Performance_Management

For many individuals, work is an unhappy experience of being unappreciated, doing work that gives little opportunity to play to their strengths and passions in life. Employers have organisational requirements for people to finish work in a set manner and within set timeframes. Such short, medium and long terms goals are generally incorporated in to a ‘management by objectives’ approach that has widely been used with individuals and teams around the globe; with mixed Results The organisation is concerned with customers, profit and loss, efficiency of operations and productivity. The individual also has these concerns, but they may not often be ‘front of brain’. Equally important is their concern for career, their development, their need to be recognised and rewarded for efforts and outputs. Unfortunately in different team these individual concerns may place individuals in competition with each other due to differences in attitudes, preferences for how ‘things ought to be done’ and motivators. An extra complication may be that individual role requirements could also conflict with all the needs of the individual. The role of the employer is to try to balance the needs of the organisation with all the needs of the individual. Organisational needs are usually defined through strategic goals and aligning work streams and role profiles to these. The way to integrate individual needs, career aspirations, personal preferences and motivators is less well defined. Successful managers make use of a range of tools and processes to build into their team’s objectives an acknowledgement of individual differences and desires within their team when allocating short, medium and long term business objectives. Managers can help shape their teams by engaging with individuals to understand what they want to obtain off their career. Established tools and techniques can be used to identify individual differences in terms of preference, motivators and behavioural strengths. However it will be the wider, more intangible conversation about career management and aligning current work and opportunities to future career goals that is almost certainly to help keep individuals engaged, performing and motivated in the long term.