Why Performance Tracking Beats Performance Management
How productivity and engagement can flourish when you shift the responsibility to perform onto your staff
At Snapp360 we are passionate about transforming performance management into continuous performance tracking. While it may seem like a subtle play on words, there’s a vast difference between the two when it comes to what drives, and motivates, human behavior.
Let’s break it down. Tracking of behavior is a self-driven process, which relies on personal motivation, whereas management implies outside monitoring – an attitude that not only makes employees feel like they are being naughty teenagers, but also fuels a culture of fear.
Managing performance through fear
We have been amazed in our consulting work how prevalent management by fear is. Businesses, by their very nature, are competitive and are required to outperform their competition.
This mindset fuels a culture that says: “If we are not winning, someone else is, and we are losing”. To ensure they are “winning”, organizational leaders try to ensure that their employees are performing to their full potential. Their solution is to measure and manage people’s performance. In simple terms, they attempt to assert control.
Fighting the caveman response
As easy as it is to see the pitfalls of control, it’s as if it is an automated human behavior. Science has an answer for this. What we have learned from neurobiology is that when we get anxious the parts of our brain responsible for complex thinking shuts down. Our brains release stress hormones and shuffle our priorities into a vigilant scanning mode.
We respond out of fear and we attempt to control our environments.. Our brains have evolved to do precisely this in order to ensure our survival.
Organizational competition literally activates our fight or flight survival mechanisms.
Fighting our instincts may be challenging, but at Snapp360 we believe that by understanding this human process, we can find a way to escape some of its pitfalls.
If business leaders are able to recognize what attempts at hierarchical control actually do to performance, they can regulate their management control. This can be done by delegating responsibility for performance to the individual in the form of personal responsibility. We believe that doing so increases both performance and engagement.
Performance managements undermines trust
In order to achieve such a shift leaders need to scrutinize their underlying assumptions about what motivates their employees. Do they assume that the people who work for them want to perform or do they believe that they will be inherently lazy. Simply put, it comes down to trust.
The yearly review is one place we see these underlying assumptions playing out. The research Snapp360 has conducted points to employees feeling as though these reviews are done because they can’t be trusted.
This disengages people and hence diminishes personal responsibility.
Switching on engagement
At Snapp360 we believe that If employees are tasked with tracking their own performance, through asking for continual feedback from those around them, their engagement and performance will increase substantially.
Their colleagues and superiors would then become enablers of performance rather than “authority” figures attempting to control them.
By assisting organisations to transform performance management into continuous performance tracking, we are supporting organizations to truly drive performance, while allowing individuals to feel personally responsible for, and engaged to, perform at their very best.
Trevor Hough is an Organizational Development Consultant and CEO and Founder of Snapp360. For more information on how the Snapp360 app can assist you to drive performance in your business contact Trevor at [email protected]
