Chapter 5

MOBILIZE

OUR FIRST STEP IS ALL ABOUT GETTING OURSELVES ORGANIZED AND READY. The success of any journey depends on building a plan and inviting the right people along, especially when you want to be sure that you have the support of those who are funding the trip. And that’s where we’re going to begin: by ensuring that our leaders are with us, building our plan, and inviting the other travelers we want to accompany us on the adventure.

Lead the Leaders

Let me tell you a memorable story that a client shared with me. As the chief human resources officer (CHRO), she had tasked her team with creating a vision piece about a new approach to performance to present to the executives. Her team excitedly built their recommendations. Bear in mind that this was high level; they were simply trying to gain support in order to move ahead with designing a new approach. The team came to the executive meeting inspired by their ideas and ready to roll. The speaker for the group, the CHRO’s second-in-command, walked the executives through their proposal. The CHRO was thrilled; it was an excellent piece of work, and she was proud of her team and their creative boldness. As the presentation wrapped up, she started clapping with enthusiasm. None of the other executives joined in. In the awkward silence, the CEO turned to her and asked, “Why are you clapping?” And with that, their dreams to rethink their performance management program died, at least for the near term. Despite all the great prep work, they hadn’t correctly calculated where the CEO and the executives were in their views, knowledge, and insight on this topic, and those leaders obviously weren’t ready to hear the team’s proposal. This kind of disconnect is not uncommon, so I recommend that you get your arms around it sooner rather than later.

Let’s face it: executive leaders often need special handling. Year after year, “lack of executive sponsorship” has been cited as the top reason for the failure of change programs.¹ And when it comes to performance strategies, I’ve found that a lack of executive support is often the thing that holds people back the most. More than anything else, it’s why people talk about changing their approach but never seem to be able to really do it.

Executives don’t resist these ideas because they are closed-minded people. Sure, some may be a little old-fashioned, but most still care about their teams, right? I think the main reason why executives frequently get left behind is that no one is willing to educate them, either because people feel that executives should already know this stuff due to the exalted role they play in the organization or because it’s just too intimidating to sit down and talk openly about the drawbacks of the established ways of doing things. Sitting across the table, looking an executive in the eye, and telling him that everything he believes is wrong might very well feel like a potentially career-limiting move, no matter how much research you have to back you up. And so nobody does it, which means it’s highly unlikely that executives are well versed in the subject of performance management—and even more unlikely that they know nearly as much about this subject as you do. This is where a little courage comes in.

Here’s my thinking on this front: First, I encourage you to check your fear at the door and get comfortable with challenging this group—diplomatically, of course. I find that folks can let the intimidation factor play too large a role, sometimes to the point where they chicken out of the really tough conversations. Always keep in mind that you’re coming to them with the intent of creating a healthier, happier organization. How can that be bad?

Here are a few tips on the special care and handling of leaders:

• Get them thinking. Don’t just tell them; help them find their own way to the knowledge. Try starting off by asking who their best managers were earlier in their careers and what it was that made them great. Ask them about their own best and worst experiences with giving and receiving feedback, or with performance management in general. Make it personal. Capture what they share so that you can use their own words later as part of their education process. Help them imagine how a change could benefit the company and your people in powerful ways.

• Educate them. I find this to be the biggest miss when it comes to making your case to leadership. All too often, people assume that leaders know it all. Surely they don’t, and how could they? Leaders simply don’t have the time to seek out the information needed to make informed decisions on all aspects of the business. That’s why they have experts like you. Your job is to take the time to educate them on this subject. You don’t need to be condescending, of course, but do be explicit about helping them learn. Ask them to read part 1 of this book to get a better understanding of the Fatal Flaws, Fundamental Shifts, and Common Goals. If nothing else, it will give you a great place to start a conversation. Additionally, find similar organizations that have already made notable changes to their performance management programs, and see if you can coordinate a visit or a call to their CEOs to share ideas and successes. There’s nothing like hearing about it from a peer. And, as you collect insights throughout the process, share them with your leaders.

• Shift their focus to the future. Engage your leaders in conversation about the future. Ask them to talk about the organization’s strategy, and have them describe where the organization is heading. Take it a step further and talk with them about their legacy. What do they want to leave behind? What do they want to be their mark? Ask them to consider how these new performance solutions will help them to achieve those goals both operationally and personally.

All this sets the stage for asking that all-important question: “Are you with me?” If you do it right, your leaders will be. And you won’t be the only one clapping.

Plan Your Journey

Borrowing the wise words of Stephen R. Covey (of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame), let’s “begin with the end in mind” and take a look at when it will make the most sense for your team to reboot your performance management.² Why is the when important? Because it’s important to consider the rhythm of your business and how that rhythm implies (or in some cases imposes) a certain window of time or even a specific date for switching over to your new approach. For example, do you wrap up your traditional annual reviews at the end of the calendar year and set goals at the beginning of the new year? If so, then you should think about switching over to your new solution on January 1 of the coming year. That means having your design and build completed by the end of the third quarter of the prior year in order to have a quarter to unveil the new direction, signal the end of the old, and get your teams ready to use new tools and methods.

A number of other factors could dictate your schedule: everything from a new leader coming onboard to a new system in the offing or the acquisition of a new company. I find technology events, like the sunsetting of the old system that housed the performance management, to be the most common of these triggers. It’s important to tune in to these technology-driven timelines because the last thing you want is to put your team through two related changes by implementing a new system and then having to do it again once you’ve finalized your process. Sadly, this cart-before-the-horse timing with system implementations happens all too often when IT and HR teams plan their projects separately. Whatever factors influence your timeline, the key at this stage is to get very clear on the planned implementation date and work backward from there to define a realistic journey plan. And by “realistic” I mean an achievable plan that allows you enough time to work through every phase of the project.

At this point, create the initial plan for how you expect your solution to roll out across your organization—how it will be staged, if you will. If you’re a fairly compact group located mostly in one place, or the makeup of your employee segments is similar, then a “Big Bang” approach—bringing everybody with you in one fell swoop—may make the most sense. However, if your organization is more complex, you may want to start with a smaller, targeted team. In this case, pick one that’s easily accessible or friendly to your cause.

For instance, I worked with a company that decided to reboot its retail stores first, designing and implementing a complete solution specifically for that audience. The leadership made the decision to start with the stores because they knew that the stores team was the place where they could have the greatest impact and deliver the most value. After the successful transition in the stores, they stepped back and began considering a solution for headquarters. While this allowed them to keep key features consistent across teams, it also empowered them to focus on the unique needs of the corporate culture and staff (as in Fundamental Shift #4—Abandon uniformity). After headquarters, they moved on to the warehouses. This staggered strategy allowed them not only to design for each specific group but also to get smarter as they went along so that they were able to build off the learnings from each preceding rollout.

I’m also a big fan of pilots. Pick a test group and engage them in a process that helps you to refine your solution and your messaging about it. Piloting your approach can be a great way to reduce adoption risk and prepare you for a much bigger implementation scope. Pilots have the added benefit of creating a group of highly engaged individuals who feel more connected to your new solution and can help build excitement and bring others along when you’re ready.

My last word on this topic is that you should never hesitate to revise the plan. One of the greatest frustrations in my work is to watch teams get well into a project and learn things that change their core assumptions or timelines, and then turn a blind eye to this new information so they don’t have to admit that the plan might need to be reassessed. Moving ahead with a poor plan is always a losing strategy, and I’ve seen it too many times in my career. Refine the plan along the journey. Periodically consider whether your assumptions have changed, if you’re experiencing more resistance than planned, if you’ve discovered dependencies that are at risk, or even whether or not you can honestly make the timing work given the resources you have allocated. A good, realistic journey plan is a valuable asset, so take the time to carefully think it through—then let it evolve as needed.

Throughout the process, I will offer these quick reminders on checking in with the executive sponsors, influential leaders, and others you’ve identified as important to keep close and tuned in. Managing change and ensuring adoption truly starts on day one. Taking these simple steps helps you to validate your thinking (therefore improving your outcomes), while also allowing you to gauge the nature of the support or resistance you can expect as you move toward implementation.

At this early point in the process, you want to be sure that you have agreement on the journey plan and timeline. Not only do you want the sponsors to be aligned with the plan, but also you need to consider other teams or individuals who have a stake in the timing of events. Perhaps the compensation team? Or the CIO? Maybe the people who drive your strategic–planning process? Or other groups within your talent management function, such as the workforce or succession planning team? Seek their input and give them a heads-up on those changes you know are coming—in short, bring them along with you on the journey.

Invite the Right People to the Conversation

Don’t try this alone. If you want to take a group of people in a new direction, especially a direction that is different from the one they have always known, then you need to be sure that you bring the right people with you from the very beginning.

Here’s the thing: Designing a new approach to performance takes good thinking. It demands tough decisions. And even once all the big thinking is done, you still have to do the work of building out the nuts and bolts of the solution. It’s totally doable, of course. But what isn’t very doable is designing a solution alone in a vacuum or with a small group of like-minded people and then expecting to bring the larger group happily along with you after the fact. For one thing, if you take that approach, your design process will likely lack the varying points of view that might take you in new and more interesting directions. For another, you’re going to need champions of the change on your side to drive support and adoption when you’re ready to unleash your beautiful new performance management solution on the team. If you want them with you when you’re ready to say “Go,” then you need them with you from the beginning. Engage them early and often.

Start by asking yourself these two questions:

1. Who should be part of my design team?

2. Who should be invited to the conversation?

You might wonder what the difference is between the “design team” and those merely “invited to the conversation.” This is an important distinction. The design team is the group of people who will work with you, side by side, through the entire design process. The conversation invitees are those folks you will need with you metaphorically (that is, they’re looped in and have your back) but who won’t be involved in the day-to-day work.

Whom should you pick for your design team? Frequently, I see organizations selecting a mix of executives and HR leaders. The conversation needs to include executives, since it’s vital that they be onboard; and obviously HR needs to play a key role in the design effort. But I prefer to see teams that go beyond those two groups in order to represent the diversity of the organization. That means inviting people from different employee segments, disciplines, functions, and locations. Include team members and other people leaders who will have a strong stake in the dialogue. I’m not telling you to build a huge design team; that comes with its own problems. I’m saying you should be creative about whom you invite. See how many boxes you can tick off with each individual.

In other words, the design team should be a small(ish) but diverse group that comes as close as you can to representing a cross-section of your organization. Of course, you want people on that team who are excited to take a fresh look at performance management. But it also never hurts to throw in a few doubters to help keep you on your toes; if all goes well, they may become your strongest advocates when all is said and done.

Figure 5.1 shows a simple example that looks a lot like a team we pulled together for one of my clients. In this case, we created a design group that nicely represented their global footprint as well as their mix of employee segments—and without inviting the entire company to the discussion.

Figure 5.1. Design team example.

Once our design team has been established, it’s time to choose the larger and wider group of people we want to invite to the conversation. For some organizations, the conversation group may include the entire organization. For others, it may be only a select set of individuals. If you’re picking a select set, then seek out those individuals who need to feel included, those who have expressed a desire to have a voice in your process, and those whose voices you want to be sure to include (such as big fans of your plan or people who could stop the whole effort in its tracks if they aren’t with you).

A great way to get the selection process started is to ask your design team and invited-to-the-conversation leaders whom they think should be included. This broader conversation group should also include people whose voices are missing from your design team, perhaps certain constituencies or demographic groups whose views will make for a better end result. I’m thinking anyone from union representatives to the distribution team in Puerto Rico. Seek out differences in opinion, and make sure you have solid representation from your workforce.

This group requires special attention, and you’ll hear me speak of them throughout the process. It is critical that they be engaged from the very beginning, which I recognize can be tough with such a diverse group. Here are a few methods you might use to engage your conversation group throughout your process, from seeking input on what’s currently working (and what isn’t) to validating your solution and rollout plans, and onward down the line:

• Lead focus group discussions.

• Task leaders to engage their teams and facilitate leadership-driven conversations.

• Crowdsource your questions.

• Design and deploy a simple survey.

One huge benefit of technology is that it gives us the ability to invite as many people as we want to the conversation. A great example of this is the process Adobe went through in designing its new performance management approach. The Adobe leaders were committed to cocreating the new solution alongside their employees. Their process included a very intentional crowdsourcing element in which they first notified employees of the plan to ditch stack ranking via a companywide blog post and then asked them to suggest what they wanted to do instead. They asked what needed to go, what should remain, and what employees thought should be added. Their approach yielded great results, and the leaders said that the crowdsourcing process crystallized their vision for the new approach.³

The headline here is that it’s imperative that you engage your executives and key decision makers, as well as diverse voices in your company, in a process that includes reasoned discussion. Pose thoughtful questions that help them challenge the old thinking, expose flawed assumptions, and introduce new ideas. And throughout that conversation, shine a light on the factors driving your choices, introducing and building support for new ideas and approaches (like the Fundamental Shifts, for example) to gain alignment on the direction to which you are committed.

Once your design team is selected and confirmed, be sure to loop back in with the leaders—both those who offered ideas for whom should be included and the managers who have direct reports who are participating in the design process. It is important that your executive sponsors know who’s on the team and that they support your choices. It’s also helpful to thank the managers of your design team members for letting their people participate. Also, remind them every once in a while of the important role their people are playing and the value they are creating for the organization. In fact, this is a great way to demonstrate your philosophy of recognition.