The Impact of Performance Management on Key Organizational Functions

Recently I stumbled across some notes that I had kept from a project I had been involved in which involved looking at manager behaviours. The aim of this project was to identify "preferred behaviours" in sales managers when they were working closely with their sales representatives. The outputs were interesting and helped my colleagues identify four main types of sales managers and the differences between effective and ineffective behaviours.

Having said that many representatives reported that actually watching this manager operate did help them as the manager more often than not had been a good sales executive and sales did tend to improve as a result of the representative implementing what they had observed.

Many difficult managers have been promoted to their current position because of their technical skills, their good attendance record, their willingness to work extra hours or their friendly non threatening relationship with their boss. Critical management skills such as organizational skills, leadership skills and decision making skills are given little or no consideration, resulting in an ineffective and at times a burdensome manager.

Everything in business is political except politics, that's personal. Learn how to play the political game by determining who the players are and how the game is played. Remember, organizational politics is a function of responsibility, accountability, authority and influence and, it is part of the organizational landscape. If you have more than one person working in your organization ; you have politics. Politics pervades our daily working life. That means building strategic relationships with others that might include personal trust and professional networks. The key is to remember 30% of people are doers, 50% are fence sitters and 20% are naysayers. Work with the 30% because these are the people who are willing to move ahead and make things happen.

The risks of doing a poor job of desktop management are now quite high given the security risks to every PC every day. Left unprotected, PCs are subject to Trojans, Keyloggers, Root Kits, Spyware and Viruses. One of the best ways to be protected is to apply all patches to operating systems and applications in a timely fashion. However, coordinating, staging and testing these patches is time consuming and something that should not be left to end users or ad hoc processes by the IT team. Every desktop needs Anti-virus software that is constantly updated, and users cannot be trusted to keep their virus data files current. Mobile users should also be protected with personal Firewall software, but again, users cannot be depended upon to install and keep such software current. Leaving this to chance can put the entire network and subsequently the entire company at risk.

Some IT departments may be concerned over the loss of control by using a management infrastructure provided as a hosted service. The quality of the service provided must be excellent and the reputation of the service provider is critical. However, only the infrastructure itself is under third party control in this alternative. Company IT staff remain in control of the actual end user interface and the actual processes and actions taken on individual desktops.

Based on the estimate, the manager then calculates the project schedule. Whereas the worker developed the estimate, the manager computes the schedule. Here, the manager considers the project's WBS and precedent relationships. More mportantly, the manager considers the Indirect and Unavailable time affecting the worker. This means the MPM concept does not subscribe to the "Man Hour" approach to project estimating and scheduling. I have discussed the differences in the use of time in many other articles, but in a nutshell we view time as

A quiet place to work is a tool. One strategy is to set aside "quiet time" one morning or afternoon each week during which noise and interruptions are discouraged. Traffic in hallways and between cubicles is curtailed, phone calls are rerouted to message centers, and visitors are asked to wait or come back later.

Finally, peer review, if introduced well and managed well, can save a manager time, but the ground rules must be clearly set to protect writers from overzealous critique and irrelevant micro editing. Lastly, managers frequently do not think to provide positive rewards for good writing. Such rewards are energizing, motivating, and encourage writers to continuously improve. A simple "Good job!" can go a very long way to improve morale and productivity.