 I met this morning with Robert McHardy, a neighbour of mine (and a good poker player) who also happens to be an executive at Self-Management Group,
a recruitment process and professional development consultancy with a
unique approach to its craft. The organization is best known for its
three stage turnkey recruitment process: (1) a pre-screening for
capabilities, by which candidates use an online SMG profiling
questionnaire to acknowledge whether they do or do not have the
essential competencies needed for the job, (2) a structured interview
to assess candidates' competencies and work-habits, and (3) an
unstructured interview to assess candidates' fit with the
organization's culture and precise requirements of the position. What
lies behind this recruitment process, however, is a complete model of
alignment between individuals' and employing organizations' performance
objectives, and a philosophy that espouses self-management as a means of optimizing, sustaining and improving that alignment.
What is intriguing about this model is that it appeals, in different
ways, to both liberal and conservative worldviews of the relationship
between employers and employees. To the liberal, this model allows each
individual to take personal responsibility for managing their own
life-long career and developing their own skills -- abilities that are
portable as employees move from company to company or create their own
enterprise. To the conservative, this model allows employers to offload
much of the responsibility for employee performance from management and
corporate trainers to employees themselves, and also puts the onus on
employees to optimize their attitude and energies, for the betterment
of both themselves and their employees. It's a very libertarian
approach to professional development and personal productivity.
The model says that people should be evaluated and rewarded on performance, not on results.
Results are absolute outcomes that can be influenced by many
uncontrollable factors and hence may have little to do with an
employee's own efforts. By contrast, performance is success relative to
potential, and is a process that is fully controllable by the individual and largely a function of effort.
The model is:
Performance =
Competency (i.e. Talent + Skills) x
Applied Effort (i.e. Commitment + Energy) x
Environment (i.e. Position Fit + Cultural Fit)
In other words, what you get done is a function of (1) your natural
talents and learned skills, (2) the focus and energy with which you
apply those talents and skills, and (3) the amenability of the
organization, both as a result of your position and the overall
organizational culture (structure, style, systems, and modus operandi),
to provide the opportunity for that effort to be effective. (What you
get done) = (What you have) x (What you do with it) x (Where and how
you do it).
If you haven't the talent or the skills, or get disengaged, distracted
or discouraged, or if the organization just isn't receptive, you will
not succeed. What is controversial is that Self-Management Group says
individuals have control over all six elements
of the equation, and that it is in the interests of management to teach
each employee, and of employees to learn, how to 'self-manage' these
six elements of performance and productivity.
My immediate reaction was great skepticism. I accept that, in this day
and age, we must each take primary responsibility for our own
competency, but surely the organizational environment is outside our
control, and, if our applied efforts are continually rebuffed by
indifferent, misguided or otherwise-preoccupied management, surely that
will start to dampen our enthusiasm and sap both our commitment and
energy to keep doing our best? How can this be our fault? Haven't these guys heard that 90% of everything wrong with business is because of management?
Robert's answer is that fault-finding, and causality, are beside the
point. The environment is what it is, and organizational culture
changes very slowly, so as employees we need to understand it, accept
it, and apply ourselves within those constraints. If we conclude that
we simply cannot be
productive in that environment, then we need to change that by either
getting into another position in the organization, or finding another
organization with a culture more receptive to what we have to
contribute.
And this isn't just true in the workplace -- it's true in whatever
we're doing: Personal relationships, fields of study, hobbies,
communities where we live and make friends. The equation above holds
true, and if the performance is low, it's up to us to fix it. Each one
of us has the power, and the responsibility. The self-management
process is:
- Set your own goals, performance objectives, and challenging but realistic expectations
- Figure out what you need to do: Concrete, measurable, (self-)manageable steps
- Make a personal commitment to do them, keep that commitment, and give yourself credit for keeping it
- Evaluate your own performance (using the above formula) and its results
- Reward yourself for high personal performance (and ignore
external, purely results-based rewards unless there is a sustained and
pronounced disconnect between these external rewards and your
self-assessed performance)
The higher you reasonably set your own expectations, the greater your performance is likely to be: If you think you can,do it, you're right. Instead of relying on external motivation and rewards, learn to self-motivate and self-reward.
Ultimately, no one else can motivate you -- the best they can do is to
guess what would motivate you and reward you for that behaviour/effort.
That's why management-run contests and bonuses can ultimately become de-motivating
-- they need to be sustained, become expected, and if they reward
unachievable or uncontrollable results they can be demoralizing and
lead to dysfunctional and irresponsible behaviours. By contrast,
self-motivation is self-reinforcing: Personal achievement brings
personal satisfaction and other self-rewards, as well as new
competencies and greater self-confidence, which raises personal
expectations, which further increases personal performance and
achievement.
McHardy explains that there are some tricks to doing this right: You
need to learn to budget your energies and align them with the
commitments you've made to yourself, to avoid burnout. You need to
break performance objectives down into achievable interim objectives
you can measure against each small step towards a major goal. By
focusing 80% of self-management on allocation of time and energy, and
only 20% on objectives and results, you learn about why, when and how
results are achieved, which improves future performance further, and
you can anticipate (and adjust energies for) unsatisfactory results,
and not blame yourself for them. And for procrastinators, he offers
this advice: Put your energy into doing it, not into thinking you
should do it. Choose what should be done (prioritization), immediately
turn the "I should" into "I will" (commitment), and turn the "I will"
into "It's done" (keeping the commitment). Getting Things Done can help here.
All of this is consistent with what Tom Peters called 'businessing'
your own job, being the CEO and sole proprietor of your own enterprise
offering services to your employer, and setting and following your own
Business Plan.
This adds another element to the Personal Productivity Improvement equation. Initially I described PPI as helping front-line employees use the tools and knowledge available to them effectively -- Personal Content Management and Personal Technology Management. Then I added in helping these employees to handle information processing activities and information overload more effectively -- Personal Workflow Management. Now we can add Personal Performance Management to the PPI skill-set.
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