#69 Performance & Development Plans: Retain Talent and Build Better Teams

Speaker A: All right, team, welcome to another episode of the Exceptional Leadership Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Matt Hamilton. Delighted to have your company with me once again from wherever you might be. Listening to the show from right around the world. Very exciting, uh, for a discussion today on the topic of performance and development of your team, specifically as a leader. And I want to get into why this is so important. So off the top, there are a couple of things that will be focused, focusing on now. The first is, of course, that people like to feel cared for. Uh, it is in their interest to be developed from a skill set perspective, and we can certainly facilitate that as leaders and keep improving our people year on year so that not only, uh, they get, you know, meaning from their role and they feel like they're getting somewhere, but also from a team and a business perspective, we are building those skill sets which come all the way back around to benefit us as an organization as well. So it really is a mutually beneficial thing to become proficient at and to focus on. We will, of course, as we so often do, use an example from recent history to help illustrate the point. Before I get into that proper, though, I do need to ask you for a favor right off the top, and that is if you listen to the show specifically on Apple Podcasts, I need to get the reviews up on that platform. We've only got a couple, so if you'd be so kind. It's a little bit complicated, so I'll give you some instructions. If you could access the app, find, uh, the show, and then scroll all the way down through the episodes to the review section where you can leave us a five star review. And if you're feeling really generous, write something nice about the show and what you're getting from it. Reason I ask that is that these reviews are very, very important for helping the show get traction. And it also builds credibility. It's a real marketing, uh, principle that I'm trying to tap into here. That, um, social proof aspect, right? People see lots of reviews and they go, okay, must be worth listening to. So I'm assuming if you're listening to me right now, I'm giving you some value. And I would be really appreciative if you wouldn't mind doing that for me on whatever platform you listen to the show on. Um, uh, really would appreciate that, guys, but without further ado, let's get into this example that I spoke of in the introduction. This is a bit of a long one, but I think we all like a story, don't we? So let's Sit back and enjoy this one as we set the scene. So what I want you to imagine is that you're a young executive at a fast growing technology company in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. Now, your company is exploding, the revenue's growing, the team's doubled, then doubled again. And every decision feels urgent. Investors are watching, competitors are closing in. And on paper, everything looks great. But in reality, you are feeling overwhelmed. You were an excellent engineer or product manager just six months ago. Now you're suddenly leading hundreds of people, and nobody taught you how to do that. And one afternoon, your phone rings. It's a guy on the phone called Bill Ken Campbell. And he says, let's go for a walk. Campbell wasn't a celebrity CEO. Uh, he wasn't even a famous management theorist. He had played college football, coached football, worked at Kodak, and eventually became a technology executive. But over time, he developed a reputation for something a little bit unusual. He seemed to care more about developing leaders than building his own public profile. And while many executives protected their time, Campbell seemed to give quite a lot of his away. So let's picture a typical week. A founder from Google calls with a leadership problem. A senior executive from Apple needs advice on handling conflict inside a team. Someone else is struggling after a promotion and secretly is worried that they're not capable of doing the job. Campbell meets with every single one of them, not once, but repeatedly, month after month, year after year, playing a real coaching role here. What made him different wasn't that he gave advice. Lots of people give advice. What made him different was how deeply invested he became in the success of the people that, that he coached. If he believed that someone had potential, he would push them into opportunities that maybe they didn't think they were quite ready for. Sometimes those conversations were even a little bit uncomfortable. An executive might spend an hour explaining why they didn't think they were capable of taking on the bigger responsibility. But Campbell would beg to differ. He'd say something like, you're focusing on why you might fail. I'm focusing on what I think you're capable of. And then he would keep encouraging you to take up that new opportunity. And one story that captures this style involves a gentleman called Eric Schmidt. When Schmidt became CEO of Google, he was leading some of the smartest engineers in the world. The technical challenges, as you might imagine, were enormous. But Campbell really focused on technical problems instead. He focused on people. Were the executives aligned? Were they telling each other the truth? Were they building trust amongst the group? And more broadly, were they helping each other to succeed. Campbell believed that if you built a strong team of leaders, many other problems would solve themselves. He believed it was foundational. So while everybody else was obsessing over products and, um, competition, he was obsessing over relationships. And over the years, a pattern began to emerge. People that Campbell coached often became exceptional leaders themselves. Not because he gave them some secret formula, because he invested in them repeatedly. He challenged them, protected them when necessary, connected them with opportunities and held them accountable. And, uh, perhaps most importantly, he believed in them before they fully believed in themselves. And what's remarkable about this example is the scale of it. Most managers will mentor a handful of people, sure, but Campbell became a trusted advisor to leaders across much of Silicon Valley. His influence spread not just through organizational charts, but through people. A young manager becomes a director, the director becomes a vice president, the vice president becomes a CEO. Uh, years later, many of those leaders are still using lessons that they learned from conversations that they had with him. So when Campbell died in 2016, the reaction was somewhat unusual. You would expect tributes for famous founders, sure, you'd expect tributes for a billionaire. But Campbell was neither of those things. Instead, many of the most successful leaders in technology spoke about him with genuine affection. And it wasn't because of products that he built. It wasn't because of the wealth that he accumulated. It was because he'd spent decades helping them become better leaders. His legacy wasn't primarily a company. It was instead a generation of people whose careers, confidence, and capabilities grew because one person decided that developing others was worth treating as a full time mission. And that's what makes this story interesting from a leadership perspective. Bill Campbell's extraordinary measure wasn't a dramatic one time act. It was the decision to spend thousands of hours over decades in investing in the growth of other people when he quite easily could have spent that time advancing his own status instead. So a bit of a long example, but a really poignant one that's going to dovetail beautifully into a couple of discussion points that I wanted to raise with you all today. And how does that translate to what you and I do on the ground? Well, I've got a couple of ways that I think it does. So let's talk developing people, because that's what this is about, that's what today's about. So in that example, it was mentioned that he liked to have informal chats with people he'd call, you know, um, colleagues, more junior people, out of the blue. But how do we tie that back to us in our organizations daily when we're leading a team of, let's say, 10 people. Maybe if you're on the bigger end, maybe it's sort of 15 to 20. That's starting to get reasonably sizeable. How do we handle a situation like that? So look, informal chats are great. It builds rapport, builds, uh, relationships, and it's excellent for helping you to take the temperature of the team and find out how they're feeling in a more relaxed setting. A real crucial skill as a leader. So we absolutely need to keep doing that. But the reality is that it's no way to formally structure things when it comes to the organized development of your people. There's a lot of people to keep track of even when you're leading a team of 10. So the reality is that structure is important when it comes to the development of them simply because of a few really common key things, right? You might forget the goals that they mentioned to you. You might forget what they said they were working towards. You might forget grievances that come up in those day to day conversations. You might forget that they requested a particular training course. You might forget that they've mentioned their time allocation across different disciplines of the business are changing. You know, job roles are really static. People's roles evolve with the needs of the organization. So these things change naturally. And so if you have these tap on the shoulder sort of conversations and no structure to it, sure, you're touching base with people, great. Yes, you probably have an idea of what the temperature is on the ground. But you're likely, when you've got lots of people to concentrate on going to forget who asks for what, who had what aspiration, who was upset about X, Y or Z. And these people might come away with the impression that, yeah, he talks to me all the time, or she talks to me all the time. But, uh, it sort of goes in one ear and out the other because they never seem to remember that I wanted that training course that I asked for. So we need a plan. We need a performance and development plan. Now I would not be surprised if you are familiar with these and if they exist already in your organization. But there's also every chance that the organization you work in isn't quite so structured as it should be and you don't have any formal performance and development, um, plans. But I've got something that will suit both situations by way of reminder as a leader. So firstly, let's get back to basics. What is a performance and development plan? Look, quite simply, it is a formal procedure usually supported by a conversation between yourself and your direct report or a team member. Uh, and it's also backed up by a formal document which enables you to work through a few key things with the employee. That might be, hey, if we take one FTE as being a representation of 100% of your allocated time for the year, let's break that down into subcategories and work out where we think you're spending most of your time. Okay, so one FTE as the reference point is point two of that directed towards, uh, repairs and maintenance in the facility. Maybe we'll log that is, uh, 0.3 of it, or 30% dedicated towards HSE and safety initiatives, so on and so forth. I don't need to labor the point. You get what I'm saying, What I'm saying? But in this document, you will lay out the time allocation percentages roughly so that you can build off that and use it as a foundation with respect to the performance and development process that you will work through together for the year. So you might go, well, that's fantastic. But why would either of us want to do that? There's a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a conversation. It's an excuse to have a conversation, and a point at which you can check in individually with that team member. You know, you might go tap them on the shoulder, uh, you know, every couple of days. That's great. But maybe they're not comfortable talking to you about specific things in an environment like that. Maybe they just want some one to one time behind a closed door so that they can raise some more difficult things with you. So it's an opportunity for them to get a bit more serious. It's also an opportunity for you to create measurable goals and outcomes with that person in a way that will be documented, mutually agreed upon, and therefore measurable when you come back to review it 12 months later. And the beauty of that is everybody's on the same page. You can measure performance, you can measure development initiatives, and it's structured and documented so you don't forget what that person asked for, because you've written it down together in a formalized document. Now, what should it contain? So we talked about time allocation. That's an example of a foundational element that you can have included in this document. Doesn't have to be fancy, could just be a word document that you draw up yourself as a basic template, or you could maybe find one online, or perhaps your company already has one, whatever the case may be. So we'll have our time allocations, but then what I'd also like you to do is I want you to focus on training initiatives. What developmental activities can we and the business provide you, the employee, to help you do your job better, to help you feel like you're progressing from a career perspective. You know, someone might say, well, I would like, uh, specifically some training on, you know, this particular machine, or I would like some training on this particular system. We, um, want to facilitate that development piece in this setting, regardless of the industry that you work in. And what we should also do is we should clearly set out goals that are going to be measurable. I'd suggest smart goals. Um, we won't go into the definition of that for this podcast. Give it a Google smart goals. And we will use those goals to clearly set out what our objectives are, uh, for the employee. And that will enable us to measure them when we get to the end of the process, 12 months later, to figure out how we've gone, what needs adjusting, so on and so forth. So that's some, um, foundational pieces that I'd like you to consider. But the capstone piece that we should have in every performance and development plan is a conversation about how they're feeling overall from a career perspective, what are their career aspirations from here, if any, and it's okay if there aren't none. Some people just want to come in, do the nine to five. They're not interested in progressing. They just want to do their job and do it well, and that's okay. But others who are perhaps more aspirational among us, we want to capture that. We want to understand what that looks like and get a read on what this individual might be working towards and what they're capable of. So we should have a section in there that talks about their career development aspirations and how we can help them get there. The thing that this is predicated on is that we want to develop talent internally. We don't want to have this churn whereby people go, okay, you know what? I'm not getting what I need here. I'm going to leave for another organization that cost us, uh, time and money as leaders and as businesses, doesn't it? Because now when they've left, we've got to go and recruit someone again, which costs money and time, train that person up to get them to the same stage standard that this other employee was at. And then we start on this treadmill again. Once we work hard to acquire talent, we want to keep them invested, don't we? We want to make sure that we develop them and get every drop of talent and potential out of them so that they keep contributing effectively to the business. That's what we want and it's a sign of a good leader if you can facilitate that. Now the next question is, do people even want it? I mentioned that, you know, some people aren't particularly aspirational. They just want to come into work. Do the 9 to 5 go home, feel um, like they're supported at work? They don't want to climb the tree, they don't want to become management, they don't want to become an executive. Guys, you are absolutely going to get people that really don't like doing this performance and development stuff. How I would get around that from your perspective is to acknowledge that, hey look, if you don't really have any aspiration, that's totally fine. You know, you're a great project manager or you're a great mechanic, you know, whatever it might be, that's totally fine. If you want to stay there, I'm not trying to force you to develop people who don't want to be developed. But it is for everybody, regardless of their aspiration levels, a great place to have a conversation about what's bothering them at the very least or how they think the organization could be run better. So it doesn't necessarily just have to revolve around their personal development. It's a good place to formally check the temperature with them in a more in depth fashion. You can get a lot of value from that as a leader if you really nurture those relationships. So you. Yes, some people won't want it, right from a development perspective. But if you run it effectively, most people should go, well, actually I still get value from this. Cause they understand that it's a place where they can raise things. That's perhaps been on their mind for a while, uh, in a formal setting. But what it says, right. One of the biggest reasons I think that we should have our performance and development plans in place is it says that as a leader I care about you, as a business, we care about you. Alright? If you want more training, if you say you want development in this particular area, we're going to do our best to capture that and actually deliver that to you. Because at the end of the day, and we'll finish on this, I say it over and over again, people are the most important asset any organization. And we are uh, chiefly responsible as leaders for developing them. And this from my perspective, is a way to invest in them. It says we care. It brings organization to the whole process and structure which is really crucially important from a credibility perspective because your employees and team members see that you're super organized and onto it when it comes to how you manage their performance and their development. But it also does you enormous favors because, let's face it, doesn't take long as a leader before you can have some loose ends. You know, even 10 people, that would be considered a reasonably small team. But it's quite hard to keep a track of every gripe, aspiration and point that people raise with you over the months and the years. So it's important that we bring structure to this and we invest in our people in a way that is sustainable. The other point is just quickly that these performance and development plans are also great scaffolding pieces for us to develop training budgets around. Because if we do all of these, um, assessments for, say, you know, the 10 people in our team, and it turns out that five of them want training on X, whatever that might be, we can then use that information, go away, scope up the training cost, and come to, uh, the finance department with an idea as to what that might cost and why it's important that we fund it. So it is a scaffolding piece as well. The beauties of structure and organization guides. It does wonders as leaders. Guys, I'll leave it there. Thank you so much once again for tuning in. It is a pleasure to have your company. We've seen some really spectacular growth actually, uh, in the podcast over the last couple of months. So I, uh, am really pleased that the message is resonating. And as long as I can keep providing value, I will keep doing this. So, uh, by all means, leave your nice comments, reviews, uh, share the show with a friend, share it with 10 friends, tell everybody, and, uh, hopefully together we can lift the standard of leadership globally. Until next time, crew, I will speak to you later.