How Does Your Business Make Money—With Effort or Results?

Employee Development Plans:  A Means or an End?

I got into a fight recently—with a dozen people.  Well, not a bare-knuckle, street brawl where you come away with a bloody nose and get hauled away to jail for the evening.  In fact, this fight didn’t take place in the street or even in the company break room.  No, this was an engaging, thoughtful debate with some small-business owners about integrating employee development plans into the performance evaluation process.

How do you evaluate employee performance?  Many small-business owners have no formal process for providing timely, relevant feedback to their employees about their strengths and areas for improvement.  But even if you do have an established process, are you measuring the right factors?  And if you are, does it make sense to also evaluate the outcomes of employee development plans?

The group and I began by discussing skill and behavioral areas to evaluate, but then moved to individual development plans and whether they would also measure their employees on the items in their plans.  Things started to get tense when I presented the group with a list of factors that one might measure:

• Potential
• Attitude
• Effort
• Job knowledge

For which of the above four factors would you evaluate and provide a score?  If you answered none, come over to my side, grab a stick and join the fray.  The participants couldn’t believe that I would not evaluate any of these variables.  Let’s look at them together, determine what we’re trying to accomplish, and understand why these items may not be useful to evaluate:

• Potential: this really isn’t measureable, as nothing has happened yet.  If the employee has performed well in the current role, then reward for that.
• Attitude:  attitude itself isn’t useful to evaluate, though it leads to behaviors and results which are measurable and could have an impact on your business results.  Connect attitude to behaviors, and behaviors to results.  Then, evaluate.
• Effort: trying to do something and actually doing it are not the same.  In fact, doing something and getting business results are not the same either.  How does your business make money? With effort, or with execution and results?
• Job knowledge: knowledge, skills and abilities are of course important in any role.  And many IT companies I work with reward their technologists for obtaining certifications.  But what makes them important is what employees are able to do with the knowledge and expertise they’ve acquired.  Whether it’s through training or other means, knowing something and doing something with that knowledge are quite different.

As you can see, I’m much less interested in what employees know than in what they can do with that knowledge.  For which do you want to reward? 

So, the next time you’re helping someone create a development plan, think twice about evaluating the person on the details of the plan.  Instead, focus on results and use the plan as the means (and not the end in and of itself) by which the person will get those results.  Your employees will win the fight for top performance with a strategic development plan that leads to growth and profitable outcomes.