Managing Performance: Effective Management Communication

A leader's primary responsibility is managing performance to meet business goals.

Yet, in a recent Blanchard survey of business leaders, only 41% agreed that people in their organizations are held accountable for meeting performance expectations. What an opportunity for improving performance!

Getting work done through others. Peter Drucker made it sound simple. But many leaders have never mastered the art of managing employee performance – and even fewer have mastered the skills. Surveys show that employees don’t do what they’re supposed to do because they don’t know what is expected. Lack of clear, focused, unambiguous communication about expectations is a major cause of performance deficiencies.

And even managers who communicate expectations clearly often fail to check in on progress towards goals, discovering too late that things are not on track.

You’ve heard that “feedback is the breakfast of champions,” yet most managers leave employees hungry for the feedback they need in order to perform successfully.

This Managing Performance workshop equips leaders with skills and builds their confidence in having conversations about performance. This helps your organization achieve important benefits:

• Greater alignment -- Employees committed to achieving important business goals and meeting customer requirements
• Improved performance throughout the organization
• Managers freed up to lead more strategically because they aren’t having the same conversations over and over (and getting the same results)
• Increased employee engagement – the key to sustained performance
• Managers addressing and solving performance deficiencies instead of ignoring them and hoping they’ll go away
• Measurable financial improvement

Managing Performance Training highlights:

• Managing performance through effective communication
• How to set and communicate clear, measurable, unambiguous performance expectations
• How to link individual job expectations to larger strategic goals
• How to include required and desired behaviors in the performance expectations
• How to ensure that performance stays on track
• How to handle the good performer whose behavior causes problems
• How to recognize and reward good performance
• How to extend the reach of managers through effective delegation
• How to have the difficult conversation about performance problems and get performance back on track
• How to create an environment where personal responsibility and accountability are expected
• How to get commitment – not just compliance
• How to give ongoing feedback so that reviews hold no surprises.

Managing Performance Methodology

Participants in Managing Performance spend most of their workshop time in practices with coaching and feedback in P2P Videolabs™ – AlexanderHancock’s trademarked process for rapid development of business communication skills. They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions.

Managing Performance Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Managing Performance to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Managing Performance Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Managing Performance:

• To align performance enterprise-wide with critical strategic business goals
• To build a culture of high expectations and accountability
• To reset expectations after a merger, acquisition, or turnaround
• To reduce bureaucracy, re-energize the culture and dramatically improve performance in a more traditional organization
• To bring entrepreneurial accountability to government organizations

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