The trend is clear: the classic questionnaire-based. Exclusively for customers, management evaluations are being challenged and are on the decline in many places. 58% of managers in an international survey didn't think performance measurement is worth the time (see notes 1, 2 and 3 below), which is the same thing I'm seeing as more companies begin to question the usual ways of measuring managerial performance. Are we really measuring what creates the most value? Are we steering people in the right direction? our overall goals? Or are our large, complex measurement systems really just expensive systems that contribute to frustration and complicated overviews that we don't act on anyway?
The question more and more organizations are asking themselves is: How can we make our management evaluations more manageable and therefore more useful for the purpose of management development? One of the ways we can do this is by thinking about new ways of evaluating - for example, through dialogues.
Let's skip the data analysis and jump straight into development
In classic quantitative management evaluation, we spend a lot of resources on preparing analyses, sending out questionnaires, asking the organization to answer them and then waiting for results, which we can then analyze and send out to the organization. Only then does the development (maybe) begin. What if we just jumped straight to development?
This was precisely the ambition in Skive Municipality, where 120 managers and 4,500 employees have just held "Development Dialogues", which is the successor to their quantitative management evaluation system. Today, management evaluation is without numbers and graphs. Here, after a short preparation, managers and employees get straight down to talking about what is important to them in terms of management - and immediately talk about what is important to them in terms of leadership. and immediately talk about what they need to do about it together. With these simple steps, the usual ways of conducting management evaluations are changed:
- We now talk directly about what's important to us without a lot of costly analysis beforehand.
- We talk as a group without anonymous comments.
- We're in it together to find a solution - it's not just the manager's responsibility to create good leadership and well-being - it's something we need to create together.
By conducting management evaluations through a guided dialog where 1) what is important to all employees in relation to management and 2) what needs to be changed in clear speaking and listening positions. and 2) what needs to be changed in clear speaking and listening positions, everyone has their say and everything is written down for later collection. We have already made a quantum leap: Invitation to evaluation dialog -> Jump straight to talking about solutions.
In another organization, after a management evaluation dialogue, an employee said: "It's definitely easier for me to be able to say things to my manager after we had this dialog. If there's something I think she should do better, well, I've actually found out through the dialog that it's okay to come and say it, and I wouldn't have done that before". The point is that the dialog itself, in addition to evaluating the managers, contributes to building trust in each other.
Some departments will consist of many employees, which is why the dialog process must be adapted so that both departments with 5 and 80 employees can succeed in giving the manager feedback in a short time. This exercise has just been completed in Skive Municipality, where all managers and
employee representatives answered: "YES" to the question: "Did you have the opportunity to talk about what was important to you in terms of leadership and well-being?" in the subsequent evaluation of the concept. This is a very clear indicator that it is possible to get straight to the core - even in a very diverse organization with many different types of managers and employees.
Of course, there are several concerns associated with moving from using questionnaires to using dialog as the primary tool. The two most common ones are 1) that managers are worried that employees won't be honest in the dialog and 2) that you can't do without the big data overview. Let's take a look at these two constraints:
Step 1: Talking to each other requires trust - what if it's not there?
This is one of the most common concerns I hear from leaders who are considering making the leap. We want to start talking to each other about good leadership and collaboration instead of ticking boxes on an anonymous questionnaire, but we don't dare.
In connection with evaluations, it is inevitable that different feelings will arise, such as insecurity about being evaluated by your management - or entering into dialogues as an employee where potentially difficult topics need to be discussed. It is therefore important to create a sense of comfort with the evaluation even before it is carried out. There are several things we can work on here:
- Managers should send a clear signal to their employees that he/she will take development seriously after receiving feedback. This will often result in employees wanting to participate in the evaluation and respond honestly (see note 4 below)
- That everyone has a clear picture of the subsequent process and follow-up, as it should be clear to employees why they should put time and energy into honest answers (see note 5 below)
As a minimum, managers should address the review in a constructive way at a staff meeting in preparation for the upcoming review process. The purpose of this is for the manager to provide insight into why he/she is personally looking forward to the process - and what the follow-up will look like.
One manager I worked with built trust in the evaluation process through a very clear example where he gave a small anecdote to his employees: "I once received feedback that I was often too controlling in my management. At first I thought: NO! That's definitely not true! I felt like they were criticizing my personal management style - and that was hard to take. Gradually, I began to realize that this was something I might need to take a closer look at. Over time, several employees became more and more quiet when I asked for input. After all, I was the one who set the direction and made the final decision. I realized that I needed to find a balance where I could be supportive while still being in control. It's a feedback that has significantly changed me as a leader and, I can see now, has changed the way we work together for the better. I need feedback on an ongoing basis to become the very best leader that can drive us forward together. I want to be the great leader you deserve! Help me become that with you." What remained was a group of employees who had not only been told to answer honestly and voice their opinions in the dialogues about good leadership and collaboration - but also a group of employees who could genuinely feel a leader who meant what he said!
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2. Leg span: Can we do without the big, chrome-plated data overview?
Most senior executives like numbers because they provide a sense of overview and control. But it's a false sense of security if the numbers don't reflect the reality of the organization. With qualitative data created through dialogues, you get a deeper picture of what's actually happening in the organization right now. The common organizational data base from the qualitative management evaluations is built on the basis of data about overall themes in the individual dialogues, which are subsequently reported by each department. If you still want central figures, you can also choose to include a few short scale questions in the questionnaire, such as "How good is your manager on a scale of 1-10"? What else can be deduced from a classic qualitative overview after the dialogues is what themes the organization is concerned with. Here, you can choose to design the evaluation so that the themes express the strengths and challenges in management - not on a scale - just as headlines. The organization can then use these headlines to make choices about which themes to work with in the future to develop leadership, collaboration and well-being. Can we do without the nuances and "settle" for the overview? Do we dare to let go of the illusion of control and management that the annual quantitative management evaluations with a fixed questionnaire give us? These are key questions to ask yourself if you are considering moving from questionnaires to dialogues.
Can we just jump straight from numbers to dialog like that?
Organizational cultures are different, and for some, going from numbers to dialogue would be a much bigger leap than for others. Of course, you need to consider what the feedback culture is already like. However, experience so far suggests that this can easily be done. When you are about to start your qualitative evaluation, you can start with:
- The purpose! What decisions will you be able to make based on the evaluation? What do we actually need our management assessments for? Is it to provide a big picture view of all the nuances of leadership throughout the management chain at different levels? Is it to provide a strategic overview of how good our leaders are at supporting our strategy and executing it? Is it a strategic development tool for the organization to help prioritize resources in HR for the next development activities? Or a personal development tool to help individual leaders learn and develop? For management teams? Contribute to trust between managers and employees? Ensure control by following up on whether managers are doing what is expected of them? Or something else entirely?
- The method: If we want to move away from the questionnaire, we need to consider which qualitative method is best suited to our organization. Maybe we just need to get the ball rolling and directly put good leadership on the agenda between managers and employees in a joint dialog. Perhaps the right method for this is to have someone observe the manager in their everyday management in order to use this data together with the dialog and draw examples from it. Perhaps the right form is interviews of employee and manager groups (where the manager being evaluated can choose to be present). Or perhaps ongoing whiteboard meetings where we talk about leadership and collaboration in a regular, everyday format is the solution for us.
So, together, let's consider whether we can ditch the large, expensive and complex management evaluations in favor of evaluations that are closer to management and, with fewer resources and less complexity, create greater management development and results for the collaboration in the individual department.
References
- (Nabaum, Barry, Garr & Liakopolus, 2014)
- This trend isn't unique to the UK - in another international survey, 89% of companies say they are either in the process of or will change their performance management system within the next 18 months (Sloan, Tsuchida & Parent, 2015).
- In addition, a survey conducted by HK found that 40% of the 500 managers surveyed believe that management evaluations are only "to some extent" a useful tool for self-development - with only 11% answering "to a great extent".
- (Bracken, Timmreck, Fleenor & Summers, 2001)
- (Haustein, Facteau & Schmidt, 1999; Woehr & Huffcutt, 1994)
