I’m a big supporter of performance management. I benefited greatly from it throughout my career, both as a recipient and a reviewer. Being held accountable often seems to imply a negative issue but of course, you can be accountable for success as well. So we need to celebrate success as well as tackle failure. You ask for examples, but I wouldn’t want these to be identifiable to an individual, what I would say is that I have managed successful teams, both directly and through managers who manage their own teams and so, inevitably, i’ve been required to handle under-performance, dismissals, and redundancies, etc. With the exception of redundancy, there were rare to be honest, because I believe that failure would have had as much to do with me as the team member. Did I recruit the wrong person, was the objective I set realistic, did I have the right KPI’s in place to enable the measurement of ongoing performance, or lack the of, etc? Another important issue is differentiating between task objectives and the role of decision makers. If you are measuring the performance of decision makers it becomes more complex. Making a rapid decision in a critical environment should be measured very differently from a decision arrived at via a long period of consideration. At this point we’re often measuring risk - a quick decision would, in my view, reduce risk and maybe dampen down benefit; whilst a longer period for a decision would allow risk mitigation and therefore the emphasis could shift to a greater benefit. What i’m saying, and I think what you’re asking, is that if a Club Board member fails to deliver, my belief is that we should first look at the TB’s role in setting objectives, etc, rather than immediately focusing on the Directors themselves because, whatever the case, through good governance we should be monitoring performance well enough to ensure the risk of failure is minimised.
I do recall that this was a common theme for last years candidates, and this is twice now that i’ve responded to a similar question. I’d love to understand your thought on this, and what prompted the question.
