Episode 013: Performance Management — Introduction

Key Takeaways:

• Performance management is a system that helps an organization measure and manage activities and outputs to ensure it meets its goals effectively and efficiently.

• An organization’s leaders and individuals working within the organization are evaluated with a performance management system; the organization, in whole or in part, and its processes are also evaluated using a performance management system.

• Effective performance management systems:

  • Clarify responsibilities and expectations.

  • Enhance individual and group productivity.

  • Develop individual capabilities through feedback and coaching.

  • Align individual and group behaviour with an organization’s values, goals, and strategy.

  • Improve communication within the organization.

  • Are the basis for deciding how, when, and where to deploy an organization’s staff and volunteers.

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Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

On today's episode, we're going to introduce a new series on performance management. So this should be a shorter episode just to whet your appetite for what's to come. So first, in this episode, we're going to define what performance management is and we're going to define who and what gets evaluated when we're talking about performance management and some of the things that effective performance management should achieve if done correctly.

What is Performance Management?

So what is performance management? Performance management is a system that is used to ensure that the activities and outputs in an organization meet the organization's goals effectively and efficiently. So when you break it down, performance management is just a system and it's a system of measurement. There's an old adage in business especially, but also other areas: what gets measured, gets managed. So this is one of the things that performance management does. It measures the performance of an organization and people who are part of that organization.

And the whole purpose of doing the measurement is not to lord it over people and saying they're not living up to expectations. It's to ensure that the goals of the organization are achieved effectively and efficiently, as much as possible, and that people aren't just running around doing activities and producing things that don't achieve the goals of the organization.

Who or What Gets Evaluated in Performance Management?

So the next question is who or what gets evaluated in performance management? Well, the first people that get evaluated are leaders. And it's important that leaders evaluate their performance regularly so that they can ensure that they are pointing their people in the correct direction and making sure that the organization is meeting its core values and its mission and vision and, ultimately, achieving the goals that have been set out for the organization to achieve.

And, obviously, another set of individuals that get evaluated in performance management are your crew, your volunteers, your congregants. That's usually the first thing that people think of when they're thinking about evaluating performance -- employee reviews and annual reviews and all that kind of stuff that most people tend to dread. I'm hoping that, during this series, I can show a different kind of approach than the dreaded annual review where everybody sits down with their manager and gets told all the things that they did wrong (usually is what they're expecting) and a couple of things they did right and then they get rewarded based on what they've done over the year. I'm hoping to outline a way of evaluating the performance of your crew that's more of a continuous coaching and mentorship rather than a one time a year sit down and run through all the goals of the organization and ask how well somebody did during the year.

Something else that gets evaluated in performance management is the organization itself, whether a part of the organization or the organization as a whole. So if you notice that one particular part of the organization is not doing as well as the others, then a performance management system will help you figure out why and what things are missing and what things need to be changed in order to make that part of the organization run at its most efficient and effective level. And also the processes of the organization get evaluated, the systems that are used in order to help the organization run. So it's important to evaluate those as well.

That may not have anything to do with your people. It's... it's the way you do things when you do your day to day tasks, the steps that you go through in order to accomplish particular things that you're doing day to day. And when you look through that... if you're going through your performance management system, when you look at the processes, you may find that some of them are not as effective as they once were or never were effective at all and should really be reevaluated and tweaked so that the outputs that you get are much more efficient and effective at achieving the goals of your organization.

Benefits of Effective Performance Management

Clarifies Responsibilities and Expectations

So just a few of the things that effective performance management can lead to -- and this isn't everything but this is some of the main things that a lot of people find when they put in a really good system for evaluating the performance of the individuals working in the organization and the organization itself -- so, firstly, it clarifies responsibilities and expectations. So when you have a good performance management system in place, you have to outline what every individual is doing in that organization, what every process is accomplishing in that organization, what every department or part of that organization is accomplishing. Because if you have confusion when it comes to what people are doing as individuals or what different parts of the organization are doing or overlap, then you could be running a lot less efficiently than you really should be.

So in order to even evaluate the performance, you have to outline what you're expecting the performance to be and what the tasks are that you're trying to accomplish. So it really helps to narrow down people's focus either as an individual or as a group, a team working together within your organization, to know what they're responsible for and what the organization as a whole is expecting them to do.

Enhances Individual and Group Productivity

Effective performance management also enhances individual and group productivity. So if you notice that you as a leader are not very good at delegating, that can really hamper your organization's ability to move forward because everything's falling into your lap and you can't do all the things. So as you're going through your performance management, you really realize you need to work on that particular area and learn how to give some of the tasks that you yourself don't really need to do... to teach somebody else how to do that so that they can run with those tasks and free you up to do the things that only you can do in the organization. That's one of the things that performance management can help with. And that will improve your productivity because you're not worrying about all the different things that you have on your plate. You only have a few things that only you are focusing on and that only you can do.

And also as a group... if you notice that you have a set of skills that you're missing in a particular group working in your organization or team, then you can say, "Okay, we either need to give the people who are currently on the team the skills that they're missing in order to accomplish the tasks and goals that they are trying to set up and do as a team or we need to bring somebody else from the organization in in order to give that team a boost." Maybe it's just a temporary thing. Maybe they just need to get over a hump on a certain project and they keep spinning their wheels and they're not as productive as they could be if they had that extra set of skills.

Develops Individual Capabilities Through Feedback & Coaching

Performance management also develops individual capabilities through feedback and coaching. So once you know what all of the different responsibilities and expectations are both as a group and as individuals, you can go through that either yourself or with someone else and say, "Okay, I'm doing really well in these areas. But these areas, I could use a little bit of work on and I don't really know what I'm doing. So maybe I need to take a class or I need to read a book or that person over there is really good at that. Maybe I can ask them to give me some feedback and give me a few tips."

Helps Align Behaviour with Values, Goals, and Strategy

The other great thing about performance management is it helps to align behaviour with the organization's values, goals, and strategy. So we've already outlined all of that stuff in our strategy map -- the values, goals, and strategy -- and by evaluating performance, you can kind of see where things are starting to go off the rails. So if you see, especially when you... when you're talking about your key measures and targets that you set at the end of your strategy map -- you can say, "Okay, I see that this particular thing is going off the rails. So I'm measuring that, I'm monitoring that", which is what the performance management system is supposed to do -- measure and manage -- "and I can see that that's not going in the direction that we'd like it to go." And you'll have an early sign of that so you're not blindsided by that at the end of the year and you're thinking, "What happened there? I thought we were doing so well!" Well, this performance management system will help you monitor that stuff and help you try to figure out, "Okay, how can we turn things around so we get the results that we're looking for before things really start to go too far and perhaps may not be able to be fixed? It might be too late to change things to hit the target that we've set for the year."

Helps Decide Who You Need and Where You Need Them

And an effective performance management system also is great for deciding who you need in the organization and where you need them. So if you know that you're putting a special project together -- let's say you're doing a building project -- and you have people in your church or your organization who have engineering experience or who are carpenters or architects, then they can help you figure out some of the details of the building project. I'm not saying that they're doing the work necessarily, but they might be good to consult with on occasion and say... you can take the blueprint to them, for example, and say, "Is this a good layout? Like, is this an efficient way to set up our kitchen here? Or is this an efficient way to set up some of the fire escape routes?" Because those people... they're used to looking at those things and they can look at a blueprint and say, "Well, why do you have the kitchen way over there? Because the bathrooms are on the complete opposite end of the building. If you put them all close together, that will save money on plumbing because you'll have all of your pipes all in the same area. Instead of running one set of pipes all the way down to the other end of the building... if you put them all on the same end of the building, then you can consolidate where that piping system is going to be for the plumbing.

So if you have an effective performance management tool, you can see things that are coming ahead and see holes in your human capital, your people that you have on the ground working in your organization either as staff or volunteers, and you can say, "Okay, I know that this person has a particular set of skills because we've been working on those skills with them. So we can plug that person over there because there's going to be a need over in that area."

Improves Communication

And finally, one of the other things that an effective performance management system can do is improve communication within the organization. So if you have a continuous feedback loop among all of the people who are working within your organization, whether they be leaders or volunteers or staff or just people who are outside the organization that you're serving... if you have a continuous feedback loop between all of those people, then that improves the organization's communications within and hopefully that will help you spot issues before they become big problems.

Next Episodes

So in this series, I'm going to help you look at some of the systems that you are using to evaluate your performance right now either as a leader -- so a self-evaluation of performance -- or evaluating the performance of other people working in your organization, whether they're staff or volunteers, and then evaluating the organization itself. And this is where the measures and targets that you've already created in your strategy map will come in. Because once you have those in place, then you can plug them into a performance management system that you create if you don't already have one. And then you'll be able to measure and monitor those things.

So in this series, first, I'm going to talk about managing your own performance. We're going to explore a few ways that you can evaluate the things that you're doing right now so you can make incremental improvements on what you're working on, what your goals are, so that you can contribute even more to the organization that you are running and serve your people more and serve your beneficiaries more. So I look forward to discussing that with you next week.

Thank-you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast(at)ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai