandemic has really made or rather established as a new norm. 

👉🏾 It is interesting when you realise that when people are face to face while they do realise that there is a kind of a limitation to transparency across hierarchy, it doesn't really matter so much. In the sense where you can see people around you, when you can see your team members, you can see your manager. Somehow there is a compensation that happens for the lack of transparency, whereas in the virtual time, this becomes a major, major issue. And one of the first things that the companies should ensure, enforce and establish is transparency through communication channels. Not just one channel or two-channel, but with as many channels as possible, there should be complete transparency across hierarchy, across the task forces, across teams. In this context, I would like to mention the concept of objectives and key results, this concept is quite old in the sense the genesis was in 1950s and sixties. Having said that in today's virtual world, I have found there is an increased understanding and appreciation of this tool called OKRs and one of the principal aspects of OKR is the transparency it brings across board in terms of goals, in terms of process incurred, in terms of system. And this is what I believe strongly Sudha, that companies should establish. I mean, there are many other things that a company should look at. However pivotal to everything is transparency through communication channels. 

👉🏾 Very true. I mean, if you look at it today, the need for a company's vision-mission values, to be linked and aligned to every employee's work suddenly has become the need of the hour. I mean there were times when people would just walk into office, walk out of office, do the task that was delegated. But suddenly people are asking, why am I doing this, and how is it benefiting the company? And the reason for that, I think Sudha is, work from home has kind of skewed the work-life balance. Isn't it ironic that sitting at home our work-life balances become skewed and so all the more reason that employees are asking, what is this task that I'm doing, why is it required for me to be up till 10:00 PM? And what is the value that I'm contributing to the company when I do work till 10:00 PM? And therefore, like I said, that transparency element comes in. And this transparency encourages commitment, belonging involvement, support, and this is what I meant by character competence.

👉🏾 Thank you so much for giving me this space to actually share my thoughts on this Sudha. It just happened that the number of interventions I was doing increased during the pandemic, there was more requirement and requests from managers to help streamline and align their teams in terms of performance and productivity. And during the training need analysis, I started asking managers, what do they mean by performance, and what do they mean by productivity? And then when I would meet the team members and I asked them, so what's performance for you, what's productivity for you, I realised that there was a gap. And so I kind of got down to exploring a little more and understanding. The bosses demand for efficiency and a team members submission of that efficiency didn't seem to match. You know, the boss would say, I expect more ownership from you and the team members like, "Hey, I am demonstrating ownership", but the boss looks at it as accountability. Now, what is the difference between accountability and ownership? And in fact, I think one of the things I realised was everyone uses language, the way they have learned it, the way they understand it and the way they are comfortable using it.

👉🏾 And this is where the gap came between, expectations and outcomes. And so I came up with this structure where I facilitated teams and their managers to come together to create clarity on what is the meaning of the word they use, when it comes to work. So if the manager says accountability and they say responsible for execution and if the manager says ownership is responsibility for the outcome of the task. Suddenly the employee shifts from completing the task to hanging around and supporting team members so that the overall team task is complete. Immediately you see that accountability translated into ownership. 

👉🏾 Similarly, a lot of employees believe that they have skill. That means they know how to do something and they do it well. But the bosses were asking for competence, and it was like the cloud of ambiguity that was hanging over and the team was like "okay, listen, what's the difference between skill and competence?" and then the manager would give an example. And that is when the team understands that, skill is knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, doing it well and doing it error-free. Whereas competence is, when there is a pressure of time, of infrastructure, of abilities and then you still deliver, that skill becomes competence. Okay now, there's clarity. 

👉🏾 Another example that I'd like to share with you is when we talk about the experience. You know Sudha it's very easy to say, "Okay I have 10 years experience in the industry. I have 12 years of experience in the industry. I have 18 years of experience". What exactly does this experience entail? And I remember with one of these teams that I was working with, we actually sat down and wrote down. Okay, someone says 15 years of experience, what are your expectations from this guy?    

👉🏾 And when they wrote the expectations, there were so much of divergent thought process that was going on, that everyone got excited to come on the same page. And they actually created an experience matrix. And if I may share with you the first level of experience was, that the person know how to do damage control. The second level of experience was okay, the guy knows how to do damage control. Does the person know how to identify problems when a requirement comes? So is he a problem finder? The next level was, okay, the guy knows how to do damage control, he knows how to anticipate problems, but does he flag it and does it give solution options?

👉🏾 And the fourth level of experience was, he does damage control, he identifies problems, he flags and he gives solutions and most importantly, independently, he preempts. Suddenly, you know the amazing thing Sudha? Not only people were very clear about what was expected of them, suddenly they started having a career path. And managers realised, "oh, this makes my appraisal much easier. And this is where I coined the phrase 'performance vocabulary.' 

👉🏾 Let me share with you the concept of collaboration. And I think it's a buzzword nowadays. Everybody says, collaborate, collaborate. What exactly does collaboration entail. And when I shared this confusion and the teams they came up with their own definitions. And then we come up with a team definition. And one of the most interesting definitions that came up for collaboration, is it is coordination plus cooperation. And coordination is process-driven, cooperation is people-driven. And then I asked a question. So do you want your team to be process-driven or people-driven? And it is surprising a lot of people first instinctively said people-driven and then paused and said, "Okay no, we want to be process-driven and during exigencies, we need to be people-driven. Fair enough. it's up to the team to decide what works for them. And I think that is a beauty of performance vocabulary, as a team, as a business vertical, or as a company we create performance vocabulary that manifests performance and productivity for the employees.

👉🏾 This is a good question and I think when today's virtual space, so tempts people to pass the buck because nobody's really visible, visible, and I think one of the most hated and the most frequently used line is, there's a connectivity issue. And when that comes into play and you wonder, okay ultimately on whose neck is the guillotine? That makes people pause and say, "Hey, not my neck". And so here, I would like to share with you that I strongly believe that the vision-mission values of a company, should not that be restricted to the website. It should actually be leveraged. A leverage to build work culture.  

👉🏾 Let me share a particular company's value system. So like they have an acronym BRISK. B refers to benchmarking to be the best in the market. R refers to recognising contribution. I refers to improved collaboration. S refers to satisfied customers and K refers to keeping pace with the market trends. Now when you look at this acronym, BRISK, it strikes me that it is such a perfect way to develop work culture, that is sustained. And it helps to actually define, performance means, doing the best based on customer requirement. Productivity means doing the best in the minimum time with minimum infrastructure. Now this space would naturally require the company as a whole to own performance vocabulary, and they can use their vision, mission and values to distill clarity in performance words. 

👉🏾 What are performance words? You could look at transparency, what does it mean to be transparent? What does it mean to be flexible?

👉🏾 What does it mean to be agile? How is flexible different from agile? What is the meaning of, say effective versus efficient. In fact you know Sudha, a lot of teams with whom I have worked, I have asked them to create a document that is an organic dynamic document, where as a team grows into the project and evolves in its work function, they're able to keep adding vocabulary and keep building it. And anyone who joins the team, is introduced to this vocabulary so that there is absolute crystal clear understanding of expectations, right from day one. So the company should own performance vocabulary, but it could be built in to be customised for teams and team requirements. 

👉🏾 Absolutely and what'll help to unify it all, would be to keep it within the ambit of the company's values, vision and mission. 

👉🏾 Understood. I believe that a lot of teams and a lot of companies, instinctively have a top down approach in terms of clarity, on what performance vocabulary is. So the boss says, this is efficiency, this is efficiency. The boss says this is effectiveness this is effectiveness. Now the question is, does the boss explain to anybody, what is efficiency or effectiveness or do they expect the employees to go to Webster, Oxford dictionary and figure it out themselves? 

👉🏾 So here, my point is, if a company does not bring people, its employees onto the same platform in terms of expectation, understanding. Then the fallout of that would be, there would a lack of transparency, there would be a lack of clarity, there would be a lack of focus and there would definitely be a lack of cohesive sustained performance. So this would be a fallout and I think perhaps companies don't use the jargon, performance vocabulary. But in their own way, in their own style, do try and bring in clarity. It's just that I believe if you use the frame performance vocabulary, your KPIs become clearer, your performance management tool becomes easier. The employees understand what is expected of them and outcomes suddenly are so obvious and so meant to be achieved. 

👉🏾 Ahh this is interesting. I believe that would depend on the dynamics of the company. If it is a hierarchy driven company, then obviously it'll be top-down. Otherwise, if it is a company, which by the way, situation more often nowadays, where there's a lot of lateral growth, and there's a lot of deconstruction of hierarchical aspects. I think there what happens is the whole performance vocabulary could be a contributor to organic, dynamic space. And it had to change, you know, as you bring in diversity, as you bring in multiple domains into the same company, automatically the performance vocabulary will need to be adjusted, accommodation, fine-tuned. So I believe that performance vocabulary needs to be organic and dynamic and I believe it needs to be revisited periodically. Rather than an ownership of an individual, I would recommend that the company's vision- mission values, trigger an understanding of what is it that you expect and what are the outcomes and therefore define performance vocabulary.

👉🏾 I think one thing a lot of managers have told me that they are struggling with their teams, when it comes to commitment, when it comes to, clarifying on time when it comes to involvement and when it comes to taking pride in not just their achievement, but the team achievement. And when we were having these discussions, I realised that, commitment, clarification, involvement, achievement. These are very task outcome words and when you kind of analyse this, when does commitment come? When a team member feels accepted by the team. When does a team member feel comfortable to clarify? 

👉🏾 When there's a sense of belonging to the team. When does a team member get involved, not only in their task, but the team’s task? When they feel supported, they reciprocate support. And when do they feel a sense of achievement is when there is, an atmosphere of team pride. So we realised that while we were looking at task outcomes of commitment, clarification, involvement and achievement. We were actually struggling to build acceptance, belonging, support and pride. And it was absolutely magical Sudha, when teams came together to focus on creating this acceptance, the sense of belonging, the sense of support and pride. Automatically these