Performance Training for Improvement

What happens to the performance of professionals over time if there is no performance training? It would be nice to think that people get better and better at doing their jobs, just by doing their jobs. However the truth is that all of us start out on a steep learning curve, make mistakes, learn quickly, reach a plateau of peak performance then begin a gradual decline as bad habits and corner-cutting sets in. This is the natural way of performance without feedback.

Two aspects to performance training. Professionals such as lawyers and accountants continuously develop because of good management feedback? There are two aspects to performance training for professionals. Firstly there is the leadership skill of giving feedback and secondly there is the ‘performance management cycle’.

Too many leaders do coaching from the mistaken idea that good performance training is helping their people learn from mistakes. They focus on improvement and correct performance only after errors have occurred. In today’s environment, organizations can’t afford trial and error; they need things to be done right the first time.

Performance training is all about feedback. Performance training for success has feedback that is balanced, timely and specific. Balanced feedback is more about what people do well, and how they can improve still further. It sounds like “Your client was very happy because you....”. When people do make mistakes they need to be corrected with positive feedback at the same time. Timely feedback is essential in performance training because good performance has to be reinforced immediately or it is unlikely to to be repeated. Specific feedback is feedback that includes the measured positive evidence of the individual or team's performance.

Performance training is a continuous cycle. From top to bottom of all professional organizations, face to face meetings on performance training need to take place within a cycle of performance improvement. There are three phases in the performance management cycle:

l Agreeing performance objectives. The operative word here is 'agreeing'. Performance objectives cannot be imposed nor are they the same for everybody. They must be individually SMART; specific, measurable, attributable, realistic and time bound. Realistic here does not mean easily achieved. Soft objectives are as big a demotivator as are unattainable ones.

l Ongoing monitoring and regular review. Objectives should not be put in a drawer to gather dust until the time for appraisal come around again. Regular reviews with good feedback are a must in order to improve performance.

l End of cycle assessment and agreeing new objectives. There should be no surprises come appraisal time because people have been monitoring their own performance all along. This is the time to raise the bar for all objectives but again in agreement with the individual.

Performance training is one of the key aspects of leadership within the professions and it does not just happen naturally. It requires management training and skill practice in a positive learning environment in order to understand and use the organizations' particular performance management cycle and build the feedback skills for success performance training.