Last week I was fortunate enough to chair day two of the Employee Performance Management and Development conference.
Given the quality of the panel discussion that occurred at the back end of the day (the second of two quality panel discussions) I omitted my closing address.
I thought it prudent to share my personal conference highlights via a brief post in lieu of not providing an official conference closing.
First-up on day two Tracey Williams from Bank Australia provided us with the perfect opening to the day with her insightful presentation on Value alignment – Strategies for shaping a culture that supports high performance. I noted with interest how Bank Australia maintain a focus on keeping values front and centre in ‘the conversations’ not ‘on the walls’. It was interesting to note that Bank Australia recruit on values via a ‘coffee first’ interview policy.
Next off we had the energetic Andrew Curcio from PwC take us through Developing a successful rewards program without ratings and rankings. Key points I noted from Andrew’s presentation were: ‘Reward’ is an art and not a science, everyone has a price, the correlation between perceived value and discretionary effort, the questionable value of benchmarking, leveraging multiple data sources to inform any relevant initiatives and keeping separate the Reward, Performance and Development conversations.
Following the morning tea break we had the first of our panel discussions. A big thank you to Breckon Jones from American Express, Pam Sluijs from Crown Resorts and Warren Antonik from GE for supporting our conversation around Looking at new models of connecting performance and rewards for motivating a multi-generational workforce. Of particular significance was the focus on connecting ‘purpose’ to any performance and rewards model supported by authentic and trust oriented leadership, and the concept of ‘micro-rewards’.
Leading into the lunch break the effervescent Karen Gately from Ryan Gately provided us with some valuable insight into Making employee development a key priority. I was particularly interested in Karen’s observations regarding employers commonly appointing top performing employees to leadership roles regardless of interest, appetite, desire and leadership capability…… a concept referred to as ‘voluntold’. Other key points to note were the notion of ensuring the leadership conversation consistently has ‘Talent’ on the table and (a concept close to my own heart) ‘Manager as Coach’
Following Lunch, Justine Figot from KFC presented a highly entertaining case study on Talent development as a critical component of performance management. One of the overwhelming themes from Justine’s presentation was the amazing use of ‘people as advocates’. I was also most interested to hear about the KFC graduate leadership program as well as the global store manager program. For me the most insightful and moving part of Justine’s presentation was hearing Richard Wallis, a KFC leader talk about the value that ‘authenticity’ and ‘vulnerability’ bring to leadership.
Next up Gaye Haug from KPMG tied things together nicely with her case study on how KMPG have managed to review and rejuvenate their performance review feedback process. I felt it was valuable (as an attendee as well as the conference Chair) to see pictorially, what a logical and robust performance review and feedback framework looks like. Other key takeaways included the concept of ‘Building for Us’, the FANG design principle (the product has to be as easy to use as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) and the rule of three (people will generally only remember a maximum of three things).
A typically tough post afternoon tea speaking slot proved only too easy for Henry Skene of Seyfarth Shaw who captivated the room with his presentation on Avoiding the pitfalls in performance management. Henry’s experience in employment law drew a raft of mid-presentation questions from a fascinated audience as he highlighted some of the key risks vs actual realities of performance management cases. My key takeaway was that failure to manage performance management situations effectively prior to breaking point is the most common root cause of legal challenges. Furthermore, a reluctance to have difficult conversations coupled with a lack in training managers effectively in performance management are key contributors to performance issues escalating. Finally, ensuring any official performance related discussion involves a minimum of three people was a handy tip.
For the final session of the day we were fortunate enough to have a very healthy and insightful panel discussion involving Michelle Fenwick from Northern Health and Anne Bastian from Liberty Financial on the Key considerations in handling underperformance. The audience participation and richness of questions were especially prolific during the discussion which ran well over the allocated time. Key takeaways for mine were; the fact that ‘people don’t wake up being difficult’, storytelling is a valuable tool in handling difficult discussions, leadership workshop groups are highly effective in sharing information and lessons, role plays are another very valuable tool in teaching leaders to manage underperformance and one way to structure a performance evaluation model is to use a 60% ‘modelling behaviours’ vs 40% ‘KPI’ model.
A huge thank you to both the highly engaged conference attendees as well as our highly engaging speakers. Together you made the day a delight to be a part of!
Nick Kennedy
Managing Partner – deliberatedge
Partner – deliberatepractice
Chairman – The Workforce Planning Institute