**You\'ve Got the Power: Using Goal-Driven Performance Management to
Empower**\
*By Lynn Summers and Shabbir Dahod, Performaworks, Inc.*

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     Organizations recognize that different management practices produce 
     dramatically different work environments. Some practices create     
     conditions that empower employees while other practices offer up    
     conditions that disempower. In this paper, we explore the           
     conditions that disempower and define a set of \"worst practices\"  
     for any interested management team to follow. Using this opposite   
     image of the desired state as a foundation, we then build up the    
     case for empowerment: What is empowerment? What are the             
     organizational conditions that foster it? What management practices 
     can create and sustain those conditions? Despite the elusiveness of 
     the empowering ideal, a goal-driven performance management system   
     can help to create and sustain corporate-wide empowering conditions 
     by promoting and reinforcing the consistent application of \"best   
     practices.\"                                                        

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The advantages of an empowered workforce have been recognized for some
time. Organizations have attempted to achieve heightened levels of
empowerment through a variety of methods and programs. As many companies
have learned, however, empowerment is not a program; it is a way of
life. It requires concerted effort to create the conditions that foster
empowerment and ongoing effort to sustain those conditions. And it is
mostly through the adoption of certain management practices that these
conditions can be created.

Goal-driven performance management (GDPM) lends itself ideally as a tool
to further an organization\'s efforts to create and sustain an empowered
workforce. The primary purpose of GDPM, at the organizational level, is
to orchestrate the talent and energy within a corporation toward
achievement of the organization\'s strategic goals. At the individual
level, its purpose is to enable managers and their direct reports to
collaborate in setting meaningful goals, track progress against those
goals over time, and evaluate performance. Because GDPM provides a
common structure within which to align and manage the work efforts of
everyone within the organization, it lends itself quite well to the
challenge of promoting and sustaining those management practices that
empower.

First, let\'s give a bit more detail about GDPM systems. In a
technology-facilitated GDPM system, employees go online and set their
goals, aligning them to higher-level goals. They can see the
competencies that apply to them in their respective positions. They
track their progress on their goals over the course of the year and use
the system to communicate with their managers or colleagues concerning
obstacles they encounter and resources they need. Managers can keep
track of progress, either on an individual employee basis or by looking
at rollups of aggregate status information. Electronic notifications
alert them to issues requiring their intervention or coaching. And at
the top of the organization, the CEO is able to track cumulative
progress against the strategic objectives.

### The Conditions that Disempower

Now, let\'s consider empowerment. What exactly is it and how do you
create it? We think it is useful to answer this question by first
exploring empowerment\'s opposite \-- disempowerment. People are
disempowered if they are told what to do and have little insight into
the ends to which their actions are contributing. They do not see
themselves as causes of important outcomes, but rather as pawns in a
system over which they have no control.

Think about the kind of work environment that creates and sustains a
disempowered workforce: Supervision is authoritarian, employees are
admonished to \"do as you are told,\" management shares little with
employees in the way of why they must do the things they have been asked
to do, individual managers engage in micromanaging their employees,
there is an inordinate amount of bureaucracy, and blame is sought when
things go wrong.

Under these conditions, employees tend to feel powerless. They wait to
be told what to do and are reluctant to take the initiative for fear of
doing the wrong thing. They do their jobs \"by the book\" and feel
little sense of personal responsibility or commitment. They comply
grudgingly with work rules and procedures and often attempt to win back
some sense of power by scheming to \"beat the system.\"

When a large number of employees feel disempowered and act accordingly,
it can be costly to companies. Such companies tend to be inflexible,
lack innovation, and deliver lower quality products and service. They
often get caught in a vicious cycle in which employees\' disempowered
behavior induces managers to supervise more closely, which of course
only exacerbates employees\' sense of disempowerment.

If you were to deliberately instill management practices that
disempower, what would those practices look like? Here is a list of such
practices for managers to follow:

-   Assign goals to your employees without mutually agreeing on the
    goals and their measures.

-   Minimize the significance of goal alignment (or ignore it
    altogether) so your employees do not have a sense of the larger
    context into which their own efforts fit.

-   Set your employees\' goals for whatever is most measurable rather
    than what is most important.

-   \"Over determine\" goals by tightly prescribing how your employees
    are to achieve the expected results in addition to defining what
    results are expected.

-   Have very few, if any, interactions with your employees during the
    year to discuss how things are going.

-   Don\'t let your employees have access to information about other
    people\'s goals \-- especially to information about your own goals.

-   Discourage your employees from admitting that they are having
    difficulty with a goal or from asking for help or coaching
    assistance.

-   Require periodic status updates but use them only as documentation
    of performance, ultimately to be used in a performance evaluation.

This is a veritable list of \"worst practices.\" Unfortunately, many of
these practices are followed by at least some managers in most
organizations today.

### Using GDPM to Empower People

Having explored \"worst practices\" and developed a clear understanding
of how we can completely disempower a workforce, let\'s turn the tables
and paint the positive picture. What is empowerment and what are the
conditions that spawn it? People are empowered when they have the
freedom to act in ways that will achieve important outcomes and when
they believe that they are responsible for results that are meaningful.
An organization that fosters such a work environment will facilitate a
sense of empowerment among the people who work within it.

Think about the conditions that can result in a sense of empowerment.
People feel empowered when they understand how their own work
contributes to the larger purposes of the organization, they have goals
to be achieved and some degree of freedom in choosing how best to
achieve them, they have ways of determining how well they are performing
and clear standards against which their achievements are evaluated, and
they are held accountable for achieving the goals they have agreed to
take on. Empowerment takes hold when there is a minimum of bureaucracy
and a great deal of interest in discovering better ways of doing things,
and when managers are supportive and actively coach their employees. At
the heart of most empowering environments is the idea that decisions
ought to be made as far from the top of the organization and as close to
the customer as possible.

Under these conditions, most employees genuinely feel empowered. They
are encouraged to seize the initiative rather than waiting to be told
what to do. They make decisions and act with confidence, knowing that
they have made their decisions in accord with corporate values and
high-level goals. Employees feel a sense of responsibility and ownership
and are committed to the organization\'s success. They act independently
and even begin to impose their own standards on their job performance,
which are often higher than the standards suggested by their managers or
by the company.

As a result of having a critical mass of empowered employees, a company
can be more agile in navigating its external environment. It can count
on the teamwork of its employees, on people working together in pursuit
of a commonly shared higher purpose. Because employees are not just
doing what they are told to do but rather are striving to achieve
clearly understood goals and imposing on themselves their own rigorous
standards, the quality of the organization\'s products and services is
higher. And, not least in importance, the company\'s pool of ideas
encompasses not just the top management group but all employees.

So, given the positive results to be gained by an organization from
having an empowered workforce, it\'s not surprising that companies
aspire to achieve it. Many of the conditions that foster empowerment are
the products of management practices. What are these empowering
management practices and how can GDPM facilitate a corporate-wide
embrace of the practices? Here\'s a checklist of management practices
for using GDPM to drive higher levels of employee empowerment:

-   Set goals collaboratively with your employees, getting their input
    on what they should be working on and gaining their commitment to
    the goals.

-   Emphasize how your employees\' goals align to your goals and to
    higher-level goals so that they have a clear sense of the broader
    context in which their efforts fit.

-   Work with your employees to set goals that produce important results
    rather than goals that are merely convenient because they are easily
    measured.

-   Set goals that focus on the results expected rather than over
    specifying the means by which your employees must achieve the goals.

-   Require your employees to access information about others\' goals so
    that they can understand the interdependencies of their own goals
    with others\' goals.

-   Encourage and reward your employees for using the system to signal
    the need for help or coaching assistance when a goal is in jeopardy.

-   Require periodic updates with the system, using the information to
    trigger discussion of progress as well as provide documentation to
    ensure accurate and fair performance evaluations.

-   Act on information supplied by your employees through the system to
    increase the company\'s agility.

### Good Bye to \"Big Brother\" and the Jackass

When GDPM is used in this way to facilitate empowering management
practices \-- \"best practices\" \-- employees will be much more likely
to feel and act empowered. Think about some of the contrasts between
disempowering management practices and the use of GDPM to create and
sustain empowering conditions.

Under disempowering conditions, close supervision and the one-way
extraction of performance information from employees serve to create a
\"Big Brother\" aura. But when GDPM is fully deployed, not only can
managers peer \"down\" and see what\'s going on within their parts of
the organization, but employees can peer \"up\" and see how managers are
progressing on higher-level goals \-- those that the employees\' goals
support. This turnabout is not only fair play but encourages
collaboration and commitment across organizational levels.

Under disempowering conditions, detailed prescription of how results are
to be achieved, close supervision, and the carrot-and-stick approach to
rewarding and recognizing employees result in people feeling trapped. As
Harry Levinson, chairman of The Levinson Institute and clinical
professor of psychology emeritus at the Harvard Medical School, famously
pointed out, if you are the one who is between the carrot and the stick,
you will undoubtedly feel like a jackass, as that is the image that
immediately comes to mind. This is a type of accountability, but
certainly not a very constructive or humanizing type.

In contrast, under empowering conditions supported by GDPM, people\'s
feelings of accountability arise not from sanctions and pressure, but
from understanding and obligation. If you understand how your goals
contribute to your group\'s goals and to the organization\'s success,
you are more likely to dedicate yourself to achieving them. And if you
have a sense for how your colleagues are dependent upon you in order for
them to meet their expectations, you will hold yourself accountable \--
no management coercion required.

Using GDPM, people can be legitimately rewarded and recognized for their
effective work. In organizations where disempowering conditions prevail,
the \"effectiveness\" of individual performance is often determined at
the whim of the manager, by the persuasiveness of the employee at
evaluation time, or through the achievement of simplistic goals (the
ones most readily measured).

Under empowering conditions promoted by GDPM, an individual\'s
effectiveness is evaluated by comparing results achieved against
mutually set goals. And, importantly, effectiveness is also judged by
considering how the employee achieved those results \-- through
application of the appropriate skills and adherence to the core values
of the organization. GDPM assures that the information needed to arrive
at a fair evaluation of a person\'s performance is available to both
employee and manager.

The properly deployed GDPM system helps employees do their jobs, rather
than merely report what they\'re doing. This enables everyone to become
a committed contributor to organizational success rather than a pawn
under the ever-watchful eyes of management.

In short, the major benefit to be derived from using GDPM to support
corporate-wide best management practices thus comes not only from what
it can do for management and for individual employees but from how it
can empower everyone within the organization.