It is recommended to go through the chapter of scorecards and dashboards before you look at this page. In brief:
- Scorecard review sessions are more holistic, span a greater horizon of performance and have operational as well as strategic perspective.
- Dashboard review sessions are have narrow domain, have operational focus and highly frequent.
Start with reinforcing the objectives of the session and ground rules
At the beginning of the meeting, one can reinforce the following objectives:
Keep the review focused on 5-10 key performance points.
Key Performance Points (KPP), are the points which need most attention for enabling performance in context of the review session. These performance points include key reasons for under or over performance, key threats and opportunities, any strengths and weaknesses which need attention. The performance review session will have a holistic review, but fair proportion of time will be spent on key performance points..
The key performance points will keep on changing across the review sessions. These are different from KPIs, which are more linked to your business plan and strategy blueprint. A pre-circulated scorecard helps the participants to identify their KPPs. To keep it simple, the group will evolve its KPPs, throughout the session. One need not agree to these KPPs in the beginning of a review session.
Do not keep the review sessions too regimented
One does not need to be too regimented in terms of the sequence and agenda, as long as the key imperatives of a good review session are met. One needs to focus on the objectives more than the process. For example- if the sales are significantly down in this month, one may start the discussion around that subject, before going through the entire scorecard. One does not need to be a slave of the process. If the need be, one can extend the time of the review session or can have a follow-up review session.
Apply situational leadership
This subject will be covered more when we build a section on leadership. Depending upon the skill and readiness of a team member to handle a situation, the team leader can go into varying levels of diligence and review. For example, a team member having a good track-record and having the readiness and capability to handle the under performance may not be questioned much. On the other hand, if the same team member is facing a new and unforeseen situation, one may spend more time on it.
Focus on the decisions which need team involvement
Out of all the discussion items and decision points, we should focus on the ones which require team inputs or sign-offs. This makes the best of the teams collective presence. It is generally difficult to get a team (say management team) to-gather frequently. The items which are linked to few team members, can be scheduled for offline discussions
Keep some time for feedback on whole performance review process
As you institutionalize the process of generating scorecards and Dashboards and the performance review sessions, one should keep few minutes for the team to comment on its efficacy.
Do not do too many time-checks
A strong facilitation is a combination of subtle and obvious. The facilitator should not appear like doing a policing work. There are many tricks, one can apply in terms of driving the focus. One can also leverage the team-manager to drive the focus.
Keep on building the outcomes throughout the session
One can keep on building the outcomes as you move forward in the review session. For example, as soon as a decision is agreed upon, one can either place it in a soft-sheet projected to all or can put it on the flip chart.
Interject with appropriate statements to stay focused
Here are some examples of the facilitating statements one can use:
- So what is the problem we are trying to resolve?
- What is the decision we plan to take here?
- Is there a timeline to this action?
Use templates to drive discipline
If you are using good templates to record the outcomes, they can enforce a discipline. For example, in the actions listing, if the template has columns like:
- Action
- Description
- Owner
- Data of completion
- Next check-point
- Completion criteria
It will encourage participants to fill-up these columns.
Facilitation differences between scorecards and dashboard review
One can refer scorecard vs. dashboard to understand the difference between the two. This difference drives the facilitation imperatives.
- Dashboard are operational focused and the outcomes as well the discussions should be focused on operational context and non-strategic aspects. One cannot discuss the product design issues, when discussing daily sales dashboard.
- The dashboards review sessions need to be quick and have a stronger and more regimented facilitation.
|
