Chapter 10
MAKING IT STICK
WE ALL KNOW OF, OR PERHAPS have even been part of, teams that have devoted huge efforts and resources to revamping a process, only to have it fail miserably. People don’t get onboard. Resources dry up. Resistance builds. Leaders abandon ship, claiming they weren’t really keen on it to begin with. Confusion or disenchantment arises—and in the end, the potential value is never realized.
Don’t let the new performance management solution you worked so hard to build suffer this cruel fate. As you lead the charge toward improved performance management in your organization, you’ll need a strategy to stay there once you arrive. A thoughtful approach to managing the change is your best investment to ensure that your hard work of creating a custom, modern performance management solution for your organization won’t be for naught.
With that in mind, throughout this chapter I’ll help you consider how to cement the buy-in, adoption, and sustainability of your new solution. The guidance provided is by no means a comprehensive change management program; instead, I highlight important considerations to drive adoption and share helpful tips for managing the often-unavoidable resistance you’re likely to face. I have much more that I want to share related to managing the human side of this shift, but it is simply too much to provide within these pages. (The next book, perhaps?) As a happy compromise, I have included additional change content and tools at our website www.ThePMReboot.com. In the end, I hope this chapter, the “Support and Buy-in Checkpoint” tips in the Redesign, and the additional website resources can supply you with a strong framework and meaningful insights that will ensure that your new approach to performance management is well received, gains support quickly, and has real staying power within your organization.
Your New Job One: Leading the Change
Don’t even think about using a one-and-done email from the CEO to announce to your organization the exciting news that you’re replacing the old performance management system. There is no communication so well crafted that it will get everyone onboard and excited after it’s a done deal. No slick video message, no dog-and-pony show, no rah-rah meeting with cake, pizza, or champagne can possibly replace the value of simply getting people involved.
Why not? you ask. Can’t a well-managed staff just do as they’re told without all the touchy-feely stuff? No, they can’t. That’s just not how it works.
The urge to get moving before everyone’s truly onboard is understandable, but there’s considerable upside to slowing down a bit. When change management is done well, people will feel engaged in the process and work collectively toward a common objective—in this case, your new performance management solution. How engaged, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: effective change management increases the success rate of organizational change as much as 96 percent.1 Furthermore, research has shown that projects with excellent change management effectiveness are six times more likely to meet or exceed project objectives.2 Building a great solution and then failing to manage the change effectively is like building a high-performance racing bike and leaving the wheels off.
When you’re fired up about making a change (especially with something as earthshaking as a new performance management program), it can be hard to tolerate those who aren’t tuned in, don’t get it, or worse yet, are resistant and unwilling to fully commit to it. When you find yourself in that situation, take a deep breath and look at how far you’ve come. Remember that your own journey started some time ago, and not everyone has been traveling with you. Your job now is to meet the rest of your team where they are (no matter how frustrating it can be at times) and invest the time and effort in bringing them forward. Engaging your organization in your new program means that your employees need to know what is happening and why, understand how it will impact them, and be equipped to be successful after the change is made. This is not the place to cut corners, because a great new solution is only truly great if people understand its purpose, see its value, are equipped to use it, and feel rewarded for doing so.
Make the Case
The best foundation for building meaningful support and ensuring buyin of your future solution is a strong case for the change. This means creating a compelling story that tells your team why now is the time for a new approach to performance management and inspires them to dream of a better way, too.
The funny thing about change is that it’s hard even when we know it’s for the best. Why is it that people resist change, even when it’s clearly constructive and necessary? Neuroscience tells us that the answer may lie in the way our brains work. Change creates stress, and stress triggers our fight-or-flight hormones. This means that while you may feel like you are making logical decisions, your emotions are actually exerting a tremendous amount of control over what you do and say. In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath make this phenomenon plain to us nonscientists by way of the simple analogy of a rider and an elephant.3 The rider is our rational side, diligently processing away on the facts. Our emotional side is the elephant. The rider provides direction and analysis, but the elephant ultimately must supply the impetus to get things done. When it comes to a change, you can explain all you want to the rider, but if the elephant decides it’s going in another direction—well, it’s pretty clear who’s going to win that battle. To move in a new direction, the Heath brothers say that we need to persuade both the rider and the elephant.
A great case for change appeals to both the rider and the elephant by communicating both the actual and emotional bottom line of your new solution. It needs to paint the vision of the future, share solution highlights, lay out the implementation plan, and summarize the expected outcomes, benefits, and costs. You want it to tell a great story while at the same time being short, punchy, visual, entertaining, and, above all, memorable. Honestly, truly nailing it is a tall order. Impossible? No. But it takes some work to get right.
You’ve been building this story since the early days of your journey. Your mission now is to review what you’ve learned, look at everything you’ve envisioned for your new solution, pick the best bits, and package that information so that it appeals to the hearts and minds of your audience. You should already have the support of key influencers and decision makers, but this story is for the rest of the folks. You need it to resonate with all of them, engaging those who are new to the story and solidifying the resolve of those who are already with you.
It might be best to start with the business side of your case by asking what the old way has cost the organization in real dollars and cents. If you haven’t done it already, gauge the amount of time and resources being spent on your current approach, and then show the opportunity cost of not making a change. Few organizations have taken a hard look at the resources being consumed for so little benefit. Recent analysis conducted by CEB found that the average manager spends more than 200 hours a year on activities related to performance reviews.4 If we apply that value to a hypothetical situation, we can easily illustrate the high cost of traditional performance management like this:
We have four thousand employees, including five hundred managers who each spend an average of two hundred hours a year planning for and conducting annual performance reviews. That’s one hundred thousand hours a year for managers. Our employees each spend about twenty hours a year planning for and participating in their annual performance reviews. That’s another seventy thousand hours. Together, that’s one hundred seventy thousand work hours. At an average hourly rate of $50, that’s $8.5 million a year. Are we getting good return on that investment? What else could we accomplish in one hundred and seventy thousand work hours per year?
Or maybe your conclusions focus on your case for increasing the strategic value of HR, and your story goes something like this:
I asked HR to give me a sense of how much time they spent each year related to our current performance process. They said about 50 percent of the time. Shocking. Fifty percent? I asked why. They said it’s largely because of the complexity of our process, which increases the time to prepare the organization and to address the many questions that arise. Then there’s chasing down those who are out of compliance—missing reviews, weak assessments, etc. Lastly, they get involved in a lot of employee issues that result from the reviews. How can HR play a strategic role if they’re spending all their time just overseeing the processes?
Once you’ve locked the case on the business side, turn your attention to the emotional side of your performance management history. When you’re speaking to the emotional elephant, it is always best to show rather than tell. John Kotter, considered to be the father of change management, tells us that “showing others the need for change with a compelling object that they can actually see, touch, and feel” is the best way to get people on board.5 This is why advertisers use images and stories to grab our attention, and why high school driving teachers show videos of gruesome car crashes to shock their teenage students.
Selling your plan is no different. Consider what you might “show” people to engage the elephant. Maybe it’s quotes from your focus groups, video clips of your people sharing their thoughts on your current approach, or a huge pile of paper that represents one year’s annual reviews. Think about the focus groups, interviews, and internal and external benchmarking you did early on. Then tell the story in as compelling a manner as possible. Emphasize the human side of the equation, and connect your case for change to the values and the cultural elements that hold meaning within your organization.
If your messaging sinks in and they say, “Oh, you’re right. We do need to change this,” then it’s time to start talking about your planned destination. Borrowing another idea from Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath, think about it as if you’re sending them a postcard from some beautiful destination that says, “Meet me here! It’s going to be great.”6 You don’t need to go into detail; just share the big ideas about what your solution will bring to the organization. Your goal is to pull them into your vision of the future, and then give them enough of a plan to know what to expect and when. Keep it high level, including just enough to capture their attention—and their imaginations.
So what does this look like when you’re finished? That’s up to you. It could be a nicely designed walking deck, a set of short videos, a social media campaign, or some combination thereof. Again, there is no right answer; design the mode and methods of communication with your organization in mind. I’d simply encourage you to be creative, consider who your audience is, meet them where they are, and seek to create a burning platform (one from which people realize that there really is no way to go but forward) by telling your story. Channel your own passion and excitement; then climb into the pulpit and become an evangelist for change.
Plan the Change
You’ve designed your solution and grasped the realities related to its implementation, but all that means nothing without a great change plan. And to be truly great, your plan needs to be anchored in an understanding of how big the change is and the nature of the changes that people will experience. We also need to know who’s going to be experiencing those changes and the potential impacts on them. In other words, how much will this process upset the apple carts of the people in your organization? And how many apples does this mean we’re going to lose?
The amount of effort you should expect to devote to managing the change (talking to people and getting them onboard, up to speed, trained, excited, and equipped) is directly related to the size of the change. Will the changes you want to make be relatively easy to implement? Or is this going to be a tectonic shift, requiring you to pretty much blow up your existing approach, start from scratch, and perhaps rock the organization to the core of its corporate culture?
To help you identify the type of change you are looking at for your organization, you should consider the impacts, risks, and change saturation. There’s a lot that can be said about each of these areas—and Beth Montag-Schmaltz, my business partner, cofounder of PeopleFirm, and change management guru, would likely argue that each one of these could warrant its own chapter (or book, for that matter). Who knows, maybe Beth will write that book someday. For our purposes, I’ll touch briefly on each of these considerations.
Identify major impacts
It may seem obvious, but one of the first things you as a leader should do is take the time to identify the impacts that this change is going to have on your organization. In our business, we call this the impact assessment. A good impact assessment starts with getting clear on the who, as in “Who is being impacted?” We create logical groupings of the impacted people based on the nature of the changes being experienced, identifying collections of people who are starting at the same place and experiencing the change similarly. Your groups may break down into collections such as employees in general; people managers; HR business partners; executive leaders, etc. Bear in mind that considering the “who” requires you to go back to your design and reflect on those groups you identified during configuration. Did you create special programs for your high potentials? If the answer is yes, then those HIPOs probably represent their own stakeholder group, since the nature of the changes they experience will be different from what others experience.
As you go through this process, you’ll begin to recognize the implications for these stakeholder groups, and the appropriate steps to best support each of them through the change process will become clear. Some areas are commonly overlooked or underestimated during impact assessments. Here are a few:
• Role changes. Will your new solution change the expectations for any of the roles in your organization? If you’ve moved away from a traditional program, I’m betting it will. For example, HR may now be out of the oversight game, and will instead need to shift focus to building content and capturing best practices to be shared back out to the organization.
• Manager expectations. Your people managers might have been rewarded in the past for simply getting reviews in on time, but success in their roles now might be based on how much time they spend with their teams and how effective their people say they are at helping them achieve their career goals. That’s a significant change. Remember to communicate those expectation changes to others; it’s helpful when everyone understands that what “good” looked like in the past may look a lot different today.
• Skill gaps. Undoubtedly, new skills will need to be developed in order to make your changes sustainable. The most common of these is going to be the need to retrain your managers so that they can support a more conversational, employee-driven method of developing people. You can’t just expect your managers to do this well, especially those who were promoted for their technical expertise rather than their people skills. Flag where new skills are needed; then build time and effort into your change plan to adequately address these needs.
• Employee empowerment. While you’d expect most people to say that they’d like to be masters of their own career destiny, in reality many people are just not comfortable with this level of accountability. We’ve been raised to defer this responsibility to our parents, teachers, or supervisors. Getting comfortable with the idea of asking for feedback can be tough for some. This is an excellent example of a change for the better that might still get a fair amount of resistance from the people you’d least expect: the employees themselves.
Our cultural instinct is to find a place to hold us, a spot where we are safe from the responsibility/obligation/opportunity to choose. Because if we choose, then we are responsible, aren’t we?
—SETH GODIN, “A BIRD IN SEARCH OF A CAGE”7
How do you get a handle on all these impacts? Start by simply talking to people. Work with your design team, since they know the solution best, and then ask managers, business leads, process leads, and anyone else who might provide insight into who and what will be impacted by the change. Validate your assumptions. And then be ready to adjust your plan when you start rolling out your solution, because there may be impacts you hadn’t anticipated.
Assess risk
Next, take a look at the probable level of complexity of your rollout to determine how much risk you’re taking on. Complexity may be driven by the number of groups you identified during your impact assessment or by the geographical and cultural differences you have to manage across those groups. It may come in the form of dependencies on things like new technology, or connecting the solution rollout to a larger effort, such as a cultural transformation or the integration of a new acquisition.
When assessing risk, you also need to consider which groups on your stakeholders list might present a higher risk either to the success of the program itself or to such things as your brand or customer experience. For example, which groups have direct customer-facing roles? You’ll want to be sure that these groups are well managed so that you can reduce the risk of any ill will bleeding into your customer experience. Also consider the groups that could take the project down if they are not all-in on the plan. (How awful would it be if your own HR team torpedoed your efforts?) These high-risk teams and individuals will need the greatest care and handling. And if you’ve got a team that’s both heavily impacted and high-risk? Those people are your first priority.
Consider change saturation
We established earlier that we’re just plain wired to resist change. So what happens when you force your employees to go through too many changes at once? Bad stuff: increased employee turnover, higher likelihood of project failures, productivity losses, dissatisfaction, disengagement, and higher levels of absenteeism. Change practitioners call this change fatigue, and trust me, you don’t want to deal with it as you’re rolling out your new performance management solution. Obviously, the ideal way to avoid change saturation is to time your implementation so that no group is in the midst of too many other changes at the same time. Of course, this might not be entirely realistic in today’s fast-paced business environment, but you can put some effort into coordinating with other implementation managers to avoid overloading groups of people with too much at any one time.
Create Your Change Plan
Now is the time to sit down and write up your change plan, capturing the change management activities you will be completing in order to give your new performance management solution real staying power. This is where you decide what you plan to do to help your employees with the transition to your new performance management solution. A great change plan will consider the who (those stakeholder groups you identified earlier), the what (the nature of the change activity, such as planned communications or learning events), and the when (the right time to reach each group with this content or engagement).
GUIDE TO CREATING YOUR CHANGE PLAN
To help you get started, check out the step-by-step facilitation guide to building your change plan in the Toolbox.
Gather Your Change Champions
Consider building a coalition of advocates that will support this effort throughout the journey. Change champions, change advocates, change support network—regardless of what you call them, they’ll play a critical role in the success of your transition to a new performance management solution. You’ll want to make sure that someone from each major area (department, geography, group, etc.) is represented. The role of this hand-picked group is to be educated on why the change is happening, what the new way will look like, and what the process is to get there. Their mission is to support the overall readiness of the employees and reinforce the key messages and information that you provide. Good change champions help people navigate the change and keep them pointed in the right direction. They can provide support during and after the rollout of the new solution, ensuring that people feel successful with the new ways and that they remain committed for the long term. You can also look to them to serve as two-way conduits for information, not only helping you share information with their constituencies but also providing you feedback and insights on how things are tracking.
Perhaps the most important role that change champions play is to generate enthusiasm among the masses. You simply cannot underestimate the impact that a fellow team member (someone your employees know and trust) can have in encouraging people to get onboard. These emissaries of change have strong relationships with the folks in the trenches, so their word that it’s going to be great in the long run is going to resonate more powerfully than yours, no matter how elegantly you phrase your communications.
Expect Resistance
You need to expect that your new ideas and approach will encounter resistance. In fact, you should be shocked if they don’t. Resistance will show up in a variety of ways and for a bunch of reasons. The roots of resistance are fairly predictable in any change effort and commonly include fear of loss, uncertainty, surprise, change fatigue, fear of incompetence, and fear of increased workload.8 When you’re assessing change impacts and the nature of resistance you might encounter, it is helpful to evaluate how stepping away from Fatal Flaws and toward the Fundamental Shifts will trigger reactions or influence behaviors across your stakeholder groups. Here are a few examples to jumpstart your own analysis of the resistance you need to plan for:
• Fear of loss. The groups most commonly at risk for fear of loss resistance include your leaders, managers, and potentially members of your HR team. But what do they fear they’ll be losing? Most often it’s a sense of power or control. Managers may believe that to shift to an employee-powered process reduces their power within the organization. Leaders may feel that abandoning ratings and forced distributions reduces their ability to control outcomes and people decisions. HR members may think moving to a solution that varies across the organization by employee segments or groups creates chaos and reduces their ability to control consistency in the experience, quality, and outcomes.
I recommend attacking this form of resistance head-on. Get it out in the open and talk it through with those concerned. Bring others who can share their experiences and stories into the conversation to reduce anxiety and inspire more buy-in.
• Uncertainty. This is a big resistance risk for designs that stray dramatically from tradition. People who have spent the entirety of their careers in top-down, manager-driven performance processes are likely to be more skeptical than most about the ideas put forward in the Fundamental Shifts. An uncertainty concern frequently raised is, “Does this new model mean we’re throwing out accountability?” This concern was at the heart of an experience I had just a few weeks ago when giving a presentation to a team of executive leaders for one of our clients. The CEO’s only comment about the shifts and my examples was, “We don’t want any of that touchy-feely stuff.”
This prime example of resistance rearing its ugly head stemmed from his uncertainty about stepping away from what he knows and trying ideas that he’s never seen in action. When you encounter these doubting Thomases, I find it helps to call on research, data, examples, and stories to help people build confidence. Piloting can also be used to a huge advantage—show them how it will work in a contained environment before you ask them to go all-in.
• Fear of incompetence. The apprehension that comes with questioning one’s own ability to adapt to change can drive some of the greatest resistance. Even worse, it tends to show up in passive ways, making it harder to recognize. People are just plain scared of looking stupid, not getting it, or failing in this new normal. This is especially true when the pride we derive at work from our knowledge and skill is on the line. When shifting away from a generic performance management model to something more organic and holistic, you might find that HR business partners who have invested a great deal of time in designing, training others, and overseeing your old process may doubt their ability to guide people through your new process. Managers may feel woefully unprepared to discuss careers or unaccustomed to new levels of transparency and openness. It’s worth identifying these risks early on and designing targeted interventions to build the confidence of those who feel exposed or at risk.
• Fear of increased workload. Employees and managers alike may experience this form of resistance. This perspective may be driven by the thought of scrapping annual or semiannual reviews in favor of ongoing conversations. It can also be a by-product of managers realizing that they need to take more accountability for outcomes and that they can no longer rely on HR recommendations, policies, or guidelines for easy answers. The best way to mitigate this risk is to keep your approach simple and easy to use and to provide all those involved with the necessary training to ensure that they can quickly become effective at applying the new processes, tools, and systems you’ve incorporated into your configuration. Shortening the learning curve can help win you early support and increase the speed of adoption.
And the list goes on. The takeaway here is that all of these responses are natural, and they represent the spectrum of emotions that are felt (even if they aren’t always expressed) when change occurs. Your job is to predict them where you can, prepare to respond, be empathetic when they arise, and invest the time and energy in readying your team to embrace (or maybe even love) your new program.
Of course, knowing why resistance is to be expected doesn’t entitle you to write off legitimate feedback when it’s offered. That is not what I’m advocating here. After all, some resistance may come from folks who see legitimate weaknesses in your new approach and whose insight will ultimately produce a better result. Those are the people you want to engage early in the design process so that their voices can be heard. In short, listen to the resistance. Try to identify the underlying root of it: is it a passing concern about the upcoming changes and how they will impact the individual, or is it offered in the spirit of helping the process? Some resistance may present valuable feedback you should be internalizing, while other resistance (probably the majority) is just going to be something you have to work through with your people, who, you’ll recall, are not machines. As the champion of the effort, you have to figure out how to get everyone there eventually. You can do this only by being thoughtful about how you manage the change and by coaxing both the rider and the elephant to make the journey with you.
Defend against the Naysayers
One busy Friday, I met with a West Coast client in the morning and then returned to my office to take a call from one of my East Coast clients in the afternoon. In the span of a few scant hours, both of my clients used exactly the same phrase to describe their current performance management programs: “Our performance management program is fine.”
All weekend that phrase was stuck in my brain like an annoying popcorn hull wedged between my teeth. I pondered what those words meant to each of them and what ugly truths might lurk beneath an innocuous word like fine. I think that phrase spoke loudly to me because I’d heard it so many times before.
So what do people mean when they tell me that their performance program is fine? Perhaps it’s this:
In addition, the low expectations expressed in the phrase “Our performance management is fine” are indicative of how much we’ve lost sight of our people. We seem perfectly happy to settle for “fine” on their behalf. But if our intentions for investing in performance management are to connect our teams to our strategies and goals, to recognize outstanding contributions, and to enhance the development of each individual’s capabilities, how can we possibly continue to tolerate “fine”?
When I have a debate with someone who is defending the traditional performance management approach or with someone who is fearful of making changes to such a deeply rooted process (and trust me, I have many such debates), I always hear the same counterarguments. So much so, in fact, that it’s worthwhile to prepare you to answer those same objections in your own organization. See if you recognize any of these common objections.
“My boss will never buy it.”
As I’ve discussed, it is wise to pay special attention to “the boss.” Engage, educate, and bring him or her with you. Of course, you can’t expect this to happen overnight, especially if the boss in question leans more toward the traditionalist mind-set. Meet leaders where they are, build a plan, pace your progress, and maintain your resolve. Find out what they really care about and connect your case to that theme. You need their elephant with you, but understand that most leaders prefer to feel as though they’re always operating in the rider’s world. You may have to be diplomatic and creative with your strategy to appeal to both aspects of their decision-making tandem.
“We can’t trust our managers.”
Other than getting leaders on board, this is the second-biggest concern I hear from people, and it’s a legitimate one. Since we’re considering implementing a design that relies heavily on good, or preferably great, managers, this problem often stops teams in their tracks. It’s not a simple issue, either. It’s cluttered with questions of structure, role definition, and manager expectations. Many organizations suffer from being overmanaged and under-led. This happens because we often promote managers for technical or functional expertise and not for their people or managerial skills. We also have the industrial age to thank for a legacy of too many layers of oversight, and we’re only just beginning to break down those structures. Finally, most organizations have historically underinvested in building great leaders, especially in the lean years we’ve recently experienced. In short, all these trends add up to making the manager question a complicated and messy one, and a valid source of concern.
If this worry resonates with you, I’d encourage you to use it as motivation to address the bigger problem (i.e., the fact that you don’t trust your managers). Start by peeling your own onion to get at the root of your manager concern. Do you have too many managers or too many levels? Are they not the right people? Are their goals out of alignment with what’s valued by your organization as a whole? I’m not saying that these issues can be fixed quickly or easily; in fact, this may create a completely new agenda item for you. But the fact that you don’t trust the capability of your managers has much more far-reaching consequences than its impact on your performance management solution. It’s something that you’re going to need to address, no matter what. And if you succeed in building that capability in your managers? Then you’ll have a powerful team that will take you anywhere you need to go.
Of course, no matter whom you have in place, you’ll need to invest in readying your managers for their roles in your new solution. Throughout the story, we’ve talked about bringing this group along. Like your leaders, they’ll need some special attention, especially if the roles they are playing are changing substantially. There are ways in which they may need to let go of some control, like handing the keys to your employees to manage their own careers. Then there are other roles they may need to get comfortable with owning, like determining awards without a numerical indicator. And often they’ll need to change their mode of operating from telling to listening and helping. These changes may not be comfortable. No problem—you’ll just need to guide them through the change, help them build their capabilities, give them tools to shore them up, and check in from time to time to see how they are doing.
“It’s just so weird not to do it.”
One of the challenges we face as we try to leave performance reviews and ratings behind is our basic psychology. We are raised in a world in which nearly everything we do is rated or compared with others, from our infancy right through our professional lives. When we’re babies, our development is ranked on a percentile basis with other babies. When we start school, our performance is both graded and measured by standardized tests. We’re trained from an early age to seek affirmation through those grades, and we learn to accept the notion that our worth can be assigned to us with a number or letter scored against some standard.
It’s no surprise that the thought of getting rid of a review system—of kicking that process of standardized evaluation to the curb—is uncomfortable for us. We’ve lived our whole lives expecting those periodic rankings (and perhaps even relying upon them) to substantiate our own self-worth. That doesn’t mean, however, that we actually need them or that they are even good for us. But most of us figured out a long time ago that neither our grades in college nor our SAT scores had a damned thing to do with measuring what kind of person we would become or how likely we were to succeed. And, honestly, neither do performance rating systems. Take it to the bank: a good conversation with an employee about how he or she can grow and succeed in your organization is worth a hundred pointless review scores.
“How do we determine rewards without a rating?”
Similarly, I’ll bet that many people in your organization will struggle with the reward equitably side of your frame. It’s the sticky wicket in the triad, especially given our history of pay models and our standard approach to setting compensation. This change will require your compensation team to shift their thinking, which can play out in a lot of different ways. I’ve witnessed organizations in which the compensation team saw a new performance management solution as an invitation to rethink their overall rewards strategy. But I’ve also seen compensation teams dig in their heels and bring the whole initiative to a screeching halt. The best way to avoid the latter outcome is to engage the compensation team early in the design process by inviting them to become collaborators in your solution.
You also need to deal with the fact that it’s tempting to just put one number in a machine (or spreadsheet) and have another number fall out the other side. This gives us a pass on owning the decision, and it gives us a deceptively black-and-white view in an area that, in reality, can never be anything but gray. It’s extremely important that we get people comfortable with the idea that we need to bring ourselves, our human discernment, and our unique points of view into the reward decision process.
What happens if you just don’t want to deal with this area, and the comp team, at all? Well, I’ve seen what can happen when an organization’s design solution emphasizes the desire to drive organizational performance and develop people but leaves reward equitably out of the picture entirely. It’s sort of like trying to ride a bike without the chain on. You may be able to coast down a hill, but beyond that it just doesn’t work. Rewarding equitably is an integral part of a complete solution, and one your people will expect to be included. Don’t leave it out of the picture.
“Legal will have a fit!”
We know we need a paper trail to document behavior and performance problems, and we think our annual review cycle does that for us. Too often, though, it doesn’t. As I’ve pointed out, we tend to rate people too leniently, and to downplay or completely gloss over potentially awkward issues. This is one reason why the reviews of underperformers and good performers often read very much the same. The problem is that if a legal issue does arise, or we simply want to take action in response to an employee’s behavior or performance, we’re caught in a bind between what we really know about that employee’s history and a series of reviews that don’t appear all that bad. This can lead to a messy situation. It’s better to avoid this potential pitfall by documenting issues as they arise. Then the issues will be fresh and more accurately recorded—giving you a more sound legal footing and a more actionable position overall.
“Why change? Everyone else does it this way!”
While the majority of organizations still use traditional processes, the tide is turning. Today we’re seeing respected and forward-thinking organizations trying to drive organizational performance, develop people, and reward equitably in new ways. In fact, these pioneers have received significant positive exposure for their innovative programs. That attention certainly doesn’t hurt their employer brand (a measure of how positively prospective employees view you compared with your competitors). You have a decision to make here: Are you ready to be out front, or would you prefer to wait until your competition has passed you by before you take action? Maybe you have to wait because you feel you have bigger issues to tackle. Or maybe you’re simply going to procrastinate until you’re finally dragged kicking and screaming into the new world of performance management at some point in the future. But like it or not, the world is changing, and our old accepted practices will eventually crumble under the weight of the research and the evolving expectations of our employees. Lead or follow—the choice is yours.
Build Your Courage
Now that your solution is designed and it’s burning a hole in your pocket, take a good hard look in the mirror and strengthen your resolve. Why? Well, as we’ve just shown, any alteration to traditional performance management is something that many people in your organization, perhaps some of them very high up, might resist like mad. No matter who else you’ve got on your side, you’re still going to have to own this. You’ll need to walk confidently into a room and sell this new solution with everything you’ve got. You’ll need to be able to answer objections, guide executives, and face opposition with steely determination and unshakable confidence.
The good news is that you’ve got an energized team behind you (assuming you’ve followed my advice from the previous chapters, that is), a team that has helped you assess, design, and plan your solution. Having this core group at your back is a huge asset. But the bad news is that they represent only a small percentage of your organization, so you’ll still have your work cut out for you.
Frankly, it’s going to take guts to sell this change, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Yet I firmly agree with the old adage that most things in life that are worth doing take courage. Even as adults, we’re hesitant to risk the figurative bumps and bruises that can result from tackling tough challenges and sudden change. This is where many leaders find themselves foundering. Although they want to navigate a new path, they keep hearing the siren song of the familiar and the safe. Merriam-Webster defines courage as “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.”9 Change is difficult primarily because it’s scary, and it’s scary because it stimulates our innate fear of the unknown. The comfort of familiar habits and routines exerts a strong pull on us. No matter how we brace ourselves to change course and sail bravely on toward a new horizon, there still may be a voice in the back of our minds warning, “There be dragons! Turn back before it’s too late!”
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
—ROSALYNN CARTER10
Ignore that voice. You’re at this point in the process because you’re convinced beyond a doubt that there’s a better way out there. You’ve done your research, you’ve got the facts, and you know that your organization desperately needs a new solution. Trust your expertise. Trust your gut. Trust your preparation. Trust your team. Remind yourself of the many valid reasons why you started this journey in the first place. The earth is not flat, there are no dragons, and the course you’ve set is both right and necessary. Now sail on.