Performance Management for Agile Organizations: Overthrowing The Eight Management Myths That Hold Businesses Back

235 Pages·2017·3.36 MB·English

by  Tim Baker (auth.)

OVERTHROWING THE EIGHT MANAGEMENT
MYTHS THAT HOLD BUSINESSES BACK
Performance Management for Agile
Organizations
Tim Baker
Performance
Management for
Agile Organizations
Overthrowing The Eight Management Myths
That Hold Businesses Back
Tim Baker
WINNERS-at-WORK Pty Ltd
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-40152-2 ISBN 978-3-319-40153-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40153-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957151
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This book is dedicated to Carol May Baker, my wife and life partner. I’m an
infinitely better person with her in my life. Carol’s unconditional love,
unfailing support, and abiding belief in me, sustain me.
Preface
Management as a Profession is
Ultra-Conservative
Performance management is a hot topic; it has been for some time.
Managers universally want to know what can be done to escalate com-
pany performance. What are the secrets, shortcuts, and strategies? Where do I
begin? Employers and their managers all want answers to these and other
performance questions. They want to know what can be done to opti-
mize performance, gain a competitive or adaptive advantage, and build
capacity. Further, they want to know how to responsively deal with the
fickle and ever-changing demands and heightened standards of the end-
user: the customer. Being agile, maneuverable, and flexible are success
factors for the modern high-performing company. Where to begin?
Agility—more than ever—is the driver of organizational performance.
In an organizational context, agility can be defined as:
the ability to stay open to new directions and be continually proactive,
helping to assess the limits or indeed risks of existing approaches and ensur-
ing that leaders and followers have an agile and change-ready mindset to
enable them and ultimately the organization to keep moving, changing,
adapting.1
vii
viii Preface
The way we evaluate business performance has progressed considerably
since the 1950s. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, performance was
primarily measured in terms of profit margins; other factors weren’t taken
into account. To gain perspective, it’s helpful to understand the successive
schools of thought on evaluating performance and their implication for
speed, maneuverability, and flexibility. Each performance movement has
its relative benefits and blind spots—they each emerged from deficiencies
in previous approaches.
Research suggests a link between an agile enterprise and its performance
management practices.2 The top traits of an agile business, for instance,
are a high performance culture, flexibility in management practices and
resource allocation, organizational structures supporting collaboration,
and rapid decision-making and execution. I discuss these characteristics
in detail in Performance Management for Agile Organizations.
If agility is critical to organizational success—as it’s widely reported—
then we need to know precisely what agility means—and doesn’t mean.
What are the characteristics and preconditions of agility in an organiza-
tional setting? Although there are myriad definitions and models of orga-
nizational agility, there are few, if any, used to actually evaluate business
performance. Most agility models describe what the organization needs
to do to be flexible, adaptable, and maneuverable. But these models don’t
consider the dimensions of agility and how they should be assessed. The
Organizational Agility model that I have developed promises to fill the
gap.
Building on management guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s original three-
pronged model of organizational speed, I add four additional dimensions
of agility to make up seven forms of agility. The model offers a compre-
hensive framework for appraising agility in any workplace setting.
I then examine eight long-standing roadblocks to agility. Each obsta-
cle is based on management myths rooted in Frederick Taylor’s scientific
management philosophy.
What’s commonly referred to as Taylorism, began over 100 years ago
on the factory assembly lines of several businesses, including the Ford
Motor Company. Taylor’s philosophy was very successful at yielding high
profit margins. But work itself has radically transformed from the fac-
tory assembly lines of the early twentieth century to the knowledge work
Preface ix
of the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding this transformation in the
world of work, the thinking and practice of scientific management is still
ubiquitous today. Taylorism continues to guide and inform our perfor-
mance management practices.
What’s more, the philosophy of scientific management is deeply
embedded in the psyche of management. It’s been the driving force for
performance practices that are outdated. My claim that management
thinking is passé, is tempting to dismiss. The mind-boggling transforma-
tion from the birth of the industry suggests performance management
practices have advanced too. Even though the work people do is unrec-
ognizable from the factory of the early twentieth century, thinking about
managing people’s performance hasn’t moved at anywhere near the same
pace. Management as a profession is ultra-conservative.
Outdated scientific management practices aren’t helpful in the least.
But more than that, they’re holding businesses back from executing
the nimbleness required. In other words, instead of helping—which is
what performance management practices are supposed to do—they’re
hindering business. I explain how these management myths negatively
impact on all the dimensions of agility. Several alternatives, based on a
contemporary set of management beliefs, are advanced to promote agile
performance. So a critical appraisal of the way we typically still manage
performance promises to emancipate maneuverability, heighten flexibil-
ity, and increase speed.
Taylorism has, without doubt, a profound and ongoing influence
on the traditional employment relationship. Performance manage-
ment practices, with their foundation in scientific management—such
as specialization and constructing work around jobs—have buttressed
the conventional working relationship between management and labor.
Changing well-entrenched performance management practices is ulti-
mately futile without a fresh psychological contract between employer
and employee. Unless a workplace—where new performance manage-
ment practices are implemented—can cultivate a new working relation-
ship or psychological contract, the new practices will be unsustainable.
So the challenge is transforming organizational culture, based on a differ-
ent set of expectations of the role of employee and manager.
x Preface
Performance, learning, and culture go together. Speed, agility, and
maneuverability are hamstrung in a workplace culture based on the tra-
ditional employment relationship characterized as “them and us.” The
demarcation of responsibilities in the old psychological contract is sim-
ple and clear-cut; that is, managers do the thinking and workers do the
doing. Simplicity is one of the primary attractions of a “them and us”
working relationship. Although straightforward, it’s too basic to be effec-
tive in a climate of accelerated change and uncertainty. What’s more, the
conventional working arrangement is not conducive for agile behavior
to flourish. The springboard for agile performance is a new, more col-
laborative, and far less delineated psychological contract. Knowing what
that relationship should look like is the starting point for evaluating agile
performance. Shifting this culture shouldn’t be underestimated as a per-
formance success factor.
Now, just a comment on how Performance Management for Agile
Organizations is different from the plethora of books on organizational
performance. I’m certainly not the first writer to be critical of such people
management rituals as the performance review, hierarchical organizing
structures, and the job description. I’m unlikely to be the last, either.
Even if you’ve only read one or two books in the organization develop-
ment field, you’d know that writers are critical of these, and other people
management practices. But it seems that most of this critique has fallen
on deaf ears or—more likely—the thinking behind managing perfor-
mance is deeply entrenched, faulty, and hinders progress.
Notwithstanding the abundance of organizational performance
advice, three things are novel about Performance Management for Agile
Organizations. First, I describe my new model for evaluating organiza-
tional agility, which consists of seven dimensions. Second, I consider
the eight management myths about performance that thwart speed and
responsiveness. Discussing these psychological roadblocks makes what
I hope is a compelling case for rethinking organizational performance.
And third, I put forward a case and a framework for a culture based on a
different kind of working relationship between employer and employee.
Most performance management and organization development literature
by-pass the psychological contract. It’s often and incorrectly assumed that
a new culture comes with applying new practices, rather than the reverse;
Preface xi
that is, different practices evolve from a new culture. So I take an uncom-
mon approach to performance management.
If we continue to believe people (I am uncomfortable with the terms,
human resources and human capital) are the competitive or adaptive
advantage in business, we need to reflect on the assumptions we have
about performance. How people in the work-setting interact and fuse
with the bewildering assortment of systems, processes, and procedures,
is the essence of performing at work. Scrutinizing how performance is
managed is necessary, particularly now, when many of the time-honored
systems are asphyxiating the capacity to work with agility.
I hope you enjoy my book and find it thought-provoking and practical.
Notes
1. Zheltoukhova, K. (2014). HR: Getting smart about agile working. CIPD
research paper.
2. Economic Intelligence Unit (2009). Organisational agility: How businesses can
survive and thrive in turbulent times. London: Economic Intelligence Unit.