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By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, by Jon R. Katzenbach, a senior partner at Booz & Company, which publishes strategy+business, and Zia Khan, vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation. They take a much more fine-grained approach to managing that is based on finding the right combination of the "logic of the formal" and the "magic of the informal."

In the three-part book, the authors focus on how individual managers can use informal connections and conversations to enhance the formal incentives and structures of a company - and, in the process, motivate individual performance and mobilize organizational change. Managers who can draw on both the formal and the informal as required have a high "organizational quotient" (OQ). This is a combination of intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) that balances disciplined and spontaneous actions, and rational and emotional thinking, depending on the demands of the situation.

The objective is consilience, which literally means a jumping together of the formal and the informal, a creative integration of "both...and" that harks back to Mary Parker Follett, the early-20th-century pioneer of organizational theory. This is the first of several evocative metaphors that the authors use to describe one of the most desirable but elusive phenomena in organizational life - those times when decisions, actions, and emotions jibe with strategic intent, when dynamic routines are constantly being improved upon, when employees are proud of their company, and when the company as well as the members of its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, and customers) all succeed.

Katzenbach and Khan stress that a managerial focus on the informal is not just a matter of being nice. People work and perform much better when they are treated with care and respect as individuals. The c

There is a deep gulf between the sterile, one-way and almost Orwellian practices of the corporate IT network and the rapidly-evolving, chaotic organism of today's Intranet.

What would it look like if the social world of Web 2.0 collided with the corporate Intranet? What would happen if information was disseminated from outside in, instead of inside out; from the people working on the front line? This is precisely what an interesting experiment at global consulting firm Capgemini is revealing. Many of the company's 110,000 people are based on site at client locations and it is here that 'real-world' challenges must be addressed. The IT consultants in particular, who form about half of the workforce, are in an environment where the information they use goes out of date very quickly.

To help keep its teams up-to-speed, and to stay on top of the disruptive changes in their operating environment, Capgemini began a few years ago experimenting with Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. CTO Andy Mulholland says that it is contributing to the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Management's changing role. Capgemini uses Yammer for: aligning activities, problem solving, information sharing, providing clarification. Now think about the things managers do for a living - and you quickly end up with a pretty similar list. Social networking technologies, in other words, are increasingly being used to provide the support and input that employees used to get from their managers. This frees up managers, in turn, to spend more time on the real value-added work - such as motivating their employees, structuring their work to make it more engaging, developing their skills, securing access to resources, and making linkages to other parts of the organisation. Warren Buffett is famous for saying that it is only when the tide goes out that you can see who is swimming naked, and the same metaphor applies here: when employees can get all the basic support they need for their work through Yammer, rather than through their line manager, the real qualities of the line manager are exposed and some are found wanting.  

Preview Gary Hamel's February 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review, Moon Shots for Management.In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century. The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.

a synthesis of the thinking in a whole host of recent management books that propose the reinvention of management

The truth is that everyone is, indeed, a community facilitator / manager nowadays, as you saw in a recent blog entry where I referenced Gautam's comments along these very same lines. So I thought I would develop further on this topic, specially since, earlier on today, I bumped into a couple of rather relevant and interesting links very much connected to this topic that I am sure you would enjoy quite a bit. The first one is coming from my good friend, Gautam Ghosh, once again, who earlier on tweeted a link to a blog post that he put together in September 2010 and which, despite the months gone by already, it's just as valid today, if not more!, than ever before. Have a look into "5 Skills for Online Community Managers" and find out what some of the community facilitator traits would be like, according to him…

Following are my getting back to basics recommendations: Face reality that email is not going away.  It has 100% utilization for employee collaboration & communication.   It becomes an epicenter for collaboration. The ability to post social content, receive notifications, receive activity digests must tie into email and SMS.  If your activity stream could fit into an Outlook window - even better. Recognize that collaboration doesn't just happen inside your company's walls.  Collaboration crosses many boundaries from time, distance and corporate firewalls.  Employees are using multiple tools and multiple networks both outside & inside.  Adding one more tool to the mix doesn't make life easier. Consider deploying a content/collaboration aggregator to simplify employee's ability to manage various content flows & networks both inside & outside the firewall (Example: Xobni Enterprise) Collaboration is now form factor agnostic: No longer is one device utilized.  Content & collaboration needs to flow across whatever mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop- eventually smart TV device - that an employee utilizes. Ubiquitous collaboration needs equal opportunity.  For example, If employees can get email, internet access, Facebook, Twitter on their mobile devices but only access social collaboration on their laptop- then those most available will be the top collaborative tools.  Your internal social platform needs equal access, otherwise it will continue to be Cinderella locked in the attic during the royal ball. Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform.  If an official portal is the place to get news, updates & find information - your social platform must seamlessly be an integral part of that experience.  Don't ship off your employees to a separate site to socially engage & collaborate. The intranet should become the personalized collaborative workspace for employees "one stop shopping." Rid yourself of multiple employee prof

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.  

This is not a newly identified problem.  Those of us working on social collaboration efforts for a while recognized that integration is imperative from the beginning.  At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy.  Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years (even after fierce calls for faster integration- i.e. CMS). Enterprises faced fork lift integration efforts to knit applications together.  Fork lift efforts get the budget axe when push comes to shove.  We managed to do the normal IT deployment model - the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do.  We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools - without integration.   To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.

IN medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by applying proven practices. Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are leading the way. It's time for many more to follow suit.  

Steve Denning has a great take --  and lots of material on "radical management." That's very 21C.

The top five reasons I see projects fail are (1) No slack in the system (2) Managing for the knowns (3) Not limiting work-in-progress (4) Political promises and (5) Sloppy communication.  Let's examine these:

As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations and new networked business ecosystems start to find their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual, networked business teams gradually emerge as the wave of the future.

To be successful, virtual, networked business teams need a strategic framework in which to operate. They also need good planning and in-depth project analysis, effective and accessible technologies, constant coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes and the full understanding that their success cannot be determined by a pre-designated set of communication technologies by itself.

But, until now, projects supported by virtual business teams have not been brought back major successes. Virtual teams are having major problems and managing their progress has been a superlative challenge for most. Organizations face for the first time the need to analyze and comprehend which are the key obstacles to the successful management of effective online collaborative business networks. Though the answer is not simple, the solution is to be found in examples that are closer to us than we have yet realized.

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for.

Virtual business teams DO NOT operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a whole new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. And this is why they fail.

Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have alread

According to last year's Learning for growth report from the CBI, more firms in 2010 (48%) than 2009 (39%) say improving leadership and management skills is a key priority for them, and this is even higher for the public sector (73%). The same report also highlights that over two thirds of organisations are looking for more targetted and cost effective routes for training. The IOD's Skills Crunch highlights a different challenge as leadership and management skills are at the top of the list for organisations reporting skills gaps in their current staff.

Even though most large corporations have a training and development function they are always somewhere on the periphery.   For employees, managers and executives alike, training and development is looked on as a nice to have luxury and not as an essential tool of business strategy execution. The general belief is that it helps individuals get better, not the organization as a whole.

In the American and many other Western cultural contexts, individuals are supposed to develop themselves and take responsibility for their own career advancement.  The firm has little responsibility to develop employees, relying on the competitive nature of employment and learned self-sufficiency to provide any needed skills.  Individual employees as well as managers operate under the belief system that those who take the initiative to learn will and should get promoted.  However, reality is often very different with personal prejudices and organizational politics dictating more promotions than merit.

Google doesn't have business units! I knew there had to be something different and special about Google to make it the success story that it is. This is what the Googe  CFO had to say in a recent McKinsey interview: Patrick Pichette: We don't have business units. Once a company has business units, managers tend to take ownership of these units' resources. Managers have a plan, and the natural instinct is to say, "Those resources are mine and I have to fight to keep them." This is exactly the issue we regularly see in our organisational network analysis studies. We even wrote about it here in "The Tyranny of Top Down"

Maybe your boss is nervous because he understands the potential of social media all too well. Once people learn that they can find each other, share their knowledge and work together the roles of many managers will change if not disappear. This is frightening. However the good managers will make the effort to adapt and will continue to add value in the more networked world we are moving into.  Many of them will be old enough to have children active on the web and may not be comfortable talking to them about it. Or they may get the point of social tools outside work but not see how to map them to the business context. Why not help them? Why not help your boss to understand the benefits for their business and them as individuals of getting to grips with the social network world? There is a real danger that we assume that our boss knows everything. Often they don't and may be embarrassed about admitting this. Make it easy for them to do so.

Willpower, self-regulation, impulse control - these are the ingredients for a successful career. A successful life. I don't think so. Because one time doesn't really matter. A dieter chooses to eat a salad. A smoker decides to skip a cigarette. A sex-addict stops calling adult hotlines. A teen passes the joint without taking a drag. A family buried in debt decides to not take a summer vacation. A manager who makes a resolution to not project his/her stress onto employees. - Bravo! But what happens tomorrow?

important: management practice

We've kept things as simple as possible to help you find the tips you need, when you need them. The articles have been split into three main categories:

for tips to improve your personal effectiveness at work.

containing hints and tips to help you manage your team.

to develop your interpersonal, writing and presentation skills.

Tony Schwartz. Managers at the breaking point