Memorable Quotes:
“All performance management is a process. It’s what you decide to put in place. And there’s some very important parts of that that I can talk about. But if you go deeper, what it really is is a philosophy around what an organization believes to be true about itself.” – Angela McKenna
“Employees ultimately are brought into an organization to deliver value. And there’s something about being clear from the beginning with employees about what that means and what that looks like. And that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be spun up and spit out. And it also doesn’t mean that you join and it’s a job for life.” – Angela McKenna
“For me, performance management is: how do the underlying vision, objectives, and goals of an organization, along with the values of that organization, enable all the employees in the organization to deliver value for both the company and for themselves.” – Angela McKenna
“I’ve also worked for organizations where the goals are clear, but they’re not transparent to the entire organization, and each individual’s goals aren’t transparent to each other. And I think that’s a big piece where it starts to not work.” – Angela McKenna
“It’s unfair to have a performance conversation if the most senior people, if the most powerful people in the organization, have not been clear on the definitions of success. What is it that we are striving for?” – Jerry Colonna
“And the experience at Salesforce, time and time again, in all the data and the research that we did, was that the biggest determinant of someone’s success and their performance was one thing, and that was the relationship with their manager.” – Angela McKenna
“The more structured the performance process, in my experience, the less likely you are to truly get great innovation, bigger thinking from people. And people don’t feel empowered because they’ve learned not to draw outside of the lines.” – Angela McKenna
“The core fundamentals are: you have to have clear goals; they need to be transparent. You have to skill your managers, you have to have skilled managers, and you have to have a culture where it is acceptable and it’s encouraged to have clear conversations.” – Angela McKenna
“The more you lean on the process, the more I wonder how much you’ve given up on the culture. The work that it would take to shift the culture is too hard. So the path of least resistance, and the easier, the easier of the paths is let’s put some new shiny bells and whistles on the process, or let’s make the process more rigorous, or the process has got to be wrong, we need to rethink the process. When I actually, it’s not the process; it’s the underlying culture where the issue lies, or the issues lie.” – Angela McKenna
“One of my favorite expressions is: transformation doesn’t happen with transaction. And that applies equally to relationships. If the relationship stays at a transactional level. You know, I don’t know how you’re going to truly achieve transformation in an organization.” – Angela McKenna
“And so that’s why transformative work inside teams and 360s inside teams with a goal, where people genuinely believe the goal is about the team, not singling out individuals. That’s where I’ve seen it be the most powerful.” – Angela McKenna
“If you hire a new employee and they fail and you’re not taking a look at your internal process about how that person came in, if you’re not looking at the hiring manager and saying, okay, what. In what ways could you have done things differently? Then you’re just bound to repeat the same error. And one of the things that people do is they will infantilize. They will ask for a certain level of performance without holding clear accountability.” – Jerry Colonna
