In the time of technology and investor led disruptive growth, managing emotions of employees is of utmost importance. The way half-life of skills and roles are dwindling, no one can claim that just with great education background, one can deliver sustained superlative performance. Today’s heroes can become big failure unless they are open fast to acquire new fungible skills and move at least to adjacent roles. For managing such a roller coaster of life, employees need to be groomed to build strong emotional fortitude for facing challenges, staying calm, and grabbing the opportunities. The current Performance Management System (PMS) must undergo changes to support such preparation of employees. The current PMS process focuses largely on a few top talents and not let the thousand flowers bloom!
In the past avatar, I conducted several Six Sigma trainings and facilitated completion of strategic projects by going deeper into the related processes. During this facilitation, we focused on characterisation and optimization of processes by shifting the process mean and reducing the variance. However, it is important to note that people are not processes, which can be force-fit into a bell curve under the garb of the assumption that nature follows normal distribution. Every human being is a great possibility! Due to my engineering background in metal extraction, I can visualise that every employee is sitting on gold mine. There are gangue materials of one’s beliefs, values, and life stories heaping on the gold ore. PMS process should be redesigned in such a manner that leaders can help every employee remove their gangue materials and undergo extraction of metal from the ore.
I suggest PMS not be an episodic activity. Focus should shift from rating and increments to continuous & genuine conversation. It should be a process fully dedicated to the grooming of employees at large to build both domain and emotional strengths. Bulk of leadership time should be to coach employees by asking powerful questions and listening empathetically without any biases; and help them self-explore best options to solve problems and become better version. The PMS should help develop more and more self-leaders at all levels, with a firm organizational belief thatleadership is about self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. Empathy and social skills can lead to much better appreciation of needs, expectations, and preferences of society at large. Organization can become truly customer driven with the skills of understanding the pain of society in the respective ecosystem and solving them digitally. Moreover, the organization will not remain dependent on a few glittering stars. The whole firmament will become a talent dense galaxy.