How You Can Transform Performance Management

If you work for a company that focuses on "what we want to become" then I've got some research findings for you. Instead of overdoing it with lots of details, I thought I'd just skip to a practical application of one area of the research findings. I'm covering insights that you can use to upgrade and update your performance management practices.

There is a world of exciting insights in "Global Talent 2021: How the new geography of talent will transform human resource strategies." It is a completely practical and fascinating report. Executed by Oxford Economics, it was produced in collaboration with an impressive list of heavy hitters: Towers Watson, AIG, American Express, British American Tobacco, the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, Cummins, Coca-Cola, Edison International and the Organization of American States. You may want to check out the rest of the findings (highly encouraged) or wait until my next blog post for some more coverage of the study.

Imagine this. Instead of prodding employees to struggle through "what do we do next," you can use  these findings to apply performance management to the future. 

Here are the four skill areas that will be in most demand over the next five to ten years. Notice, not job titles or professions -- skill areas. Areas that are most likely applicable across your business and jobs. Areas that can be addressed now via MBOs, development plans and internal communications -- through your guidance -- to advance your company's capabilities as well as address your employees' desires for career development.

1. Digital skills. Here they are talking about an employee's ability to solve problems via digital applications rather than specific jobs. There is a exploding array of applications that make possible digital expression of work or collaborative processes. Much of this work entails marketing literacy. Anything else? Employee experience in ecommerce is an obvious example of a future need; so is addressing internal efficiencies digitally and overcoming inefficient legacy infrastructure.
2. Agile thinking. Most of us in HR understand that the future will bring increasing complexity and some "paradoxical" leaps (instead of iterative change). Do our employees have these expections too? Are they prepared to deal with them without extreme emotional upheaval? In the near future, the acceptance of this level of turmoil will be demonstrated in work practices that prepare for not only the preferred, but also additional scenarios. This flexible mindset, and these work practices, can be introduced to a business (and HR) with great immediate value.
3. Interpersonal and communication skills. HR is ahead of the curve in understanding the need for co-creative, collaborative, team-focused competencies. But few of us have gotten our companies to move very far ahead on the fundamental for innovation -- employees with such a deep understanding of the business and its strategy that they can adeptly align with them as they make any decision.
4. Global operating skills. Here's what the near future has in store. ' . . . according to Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, firms will increasingly move from "glocalization," where home market products and services are tailored to the tastes of overseas customers, to reverse innovation, under which innovation is led from emerging markets and then brought back home to mature markets.' Each company is at a different notch on this continuum, but I think it would be really helpful to employees if they could see this strategic shift more clearly. Use the performance management process to talk over this evolution together in the larger terms, instead of describing changes as one-at-a-time updates to individual products and clients.

Margaret O'Hanlon is founder and Principal of re:Think Consulting. She'll join Ann Bares and Dan Walter of the Compensation Cafe to speak the unspoken -- Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communication -- in an upcoming book. Margaret brings deep expertise in compensation, career development and communications to the dialog at the Café. Before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal with Towers Watson. Margaret is Deputy Director of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Pacific Plains Region. She earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Creative writing is one of her outside passions, along with Masters Swimming.

Comments

[Jacque Vilet]

I like Immelt's comment about reverse innovation. I think it will take some time for this to sink in.

U.S. companies first going overseas tried to use their business model and said when it was not accepted "These countries are emerging -- they aren't very sophisticated about business. Give them time and they will learn."

Not a very "adaptive" view. In this global world --- we can all learn from each other. No one has a monopoly on innovation.

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Excellent points well presented, Margaret. Current benchmark job titles and formal educational courses are inadequate to these real issues and valid challenges. Innovation is always opposed by the status quo mechanisms. Conventional attitudes often mistake copycat "most popular practice" as "best practice." Lemmings instinctively shun truly new but situationally more effective ideas as frightening or risky.

Each brand new concept (frequently originating in a region unconstrained by arbitrary rules of traditional custom) usually requires many decades of proven success among gutsy firms before it gets slam-dunk adopted in standard job definitions and revised conventional tradecraft courses by conservative enterprises. Titles and education lag at the wrong end of the temporal curve from real innovation: they never lead and always follow long after any new approach has become a universal semi-requirement.

Agree with Jacque that new models are much more likely to originate in unstructured environments where they face the least likely prospect of being prematurely suppressed or blocked by ossified bureaucracites. Thus, the best new concepts might be identifiable by the degree of resistence they inspire in arrogant people unwilling to objectively consider them via the scientific method.

Being big and old doesn't make you smart or agile and often indicates you have lost the ability to be either. While a struggling new firm will find efficiency and speed essential for survival, a fat global HQ may be too insulated from pressure to find either characteristic very important... until they founder under the weight of the mistakes engendered by their engrained pompous certitude and resistence to change.