HR Event Turkey

01

Everyone reacts differently to pressure and stress: some march ahead despite adversity, some are unable to move forward, and others just wait for a better time to come.

Photo diary

This series comes from a photographic diary that Julien Coquentin has kept every day since he arrived in Montreal in April 2010. As a nighttime nurse, he was able to spend time analyzing the concept of the city in its changing nature: just as our faces change and age over time, so the city constantly changes, dies and is reborn. From these changes, he reveals the "hopeless fragility of the city."

Coquentin's shots express different individual reactions to the odds of performance.

Series "Le Journal": 01 Block CCCXLIV, 2011 02 Block CDLXIV, 2012-04-30

too many hours, but also because they are working too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. He claims that it takes on average 25% longer to do a task, if you don’t focus on that alone. A good manager is close to the employees and manages the balance of pressure against each individual and the number of tasks or projects.

GOAL-DRIVEN PERFORMANCE

Most companies are using goals as the key element of a performance management system. A clearly defined goal is setting direction of where an organization wants to go and at the same time it can open up for a certain level of autonomy for how to achieve the goal. Using goals as the key or perhaps the only element of performance management can, however, be challenging. First of all, how do you define the right goal from the beginning? It can be difficult to foresee a year ahead and take into account all the factors that may influence results. This is why companies tend to just add another 10%, 15% or 20% to the target from the results from the previous year. But what if people the previous year made a really extraordinary effort to achieve the goal and the organization is on the bridge of collective stress? Secondly, a good goal is measurable, which means that many companies tend to focus exclusively on the number goals, like sales or profit, while more qualitative goals like design, quality and customer experience are less highlighted. Focusing only on the end goals of more sales and better profits can lead to lack of employee ownership for the goals and seem like an endless chase of another stretched figure.

02

SENSE OF PURPOSE

Increasingly, writers are pointing to sense of purpose as a key driver for performance. It has to be meaningful for people to give all they got. Best-selling writer Daniel Pink stresses autonomy, mastery and purpose as the three key drivers for motivation and high performance. People are motivated to perform at their best, when they are in control of what they are doing, get better at doing something that matters, and contribute to something bigger than themselves. The focus on purpose does not make it irrelevant to have goals, but it is putting goals into a context that makes it meaningful and applies a longer perspective than the next quarter or fiscal year the number goals may be oriented towards. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.” - Steve Jobs, Apple. Walther Isaacson shares in his article in the April 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs,” an illustrative story about purpose: One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year: the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster. Steve Jobs at Apple is, without any debate, the prime current example of pushing people to the edge (and beyond) for the sake of the company and creating the outstanding products that Apple has delivered over the years. The crusade to disrupt the industries of telecommunication, music distribution, computers, etc. has been effective, but has certainly also created casualties along the way.

DISRUPTING THE INDUSTRY

Most companies do not have the ambition to disrupt the industry in which they are operating, but all companies can speak to a larger purpose than increasing sales with another 10%. Having a purpose seems more like motivation than pressure, and looking beyond the next quarter or fiscal year will ease up the short-term pressure and make people take the right long-term decisions. Improving performance should not always be about running faster, but rather about doing things smarter. There are physical boundaries for how fast you can run; even elite athletes are only improving themselves marginally, when they each a certain level. But there are no limits to what you can do when you are doing things smarter. Acknowledging that smarter outperforms faster in the long run, the manager needs to invest in ensuring that people become smarter and that they are encouraged to innovate and challenge working processes and paradigms. The manager’s dilemma on performance is how to balance long-term investments in doing things smarter with short-term progress and creating a performance management system and culture that allows people to focus and manage the accumulated pressure of being part of a workplace. It is not good enough just giving out a sales target, it takes investments in developing people to doing things smarter and helping people to take ownership in the purpose of the company – help them find meaning in what they do.•