Color Papers

Right on the money(ball)

Want to do more with less? Sonar6 is in the business of isolating and objectively assessing team members' performance relative to goals, which in turn influence the success or failure of the business. Sound familiar? Performance management? ...baseball? There's an obvious parallel between baseball and business: strategies, goals, teams, managers, budgets, headhunters, wins and losses, stars and underperformers... Sometimes (often! usually!) you have limited time and a limited budget to put your best team together. You probably can’t afford the really super, really expensive performers, but guess what? You probably don’t...

What's in a name?

What's in a name? You are not your job title Are gunslingers legit? Internal Principal Human Functionality Administrator? Really? So many job titles are confusing, pretentious or lame. Or they are so vague and ambiguous they no longer have any meaning. Administration Ambassador. Really? Could you hold your head up high if your name tag said Social Media Scientist? Or Job Systems Wizard? Would you accept a LinkedIn request from an IT Gunslinger, Dragonslayer, or Rockstar? (I would. Just saying.) Who’s fault is this? Does HR create these job titles or just...

Naughty or nice?

Sonar6 presents Naughty or nice?   This is the time of year that Santa, Inc takes a Helicopter view of overall performance and analyzes historical trends to decide on rewards, recognition and compensation for the festive season. In the spirit of giving, Santa, Inc has graciously allowed us to share some of their customized rating scales. Santa, CEO So this holiday season, beat the rush and find out where you sit on Santa, Inc’s Naughty or Nice scales - and maybe see what the man himself will be leaving...
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Rewards and Recognition SeriesRewards and Recognition Series

No soup for you...?

No soup for you...? Do rewards and punishments work on employees? Can managers get the behaviors they want by rewarding the good and punishing the bad? It works with puppies, but does it work with staff?* We recently surveyed a bunch of our readers to see what makes them tick (and by tick we mean 'work better') and we've come up with some tips to help you get rewards & recognition right.   Some tips we came up with Incentivize good behavior, not results Incentivizing good behavior rather than results...
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Change Management SeriesChange Management Series

Take Me To Your Leader

Active and visible sponsorship from the top down is our 3rd step in change management - and the best way to guarantee uptake. It’s good to give a hoot Sponsors need to be neck-deep in the change management process: attending meetings, communicating with managers (and helping them communicate with their teams), making critical decisions around the project and just generally being involved in an obvious way. If your change is a new performance management system, it's a good idea if your sponsor actually has a chance to get handsy with...
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Goal-setting SeriesGoal-setting Series

When Vague Is Better Than Smart

Remember SMART objectives? Specific, measurable, attainable, ... repressive, tedious...? There’s another goal setting strategy to consider. VAGUE. Know what you want to achieve, but don’t map out how you’re going to get there. It worked for Picasso: “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.” After all, every masterpiece started off as a vague sketch. Mix it up! We aren’t suggesting all goals should be VAGUE. SMART’s still important but sometimes it’s nice to let loose, to not have...
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Coaching SeriesCoaching Series

The Good The Bad And The Ugly

The Good: A pat on the back for WINNING Acknowledging achievement is Management 101. It's easy. Feedback for WINNERS should reinforce the positive and be specific. People like to know: Where they fit in the big picture How they're contributing to the business How you feel about it Someone's worked harder, longer or more diligently than normal? Back-pat! Give feedback frequently - it means more in real time than it would 6 months from now - and do it publicly (see Coaching Tip #6) The Bad: Get naked It's unlikely...

Why We Have Cake

People management can be complex and demanding, but we think the underlying rules are simple - like cake - and because we're Sonar*6* we have *6* rules: 1. Hire good people, no exceptions Hiring decisions are pressured. You advertise, then hire the best applicant - even if the best isn’t that great. Stop! It’s better to be completely inflexible on candidate fit. If no one measures up keep looking: average companies are the result of hiring average people. 2. Deal with staff problems immediately Failing to act swiftly impacts badly...

Lost

Compression has its place (& HR isn't it) Congratulations. You're a 3. The late nights and weekends, the big deals closed, the mentoring, the cupcakes you baked for the team... How did all that become a 3? In complex systems theory there is a concept called compressibility - a measure of how easy it is to summarize something. Some things in business are very compressible; financial performance can be easily summarized into metrics like profit or earnings growth. Some things in business are not compressible however. When you try to summarize...

Engagement

The economy had been through a period of prolonged stress (in case you hadn't noticed). It was still a bit shaky and nervous, and jumped at loud noises. This hit employee engagement hard; it's difficult committing to something that might vanish in a puff of smoke at any moment. Suddenly companies had gone from focusing on employer brand - doing everything they could to seem like a great place to work (in-chair massages, free fruit, office puppies...) - to perk-busting. When the economy started to tank, employees everywhere heard...

Red Queen

The Red Queen principle "For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with."* If you believe in evolution, that means a species has to continuously evolve and change to keep ahead of its peers and keep up with its prey. For a business it means, well, pretty much the same thing. *Van Valen L. (1973): "A New Evolutionary Law", Evolutionary Theory 1, p. 1-30. Likewise, if a business doesn't continuously move ahead it gets overtaken and devoured...

Good Enough

Once upon a time... (a parable of sorts) I love my little food processor     My old food processor broke and I had to shop for a new one. I chose a huge shiny one with dozens of features: it could whisk, juice, chop, blend, grate, at different speeds, in different bowls. It was also a pain to assemble, impossible to clean properly and occupied half my kitchen. Three months later it broke. I replaced it with a very simple machine: it has off / on / pulse,...

Really Useful Performance Management

Sometimes it seems like we know we need performance management (after all, we have a review once a year. usually.) but we've forgotten why... Biggest performance management challenge? Lots of HR departments get it so wrong. They focus on compliance - making sure reviews happen - instead of on making performance management USEFUL for EVERYONE. Then not only will compliance take care of itself, but it'll also lead to better people performance. Which is the reason you're doing reviews, isn't it...? So how do you make performance management useful for everyone?...

There's Really No 'I' In Team

  Businesses ultimately depend on the success of teams, but performance reviews focus on the strengths and weaknesses of individuals. How do we bridge this gap? Comparing people is instinctive It's easy for us to draw comparisons when considering a group: he has better hair, her lunch looks tastier, his hat is taller, you're way scarier. Most performance reviews don't work this way though - they require us to look at people in isolation, which is a lot harder. Likewise, "Is Natalie a good manager?" is kind of tricky. She might...

Never Should Have Added My Boss on Facebook

They're heeeerrre!! We've all heard the standard complaints about members of Gen Y - they're disloyal, lazy, have short attention spans, you practically need to throw parades when they accomplish the simplest tasks, they want the top job on day one, don't respect experience, won't be long term employees, are only motivated by money, need work to be fun... But then every generation complains about the next one. Now Gen Y is among us, what can they teach us about better performance management? Gen Y is the reality TV generation:...

Do I Need To Thank My Manager

What if the purpose of your performance management system was to create better managers, not better reviewers...? Managing effectively requires experience, maturity, responsibility. Most of these can be coached, or learned, but there aren't a whole lot of tools out there to help you manage your people. Hannibal kept his team humming by giving everyone a go on the elephants, but you probably don't have that option... So why are traditional reviews so bad, and how can you fix performance reviews to actually improve management practice? We have four tips...

Lessons From FarmVille

when users become players Just a little thought experiment we ran when designing Sonar6. What happens when you borrow design elements from something fun (games) and apply them to something not so fun (performance reviews)? Can we use the underpinning psychology in new ways? Is it possible to make reviews... enjoyable? Nobody expected the unexpected *Facebook is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.** How many people do you know who aren’t on Facebook? It is an enormous, unexpectedly popular phenomenon. And one of...

I Met Expectations

At Sonar6 we love performance reviews, it’s just that some days it seems everyone is doing them wrong. Most people don’t like performance reviews - just check Twitter any day of the week and you can see how unloved they are. Reason 1: Performance reviews are demotivating Traditional reviews create and enforce a one-sided power base, with employees typically on the back foot. Employees know reviews are coming & dread them, and so morale drops for ages beforehand. Meanwhile, managers have to give all the year’s negative feedback in...

Motivational Performance Reviews

There is a lot of talk recently about dumping the annual performance review. After all, without it you only have tax and the dentist to worry about. But it’s important to set goals and measure performance, so how can we make sure performance reviews are motivational? Performance happens daily (reviews should too) Really Useful annual reviews *summarize* information gathered and conversations held throughout the year. Nothing in them is a surprise or a reason to worry. We want to get the best from employees, not scare them, surprise them, or...

Talent Science

CEOs everywhere swear “People are our greatest asset!” In reality, information about this ‘great asset’ isn’t always easy to dig up (as compared to, say, a balance sheet). We have a few ideas for fixing that... Meet Jane. She’d just been promoted and was looking hard for a replacement inside the company. After reviewing personnel files 'til her eyes watered, she concluded there were no suitable internal candidates - then she bumped into the perfect person in the elevator. He worked for the same company, so why didn’t anybody...

Intergration

For your HR department to function awesomely, you need 3 killer systems*: 1 HRIS (or a payroll system that functions like one) to hold your personnel data and payroll details. You probably have one of these already. 2 Recruitment system / ATS to make sure you hire the right people for your roles (and your company) 3 Performance Management system to...

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