56. Solution Focused Performance Management – using difference, not removing it
Most performance management systems strive to remove difference. How much better to keep it, amplify it and use it to build positive change.
Last week I wrote about the disgraceful way in which the London mayoral election voting system has been downgraded from a two-preference system to first-past-the-post. This eliminates so much potential for voters to show their different views and reduces everything to one all-or-nothing tick in the box.
This time I’m looking at how the same kind of thing can happen in the workplace, and what to do about it. Welcome to the wonderful world of performance management.
Performance management
Sometimes ‘performance management’ is seen as a euphemism for what to do about poor performance. That’s not really what I’m talking about here. I am thinking about the kind of annual (or nowadays maybe twice a year) appraisal and performance review that happens in so many workplaces. These are supposed to be a key part of employee feedback and building the organisation, but so often they are a disappointment and embarrassment to all concerned.
When I worked in the electricity industry in the 1980s, we had an annual review process called Staff Performance And Succession Management, giving the unfortunate acronym SPASM. Really. The system had four grades, because if it were five possibilities then all the engineers would have been ‘fair’ and given everyone the middle grade. With no middle grade, went the theory, there was no place to hide; workers had to be either above or below average. Once a year, the manager would invite their team member for a discussion and tell them the grade they’d been assigned. There should then be a discussion about what had happened in the previous year and what should happen in the next year. I don’t think this was unusual at the time. It was also dreaded by all concerned, and as such had little to recommend it. The form therefore looked something like this:
(These were not the SPASM grades, but the point is the same. 😊)
All or nothing
The way this system works, the manager has to put a tick on one of the boxes. That then is supposed to be a reflection of the worker’s performance over the year. And what happens next? If the tick is anywhere apart from the top ‘fantastic!’ box, the worker will immediately start to complain that they are better than that, which leads straight to an argument with the manager having to defend their position/judgement and tell the worker that they aren’t as good as they think they are. A worse position for a constructive performance-building conversation can scarcely be imagined. And, these systems are often used to determine pay rises/bonuses/promotions too, which add to the confusion and get people even more set into their positions.
Let’s imagine we’ve given this particular worker a ‘Good’ rating. This is very like the first-past-the-post voting system I was complaining about last week; there are only four possible results here, with no prospect of acknowledging difference or nuance. What we have effectively done is remove all the variation in that person’s work over the year and reduced it to this:
No wonder the first thing that the employee will say is “I was better than that!”. And sometimes, indeed, that’s probably true. However, there is no way to record this in the system or use the difference as the starting point for a useful conversation; it’s been erased, quite deliberately, at the outset.
Using difference, not eliminating it
One brilliant way to bring difference back into the equation was developed nearly two decades ago by my Austrian colleague Günter Lueger, who wrote a paper for our special edition of the Organisations & People journal in 2003, which was later published in the book Positive Approaches To Change (2005). The book is getting very hard to find these days, so I link here to a PDF version of Günter’s original chapter on Solution Focused Rating.
The genius of this move is that it doesn’t involve new paperwork – just a new way of using the same paperwork. Here’s how it goes. Remember how we were forced to reduce a year’s varied performance into one world ‘Good’? The actual performance over the year looks more like this in practice:
There are ups and downs, highs and lows, fluctuations… and this is only for one aspect of the person’s work. There are many such aspects to consider: different tasks, relationships, delivery, development, and so on. So, how to reflect this on the four-choice appraisal form? Günter had the wonderful idea of giving the employee 100 points to distribute across the four options. So we might end up with something like this:
Also note that this conversation starts with the employee giving their own self-rating, rather than the manager. What can now happen is that a conversation can happen about the different elements of performance during the period. Taking a Solution Focused approach, that might look like this:
When were the times when performance was fantastic?
What happened during those times? What helped? Who else noticed?
What strengths and resources were you putting into action to deliver these results?
Suppose those strengths and resources were to appear more often at work… what would you notice? What else?
How can we make more times like that happen in the coming period?
(Next level) What were the times when performance was good?
(And so on…)
Starting at the top with the highest performance, we can describe that, look at what helped it to happen and start to think about how to make more of that. Then moving down, when were things Good, then (if you want) OK, and finally when were things Poor. There may not be any need to actually discuss the Poor element – having talked about how to make things more Fantastic, the lessons are usually clear across the board. However, if there are serious concerns about some aspects of the work, by the time we are discussing the Poor times there are already many successes, strengths, resources and learnings lying around which can be put to good use.
This is in contrast to the problem focused approach, where the failures are discussed first because they are a priority (usually for the manager), leading to a focus on deficits and weaknesses. That leads to an unproductive conversation where the manager is insisting that the worker is less good than they think; not a terribly productive stance. It’s surprising that it’s so popular with managers.
To sum up, the idea with Günter’s approach is to start by talking about the best performance, learn from it and (if necessary) apply that to the poor performance times. We might say that we identify and learn from the ‘green’ times and then apply that learning to the ‘red’ times.
This is something you can try easily at work. It may or may not fit with your formal appraisal systems, but the spirit of this kind of conversation is quite straightforward to start, and can lead to dramatically different results in a few moments. One word of warning from Günter; if you want to change the way people use the existing formal systems into something like this method, you really need to give them good training about the new ways to carry on. Faced with the same form, many people will tend to use it in the same way, even if the detailed instructions are different.
Conclusions
Noticing, valuing and amplifying small differences, particularly small positive differences, is a key part of SF work. I discussed this in my article on the ‘aesthetics’ of SF working, where valuing small differences is a key part of our outlook.
Next time I will write about the curious distinction between positive difference and negative difference. It’s a key plank to SF working and one with an unusual twist.
Dates and mates
Günter Lueger is very much alive and well, living in Vienna and working under the name of The Potential Focus. There is a lot about his SF Rating tool and many other pieces of work, all in German. However, Google Translate can help you understand it better.
The sessions for SF24, the international 24-hour exploration of all things Solution Focused on Friday 3 May, have been announced. I am part of several events (all UK time):
5.30am-6am: Journal of Solution Focused Practices (with Andreea Zak)
1pm-2pm: What we’ve learned writing the new edition of The Solutions Focus (with Paul Z Jackson)
3pm-4pm: Journal of Solution Focused Practices (with Anton Stellamans)
7pm-7.30pm: Journal of Solution Focused Practices (with Cecil Walker)
You can register free for ALL the many sessions with a couple of clicks, and also get more details on all the sessions at
https://www.solutionfocus24.com/
We’re counting down to the new edition of The Solutions Focus on 9th May 2024. I was excited to notice that the audio book is now being offered on platforms like Amazon, Audible and so on, with our first-choice narrator Richard Burnip in the chair. Paul Z Jackson and I have been invited to add our own voices in reading the Preface to the new edition, which we are hoping to do in the coming days.
