What is managerial performance and its hidden face?

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Many questions about the manager, his role, his usefulness and his future (Is manager still a profession?), only to end up with the same insoluble debate about what makes a good or bad manager.

Insoluble, because if we distinguish between good and bad managers , we’re dealing with subjective value judgments. Not everyone has the same vision of management, so we’ll never agree on an answer.

But we can try to objectify the judgment by starting from what we expect of him/her, and evaluate this in a tangible way. Of course, what is expected of a manager depends on the business, its culture and its vision of management, but it does help to provide a framework for reflection, because in the end, it’s the manager’s mission: to achieve objectives in a given context. This is why a manager can succeed in one business and fail in another, without his or her qualities and skills being in question (Why a very good candidate can become a bad employee ( and vice versa)).

Last week, I mentioned the limits of HRIS as a support for managerial action (Managers need more than an HRIS), concluding that to know how to equip them, it was still necessary to know what was expected of them and how it was measured (Tell me how you measure me, I’ll tell you how I’ll behave).

This brings us back to the notion of managerial performance, a notion that’s not as easy to grasp as you might think, because although it’s protean, it’s often evaluated in a one-dimensional way, which conditions the manager’s behavior (“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave”).

The two sides of a manager’s performance

Let’s begin with a moment of definition. “To name things badly is to add to the misery of the world” said Albert Camus. I don’t know if in this case it adds to the misery of the world, but I have no doubt that it adds to the misery of the employees, with the long-term consequence of adding to the problems of the business.

Most of the literature and thinking on management performance focuses on resource management and decision-making. It’s management in the management sense of the term, with nothing to do with the human dimension, apart from a little resource management, which is more of a quantitative approach.

There’s a second component, but it doesn’t have the same status: the management and development of people and teams as such.

One is measured precisely and is the alpha and omega of manager evaluation.

The other is appreciated, but rarely decisive. A bit like a “nice to have”.

Don’t believe me?

If you have a manager who has an excellent business performance at the price of human carnage, with a high level of disengagement, turnover and burn outs, and who doesn’t develop his teams, and on the other hand someone who has decent results but with a high level of engagement and trust from his teams, and who is betting on their long-term development.

Who do you think will be valued, promoted and get the best bonus? Seriously.

There’s result and manner, short and long term. You can’t achieve sustainable performance if you pit the two against each other, or take only one into account.

That’s why I prefer to use the notion of managerial performance, which to my mind implies both sides of management in equal measure, its usually visible side and its hidden side, which will finally find its way into the light to carry the weight it deserves.

Business performance: a matter of strategic performance

This is the heart of management performance in its most common sense.

It’s a manager’s ability to achieve strategic and operational objectives by optimizing the use of available resources. It’s a results-oriented approach, where numbers and data become the main indicators of success.

For some it’s “old school”, it’s the “old world”, but having already opposed people who denounced its ultimate consequence, namely “the dictatorship of EBITDA ”, I would remind you that it conditions the ability to finance innovation and pay salaries, and that when it becomes negative there is no future for the business or its employees.

The problem is not the chosen indicator, but excessive expectations and sacrificing the future for short-term maximization.

Expectations in terms of business performance are threefold.

Firstly, strategic vision: successful managers know how to anticipate market trends and reposition their activities accordingly.

Secondly, resource management: maximizing return on investment while minimizing unnecessary costs.

Finally, there’s decision-making, which involves defining clear KPIs to guide decisions.

The advantage of this scope is that it is easy to measure in a fairly objective way, provided that no conflicting objectives are set (“In 1955, businesses had between 4 and 7 performance imperatives, compared with between 25 and 50 today. 15 to 50% of these indicators are contradictory, which was not the case in 1955” – How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated).

So performance is generally measured through three types of indicators.

Firstly, financial indicators such as sales, EBITDA and gross margin.

Then operational indicators: productivity, delivery times, defect rate.

Finally, strategic indicators: market share, level of competitiveness.

Lastly, this performance is driven by various tools, which I’m only going to mention for information purposes, as we’ll come back to them in a future article on the relevance of a management information system to complement the HRIS.

We’ll start with the balanced scorecard , a tool for tracking financial and non-financial objectives.

More recent are agile methods , which enable priorities to be adjusted in line with changing circumstances and needs.

Back in the spotlight with the AI wave, we also have predictive analysis to anticipate market fluctuations.

Finally, there are OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which are designed to align individual and collective efforts around clear, measurable and ambitious priorities to encourage engagement and the achievement of strategic objectives.

It’s interesting to end with the tools section, as for example the Balanced Scorecard and OKRs should in theory serve to align the two dimensions of managerial performance (Comment bien mesurer la performance des salariés sans devenir un bisounours?) but this isn’t always the case, to the extent that I find concepts such as strategy maps more relevant than the BSC (Le rôle des actifs immatériels dans l’atteinte des objectifs stratégiques : l’intérêt des cartes de stratégie). Indeed, they clearly condition management performance on managerial performance, which makes sense in the eyes of people who swear by short-term financial indicators.

Which brings us to managerial performance as such.

Team management: people at the heart of performance

I often say that if business performance is the “what”, the performance of the managerial function is the “how”, particularly in the logic of sustainable performance.

But if we don’t pay the necessary care and attention to this dimension, and neglect its measurement and tools, we only look at the former, telling ourselves that “the rest will take care of itself”. But the rest take cares for itself, and managers don’t know whether they’re doing it right or wrong, or even what to do or how to do it (Do you have a delivery model for management?).

So let’s talk about what I call the (often) hidden face of managerial performance.

It rests on three main pillars.

First, engagement: an engaged team is more innovative and resilient.

Secondly, work organization , which involves clarifying roles, optimizing processes, simplifying organization, eliminating friction and promoting collaborative working. It’s not for nothing that work organization is cited by employees as the most important element of the employee experience (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions). We are also seeing more and more managers trying to apply agile principles to non-IT professions (The future of work: agile “by design and Agile HR revolution by Jean-Claude Grosjean).

Finally, there’s talent development , with investments in training, supporting employees in their career aspirations, and creating an environment conducive to “learning on the job”.

And although we’re talking about things that are often described as intangible, this can be measured through three types of indicators.

Firstly, qualitative indicators such as job satisfaction (Bye bye happiness at work, hello satisfaction) or engagement surveys.

Then, of course, there are quantitative indicators such as absenteeism and turnover.

Finally, there’s a more collective dimension, with the results of 360° assessments and individual feedback.

And of course there are tools.

We’ll come back to this in detail when we talk about the managerial IS, but there are different types of tools.

Firstly, HR tools for measuring engagement and feedback.

Secondly, alignment tools such as OKRs.

Finally, tools for organizing work, such as collaboration tools, ideation tools, agile boards and so on.

Two complementary dimensions

It’s clear that the two dimensions are complementary, and that if we favor the business dimension to the detriment of the human dimension, we can only be in it for the short term.

A manager who excels at steering the business without considering the human aspect risks creating a toxic environment and seeing performance decline over the long term. Conversely, management that focuses solely on people, without any strategic vision, can lead to a loss of competitiveness.

However, while the business dimension is widely measured and equipped, the second :

– is less measured and equipped

– is dispersed between different tools

– is less analyzed (what leads to what)

– is rarely correlated with business measurement (which managerial actions have a tangible, measurable impact on the business).

– is often the preserve of HR, with data of little use or use to managers.

– is simply less valued.

To achieve sustainable performance, it is essential to align objectives by integrating human values into business strategies. This exists in theory, and we have the tools for it, but we leave it in the background because it exists in the idea but not in the management tools. The idea is that one should never be to the detriment of the other.

We then need to measure and correlate the two dimensions. This means using financial and human indicators in equal measure to assess overall performance.

Finally, we need to develop leadership skills that combine strategy and empathy, so that managers can move forward on two legs, and are neither handicapped by business nor handicapped by people.

Bottom line

Managerial performance is based on a subtle balance between two dimensions: the achievement of strategic objectives and the creation of a favorable working environment.

Managers who know how to combine business and people management enable their organizations to achieve sustainable performance, in line with economic and human realities.

But we have to admit that managers are under-equipped in the second dimension, and that there are few or no integrated tools enabling them to act, measure their impact and know whether they are heading in the right direction.

Image: managerial performance by donskarpo via Shutterstock.

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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