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Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 2 – Crediting Good Intentions
“The road to ruin is paved with good intentions.”
German Proverb
Communicating assessment conclusions can be a difficult task, particularly in the case of improvement opportunities being presented to those directly managing or performing the function. Delivering the message is all the more difficult if those receiving it are organizationally senior to the self assessment lead or are influential favorites of the organization’s leaders. In these cases, business performance assessment leaders seeking a tactful way of communicating the ‘bad news’ often fall into the trap of crediting the good intentions and/or self identification of the issue by those responsible in order to put a positive spin on an otherwise negative message. Doing so, however, avoids the real issues at hand and can rob the organization of the opportunity to realize substantive performance improvements.
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Additional Resources
Lack of organizational accountability plays a significant role in the crediting of good intentions and recently self identified issues as assessment report conclusions. Principle, best practice, and warning flag articles on organizational accountability helping leaders enhance their company’s performance in this area can be found within the StrategyDriven topic: Organizational Accountability.
Other StrategyDriven recommended practices helping assessment teams avoid good intention and recently self identified issue conclusions can be found in:
- Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 1 – Executive Sponsorship
- Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 2 – Multidiscipline Teams
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers (continued)
- StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 20 – Identify the Hidden Drivers, part 1 of 3
- StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 21 – Identify the Hidden Drivers, part 2 of 3
- StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 22 – Identify the Hidden Drivers, part 3 of 3
- Strategic Analysis Best Practice 4 – Independent Assessors
- StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 15 – Independent Assessors
The accuracy and subsequently the trustworthiness of organizational performance measures is founded on the quality of their underlying data. While performance measures are uniquely sensitive to changes in data, even the smallest error in data accuracy undermines a metric’s credibility if not its output.
Management observation programs generate a wealth of individual and workgroup performance data. All too often, workgroup managers view their employees job functions as being singularly unique and so don’t consider pooling their observation results with peers. Doing so, however, creates the possibility of identifying broader organizational trends that may be culturally driven and more economical to resolve with a single integrated initiative.
Robustly implemented management observation programs offer many benefits to the organization and its managers. At their core, each of these benefits is derived from aggregation and analysis of the performance data gathered during the observations. Enabling required data synthesis necessitates the documentation of observed occurrences and conclusions. Desired behavior reinforcement and performance improvement, not to mention manager and observation program credibility, necessitate the employee be briefed on the observations made and conclusions drawn. As with all formally documented performance appraisal instruments, the documented observation should be signed by both the manager and employee.
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