6 Tips for a Performance Management Spring Cleaning

With the first days of Spring finally here, it might be time to take a pause and assess your people leadership score for the first quarter of the new year.  Q1 is inevitably the time when businesses come out punching, charging at the new year's goals and objectives, ready to jumpstart the strategic plan, duel with the competition, and drive immediate results for the quarter and beyond.

But for many managers, this Q1 "winter sprint" may have compromised their people leadership focus and whittled away at the time they might have otherwise spent providing feedback and coaching to their teams.  If your employee engagement best intentions have taken a back seat to the business plan this quarter, then consider the dawning of Spring as the perfect time to dust off your goals as a leader of people, and spring clean your performance management plan.

Here are 6 Tips to Spring Clean your Performance Management Plan:

1. Embrace Coaching: Let this be the season where you listen more and talk less.  Dust off your engagement toolbox and get some dialogue going with each and every employee.  Leverage the power of technology to provide on-the-fly feedback, document it easily, and create a true continuum of coaching activity. 

2. Provide Real-Time Recognition and Feedback:  Time to put a shine on your best employees, your hardest workers, your most focused and thoughtful colleagues..."Catch them doing something right," and celebrate the moment today.  Employees who regularly receive recognition and feedback are more engaged and more productive than their less recognized peers.  So don't skimp on providing a fresh dose of spring feedback and praise this season.

3. Leverage Social Mobile Collaboration:  How useful are the tools you're using to manage team projects and set performance-related milestones and goals?  Are you leading with transparency to foster a culture of sharing and connection?  Set a fresh new direction this season to encourage relationship building and development to improve team cohesion and project results.

4. Champion Agile Goal Setting:  Commit to a refresh of your goal-setting framework, and create one that is less rigid and more flexible, innovative and efficient.  With an ever-changing landscape of business demands, goals need to be modified and adjusted on a regular basis to remain relevant and meaningful.

5. Educate with Connected Learning & Assessments:  It's time to reorganize your learning and development resources if they are not helping your employees achieve their full potential.  Make sure your coaching and training resources are seamlessly linked, and leverage assessments to better understand individual and collective strengths.

6.  Create Continuous Performance Growth:  Now that you've "cleaned house" around coaching, feedback, collaboration, goals and learning, you're on the path to create a culture of continuous performance growth.  Remember that your people are your most unique and significant competitive advantage.  Technology enabled performance management unites the goals of the business with the aspirations of the people who bring the business to life.  

For more tips and best practices to create a culture of continuous performance growth, download the latest TalentFirst Whitepaper.