9 Align Coach Appreciate

Introduction

Leaders set the organization's incentives and, in turn, get the performance they deserve from their people. All too often, incentive systems are counterproductive and drive behaviors that conflict with the overall directive, strategy, and desired culture.

Reinforcement and incentives come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and degrees of formality. Formal options for reinforcing desired behaviors include recognition, rewards, promotions, and sometimes removing individuals. Incentives also include informal methods, such as leaders' role-model behavior and their daily reactions and feedback to employee conduct. Depending on the situation, leaders' spontaneous reactions may be even more influential than formal incentive systems. High-performing organizations align their incentives (structured and unstructured) to ensure the best system + people = performance.

Bottom line: If you want a different organization, you have to change how you recognize and reward the people. All of these approaches have to be aligned and consistent with each other and the overall strategy and desired culture. The Align, Coach, Appreciate process helps leaders provide feedback that improves follower performance, engagement, and commitment.

Read Chapter 9, Align, Coach, Appreciate, in the [Re]Create Book.

Objective – Understand the Align, Coach, and Appreciate concepts, components, and relationships and how they contribute to leadership and organization [re]design for sustainable excellence.

Download Workbook

Do your people feel appreciated? Are your employee performance evaluations and incentives aligned with your strategy and culture? In this lesson, you will apply the key concepts of aligning, coaching, and appreciating the workforce to your organization. Specifically, you will assess the alignment between your workforce performance evaluations, incentives, and strategy. Then, you will assess the alignment between the workforce performance evaluations and incentives and your organizational values. Finally, you will use the individual coaching framework to evaluate yourself and then a direct report.

Evaluations and Incentives Alignment with Strategy 

Video 0:52

Objective – Assess the alignment between your Workforce Evaluation and Incentives and your Strategy.

1. Strategic Goals

Identify the Strategic Goals using a code # (e.g., 1, 2, 3…).

2. Evaluations and Incentives

Identify each performance evaluation and incentive, including annual performance reviews, salary increases, awards, bonuses, promotions, and so on. On a separate document, identify the criteria used for each evaluation and incentive.

3. Assess Alignment

Assess the alignment of each evaluation and incentive criterion with each strategic goal. For example, you might assess the annual employee evaluation criteria as a good fit for goal number one. In other words, the yearly employee evaluation criteria align with goal number one and support it. However, you may find that the annual employee evaluation criteria are a loose fit or poorly aligned with goal number two. While it might be helpful and not harmful, it does not directly support the goal. For goal number three, the employee evaluation criteria may be the opposite. The criteria do not address goal number three at all. Consequently, if we improve the employee based on the evaluation criteria, it will not help goal number three.

Evaluations and Incentives Alignment with Values 

Video 4:00

Objective – Assess the alignment between your workforce evaluations and incentives and your organizational values.

1. Values

Identify your organization’s desired values across the top of the worksheet – one value for each column. If you run out of space, use a second worksheet. For our example, we will use the five values that showed up in the research for the [Re]Create book – employee focus, trust, teamwork, excellence, and customer focus. There is more discussion on these values in Culture Lab #12.

2. Evaluation and Incentives

Take the list that you just created for the previous worksheet (Framework 9-3) and copy and paste the evaluations and incentives to this worksheet. If you didn’t complete the 9-3 Worksheet, then you will need to start from scratch and identify the organization’s evaluations and incentives.

3. Assess Alignment

Assess the alignment of each evaluation or incentive individually with each value. For example, the annual employee performance evaluation criteria might directly support the first value of employee development. However, it may loosely fit the value of trust and integrity and may not address the value of teamwork at all. Or worse, it may emphasize individual performance over team performance. Finally, the annual employee evaluation criteria might be aligned with and support the values of excellence and customer.

The second example, bonus criteria, may be based solely on a customer metric and may not support teamwork, excellence, trust, or employees. Consequently, employees may make choices and decisions that are potentially unethical and could detract from the team’s overall performance and the larger organization's overall performance.

In the third example, promotion criteria, we find that it does not address three of the five values. The problem is that we end up promoting people who do not embody the values and/or do not role model the organization’s values. When we say we value employees’ trust and teamwork, but the people we promote and bonus do not exhibit those behaviors, many (maybe most) employees notice and realize what is really important.

Individual Coaching 

Video 7:52

Objective – Apply the Individual Coaching Framework to yourself and then a direct report.

The individual coaching framework is a format that will help you make the alignment between strategy, culture, and individual action explicit. This provides a tangible way to compare desired actions with the activities the individual is doing.

1. Activities

Identify the duties, roles, responsibilities, and tasks the individual is responsible for during the year.

2. Align

Identify the strategic goals and values aligned with the roles, responsibilities, and tasks.

3. Assessment

Assess how well the individual did on each role, responsibility, and task.

4. Action?

Identify the next steps, including developmental activities, rewards, etc.

Conclusion

Organizational systems without people do not exist. While it is easy to design a system that results in poor performance and turnover, it is challenging to create a system that drives engagement and high performance. For any system to work, it requires leadership. In this case, leaders must be willing and able to inspire, coach, and appreciate their people while role-modeling that behavior every day. Fortunately, or unfortunately, leaders get the performance from the workforce that they deserve. It is up to the leader to decide what they want and then do what is necessary.