Edie L. Goldberg, Ph.D., the President of E. L. Goldberg & Associates, is a nationally recognized expert in Talent Management.
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Last October, there were 11 million open jobs but only 7.4 million unemployed people. Numbers like that put employees in the driver’s seat—and that’s especially true for the highly skilled talent you need to continue to attract in order to execute your strategy.
The upshot is that employees are demanding excellent workplaces. They’re asking for more from their work than they ever did before. This makes delivering an employee experience that can attract and retain the best talent difficult in a current field of competition.
What do employees want and what do leaders want? Is there a way to create a win-win where employees get a great experience and you acquire—and retain—the talent you require?
Employees want their work to connect to a greater purpose. They want their work to mean something. They want a challenge and to know that they’re making an impact. They want opportunities to develop new professional skills and to advance their careers. They want their contributions to be recognized and valued.
As a senior leader, you want to attract and retain employees who are aligned with your strategic goals. You want motivated people who are progressing together, as an organization. You want the capabilities and skills in your organization to grow.
Performance enablement is a framework that can allow you and your employees to accomplish your goals. It enables a win-win in the domain of hiring and retaining talent. There are three parts to this framework. It starts with guidance and direction through clear and collaborative goal setting. The next piece is coaching, ongoing feedback and support that enables high performance in the individual and the organization. It is more focused on feedforward, which leverages learnings from the past to enable success moving ahead. The third part of the performance enablement model is developing employees—their skills, capabilities and experience—as an ongoing concern.
First, leaders must set the direction and goals for the organization. Establish clear performance expectations that drive success in your organization. Then set inspiring goals that connect employees to a wider purpose. Leading with goals and clear direction creates a wider context for the work that employees crave. Your role as a leader is to support and enable progress toward those goals.
Coaching and feedback are the next pieces of performance enablement. Coaches ask questions that can help lead employees to find solutions and achieve their goals. Effective coaching is focused on future performance more than past performance. Research demonstrates that creating a feedback culture could pay dividends. In feedback-rich cultures, managers are not the sole source of feedback; feedback is enabled from anyone at any time.
Managers must receive training on how to coach more effectively and how to both give productive feedback and receive it. They should be rewarded and recognized for their coaching efforts. Effective coaching is a missing capability in many organizations. That makes it an opportunity and an advantage to seize.
The third part of the performance enablement model is professional development as an ongoing activity. Development is not something you should offer occasionally, and it is not strictly for people with performance issues or only for high-potentials. It needs to be built into the everyday workplace.
Image Courtesy of Edie Goldberg
When you think of development, think in terms of building the expertise in your organization one employee at a time. That means putting people in positions where their skills are strongest, while also addressing weaknesses. Employees want challenging work that develops their skill sets. By focusing on development, you can give them that opportunity as you grow the internal capabilities of your organization. In the performance enablement framework, managers are there to enable employees, and ongoing career development is an important part of the game.
Each of the three chief principles of performance enablement, with their associated practices, needs your support as a top leader. You need to model goal setting, coaching and ongoing professional development—and not just talk about it. What you are doing with performance enablement is unlocking a door to high performance as a facet of your culture.
Performance enablement isn’t a program or an initiative that you take down off the shelf, apply and forget about. It’s a continuous process. The performance enablement framework is above all a high-context environment. It’s a workplace where there are continuing discussions of goals and priorities and the larger purpose they represent. A broader context creates meaning for the people in your organization, and this is one of the aspects of work that employees are most eager to find.
Through setting clear, important goals, coaching at all levels and centering development, you can give employees what they want: purpose, career advancement and a feeling that their contribution is valued. What you receive back is engaged employees who are aligned with your goals. They will be motivated, progressing toward target outcomes and growing in skills and capabilities.
Thus, performance enablement can help generate a virtuous spiral that fulfills individual as well as organizational goals. It’s a key to offering a better workplace experience for employees. It’s about creating a sustained commitment among your people that will attract and retain high-quality talent in a competitive marketplace.
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