Making Sure Your Employees Succeed

It's thecommon knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager's job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives, and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them, and for you, as their manager. Goal-setting is particularly important as a mechanism for providing ongoing and year-end feedback. By establishing and monitoring targets, you can give your employees real-time input on their performance while motivating them to achieve more.

So, how involved should you be in helping employees establish and achieve their goals? Since failure to meet goals can have consequences for you, your employee, and your team, as well as the broader organization, you need to balance your involvement with the employee's ownership over the process. Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and co-author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader says "A manager's job is to provide 'supportive autonomy' that's appropriate to the person's level of capability." The key is to be hands-on while giving your people the room they need to succeed on their own. Here are some principles to follow as you navigate how to support best your people in reaching their objectives.

For goals to be meaningful and effective in motivating employees, they must be tied to larger organizational ambitions. Employees who don't understand the roles they play in company success are more likely to become disengaged. "Achieving goals is often about making tradeoffs when things don't go as planned. Employees need to understand the bigger picture to make those tradeoffs when things go wrong," says Hill. No matter what level the employee is at, he should be able to articulate exactly how his efforts feed into the broader company strategy.

Since employees are ultimately responsible for reaching their goals, they need to have a strong voice in setting them. Ask your employee to draft goals that directly contribute to the organization's mission. Once she's suggested initial goals, discuss whether her targets are both realistic and challenging enough. "Stretch targets emerge as a process of negotiation between the employee and the manager," says Srikant M. Datar, the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University and contributor to the Goal Setting module of Harvard Manage Mentor. Be careful though: your team members are likely to resent you if you insist on goals which are too challenging to accomplish. At the same time, you don't want to aim too low, either. If you are overly cautious, you will miss opportunities and settle for mediocrity. "When done well, stretch goals create a lot of energy and momentum in an organization," says Datar. But, when done badly, they "do not achieve the goal of motivating employees and helping them achieve better performance as they were designed to do," he adds. Even worse, poorly set goals can be destructive to employees' morale and productivity, and to the organization's performance overall.

Once a goal is set, ask your employee to explain how he plans to meet it. Have him break goals down into tasks and set interim objectives, especially if it's a large or long-term project. Ask your employee: what are the appropriate milestones? What are possible risks and how do you plan to manage them? Because targets are rarely pursued in a vacuum, Hill suggests that you "help your people tounderstand why they are dependent on achieving those goals." Then problem solve with them on how to influence those people best to get the job done.

Staying on top of employee progress will help tohead off any troubles early on. "We often get problems because we don't signal that we are partners in achieving goals," says Hill. Don't wait for review time or the end of a project to check in. Review both long-term and short-term goals on a weekly basis. Even your high-performing employees need ongoing feedback and coaching. Ask your employee what type of monitoring and feedback would be most helpful to her, especially if the task is particularly challenging or something she is doing for the first time.

Very few of us reach our goals without some road bumps along the way. Build relationships with employees so that they feel comfortable coming to you if and when problems arise. If your employee encounters an unforeseen obstacle, the goal may need reworking. First, however, ask him to bring a potential solution to you so you can give him coaching and advice. If his efforts to solve the problem fail, you will need to get further involved.

Some managers neglect to think about what an employee is personally trying to accomplish in the context of work. "If I account for the interests of the whole person, not just the work person, I'm going to get more value from them," says Stewart D. Friedman, thePractice Professor of Management at the Wharton School and author of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For example, if your employee has expressed an interest in teaching but that is not part of his job responsibilities, you may be able to find ways to sculpt his job to include opportunities to train peers or less experienced colleagues.

The first step is for you to understand what these goals are. Ask employees if they have any personal goals they want to share with you. Don't pressure them; they should only share these aspirations if they feel comfortable. Friedman suggests you then ask, 'What adjustments might we try that would help you toachieve your goals?" This allows the employee to take ownership over the solution. Just as with work goals, you need to be sure personal goals contribute to your team, unit, or to the company. "It's got to be a shared commitment to experiment and mutual responsibility to check in on how it's going. It's got to be a win for both," says Friedman.

There will be times, even with the best support, when employees fail to meet their targets. "Hold people accountable. You can't say 'Gee, that's too bad.' You need to figure out what went wrong and why," says Hill. Discuss with your employee what happened and what each of you think went wrong. If the problem was within his control, ask him to apply the possible solutions you've discussed, take another stab at reaching the goal, and check in with you more frequently. If it was something that was outside of his power or the goal was too ambitious, acknowledge the disappointment but don't dwell on it. "Do the diagnosis, get the learning, and move on," says Hill.

It's possible that you may have contributed to the problem. Be willing to reflect on your role in the failure. Were you too hands-off and failed to check in frequently enough? Did you not review his work in a timely way? Have an open discussion about what you can do next time. "If you don't hold yourself accountable, they're going to have trouble with you," says Hill.

There are some principles to remember. For example, do connect individuals' goals to broader organization objectives; do show employees that you are a partner in achieving their goals; do learn about and incorporate employees' personal interests into their professional goals. On the other hand, don`t allow employees to set goals alone; don`t take a hands-off approach to high performers — they need input and feedback to meet their goals as well; don`t ignore failures — be sure people have the opportunity to learn when they don't achieve goals.

http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2011/02/making-sure-your-employees-suc.html

 

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