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May 9, 2007
Performance Accountable Organization
Wouldnt it be great? Everyone is accountable for his/her performance and contribution to the organization. Everyones added value is clear, and for every target there is a clear owner.
It is the mantra for enterprise performance management, and it is a beautiful vision.
One issue: it doesnt work that way.
If organizations drive accountability too deep, people create their own agenda. Many of todays number games are based on accountability. Heres what happens:
(1) Never promise too much. Play down stretch goals
(2) Always build in cost, risk and virtual profit margins in everything you do
(3) Dont care about someone elses performance. Youre not rewarded for it, it distracts your attention and hey, if they mess up and you dont, it makes you look good.
The drive for accountability leads to people losing buy-in in the shared objectives of the organization, and creating their own objectives. Local optimizations. Mediocre performance.
People turn into suppliers of performance, instead of business colleagues with the same goal. Relational behavior is driven back to transactional behavior.
It may sound weird coming from a performance management professional, but perhaps we should measure less, and trust more. Performance management should not be about control, it should be about feedback. And the feedback tells you if you are doing well, so you take the next set of decisions with confidence and with the organizations goals in mind. And the feedback tells your boss you are trustworthy.
That would be a shock in most organizations.
Yet more and more I get convinced that the one keyword of performance management and BI is not control, but is feedback, probably leading to a much higher level of control. Getting grip by letting go.
Someone called me a hopeless romantic in a panel discussion a few weeks ago. It was the nicest compliment I could think of...
frank
Posted by Frank Buytenkijk at May 9, 2007 10:00 AM
