Performance Management (PM) concerns the broad, end-to-end process by which an organisation can align its overarching strategic aims with the accountabilities and tasks everyone undertakes to achieve those aims. If there is no continuity between the corporate aims and individual aims, performance will suffer.
Instituting an effective, behaviourally based, non-bureaucratic PM process is the optimal means by which all organisations can achieve their purpose and so make vision become reality.
Behavioural competencies should be used as part of the performance management process to achieve the following:
- To help individuals understand how their behaviours underpin the tasks and objectives for which they have agreed with their boss to be held accountable
- To provide clear definitions of the keynote behaviours that act as the basis for feedback about performance and a framework against which coaching can be conducted
- To provide the platform on which coaching can be positioned as a crucial and positive activity to raise individual and team performance and avoid it being regarded as a ‘step on the discipline process’. “Coaching is for experts!” should be an organisational mantra
- To help individuals gain a really deep understanding about which behaviours they need to develop in order to make a greater performance contribution to their organisation and to position themselves for other roles relative to their own ambition and their assessed long-term potential
- To augment the coaching process by enabling 360° assessment to be acquired and provided as a component of the ongoing feedback process
- To provide the foundation of an organisation’s formal learning and development curriculum so highlighting the criticality of people acquiring real, embedded strength in those threshold behaviours coupled with a sound degree of conscious competence in those distinguishing behaviours, mastery of which lead to sustained delivery of superior performance
- To link defined, required actual behaviours, i.e. competencies, to personality measures such as GPI™ and GMI, to assist individuals understand the potential causal links between their natural style and the feedback perceptions about their actual behaviours
- To provide a means by which long-term potential can be assessed from current delivery of behaviour, response to developmental inputs and underlying attributes of personality and mental capacity. (Although we remark that knowledge and educational attainment are not as critical as behaviours in driving performance, senior managerial roles do require a good level of ‘mental horsepower’ in order to process and synthesis the torrent of information now produced by operational systems, including social networks, now utilised by organisations.)
