#49 The First Performance Conversation

Are you so busy that you battle to find time to have the kind of conversation with people that absorbs your full attention? The kind of conversation where you're listening to them with your eyes and ears and speaking to them from your heart? Do you instead write them emails, speak in bullet points and hope that when you call their phone you'll go straight to message bank so you can leave a concise message without getting caught up in small talk?

Are you writing your business goals and "communicating" them to everyone through email and presentations? Is "consultation" when you run some brainstorming workshops so people feel that have participated (irrespective of what you do with their ideas)? Then you are very likely still having trouble getting people to understand and buy-in to your strategy, performance measures and performance improvement.

Emails, brochures, PowerPoint presentations, strategy documents and vision/mission posters fail to get people excited about organisational performance. They consist of words and maybe a few images that are usually too vague and too bland to paint colourful and animated visions in the minds of those that read them. These artefacts of modern organisational strategy are always political: designed more to not provoke those that would oppose it, designed less to evoke those that would bring it to life.

When people read things that are written in typical management-speak, what happens in their minds, honestly? They can jump to their own conclusions about what "efficient, effective and productive best practice processes" look like, or they can slide deeper into cynicism or learned helplessness, or they can keep on keeping on, oblivious and unresponsive to any change in organisational direction. Not buying in, not owning it, not seeing their own aspirations and values in it.

Remember: staff usually have no knowledge whatsoever of the conversations that were had before the goals were written (and polished and rewritten and polished some more). The seven strategic objectives or the five critical success factors are just the sanitized remains of what probably started out as a very rich, emotive and inspirational dialogue about the things that really matter right now for the organisation. And here lies the secret to getting staff to buy-in to strategy: giving them that same chance to engage in rich, emotive and inspirational dialogue about what matters most right now for the organisation.

When you take the time - and it need only be one hour each month - to facilitate a conversation among staff about what the organisation should look, sound and feel like, then you'll have started the transformation. Stimulate this conversation with prompts like these:

• What results are implied by our goals?
• If we were already achieving our goals, what would we notice was different to how things are now?
• What are some of the things that our team does that directly influence how the organisation's goals are achieved?
• Are there some things our team does that impacts on other teams' performance?
• What are the most important results that we should be trying to produce or improve?

This is the kind of conversation that should precede any other conversation about performance with your staff (especially the individual performance management or appraisal conversations). A leader has no right to expect staff to perform in a way that improves organisational performance if that leader has failed to make space and time for everyone to clearly and colourfully paint in their minds a picture of that place in the future they are collectively trying to create.