If you want to achieve big improvements in performance, you just need clear and effective processes in place to help you to get there!
Improving People’s Performance is as easy as 123! Ok, maybe it’s not that easy! But it doesn’t take an HR expert to tell you that if you want your company to thrive, you need to make sure that your staff are really performing at their best. But when it comes to the tricky business of managing people, this can be much easier said than done.
Your line managers play a huge role in creating a productive and high-performing teams culture, and you need to ensure that you’re driving them in the right direction.
Here, we will share some of our top tips for encouraging your line managers to step into their roles as people managers and play an active part in improving their team’s performance.
1.Create procedures that underpin your objectives
Your line managers can often only operate within the constraints that you provide them with. If you want them to excel in particular areas, you need to create a framework that allows them to do so. For this reason, it’s important that you consider what you already have in place that help your teams to reach their full potential.
Do you have a policy that outlines how often and in what format performance discussion should happen? Is there something in place that ensures the work is being carried out? Who ultimately chases things up to ensure that these discussions are happening? What process do you follow if someone isn’t performing? It’s not necessarily about ticking boxes, but you do need to create systems that encourage the day-to-day tasks like regular performance discussions and general welfare discussions to be carried out.
2.Give your managers the confidence and skills they need to have meaningful discussions with their teams
Unfortunately, making sure that performance discussions are taking place is only the first hurdle. It’s not so much about frequency, as it is about the quality of the conversations that are happening.
At the end of the day, talking about performance and addressing areas of concern can be daunting, even for the most experienced line managers. It’s important that you give our managers the opportunity to hone and perfect their skills, and to keep developing them on a regular basis. Consider how you can do this within your business. It may be the case that you need to roll out some training sessions, or perhaps you need to have your own one-to-one discussions with your management team so you can ask them what development they feel they need to become great people managers.
3.Encourage your managers to facilitate career development in their teams
Performance management isn’t just about fixing problems and making sure that the work gets done within a specified frame of time. It’s about looking ahead towards the future and ensuring that your business has the right kind of talent to drive operations forward and achieve growth.
The key takeaway here is that, if your employees aren’t being given a chance to flourish, they’re likely to start looking elsewhere. Do you really want to lose your talented members of staff to your competitors? Be sure that your line managers are having open and honest conversations with their direct reports about where they see themselves in the next few years. That information is taken seriously and needs to be feedback and discussed amongst the senior management team in the business. Give feedback to the team member about how you see their role developing, what they need to do to get there and what the likely timescales are, so that they know you have listened and taken their thoughts on board. But please remember, don’t make any promises that you can’t keep!
How we can help
If line management capability is something that you want to improve, we can help. Our Highly Effective Managers program starts again in 2022, and this can either be run as an in-house program with 6 or more delegates or if you have one or two managers who you would like to attend, then can join our public course. Read here for more information.
Or why not join us for our next FREE Workshop on Managing Performance on the 26th November at 10am. This workshop will help you to understand the importance of having regular performance reviews with your team, how to give effective feedback, and how to tackle poor performance if it happens – making sure you are dealing with poor performance issues fairly, and what to do if people’s performance doesn’t improve. You can book your tickets here.
