Chartered Institute of Marketing: From painful paper process to a coaching model

As part of its trans­for­ma­tion pro­gramme, The Char­tered Insti­tute of Mar­ket­ing (CIM) iden­ti­fied that its per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem was not capa­ble of sup­port­ing the organ­i­sa­tion­al change that formed an inte­gral part of the over­all busi­ness strat­e­gy. Staff sur­veys had indi­cat­ed that employ­ees were also unhap­py with the exist­ing scheme and want­ed more reg­u­lar input into their per­for­mance and devel­op­ment. CIM intro­duced a plan of reg­u­lar one-to-ones and feed­back in 2016 but were unable to mea­sure progress or ensure a con­sis­tent approach that was aligned to the busi­ness objec­tives. The sys­tem was paper based, admin heavy and did not seem to be inspir­ing man­agers to real­ly engage with their teams. 

The Solution & Why Clear Review

CIM’s Asso­ciate Direc­tor of Peo­ple, Sarah Lee-Boone, recog­nised that it is only reg­u­lar and mean­ing­ful per­for­mance con­ver­sa­tions that tru­ly move the dial. Specif­i­cal­ly, CIM need­ed a high­er lev­el of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and fre­quent feed­back in order to facil­i­tate an organ­i­sa­tion­al shift to a more agile and con­tin­u­al­ly evolv­ing entity. 

Sarah knew that this would be a big change for man­agers and team lead­ers and was keen that this didn’t become anoth­er ​‘HR ini­tia­tive’ – own­er­ship and empow­er­ment were key to suc­cess. At the same time as devel­op­ing a new man­age­ment behav­iour­al frame­work and organ­i­sa­tion­al vision and val­ues, it seemed the right time to launch this new way of work­ing, aligned to a new vision for the organ­i­sa­tion. It had to be some­thing that peo­ple real­ly under­stood, bought into and was embed­ded into CIM’s culture. 

Sarah had been aware of Clear Review for a while and researched the prod­uct thor­ough­ly. From a method­olog­i­cal point of view, the align­ment was per­fect. After years of expe­ri­ence as an HR direc­tor and per­for­mance man­age­ment con­sul­tant, Clear Review founder and CEO Stu­art Hearn has strong views about that the core ele­ments of good per­for­mance. He believes these are three­fold: qual­i­ty con­ver­sa­tions; real-time feed­back; and near-term per­for­mance and per­son­al devel­op­ment goals. These are the three ele­ments that the Clear Review sys­tem was built upon, so when see­ing the soft­ware in action Sarah quick­ly con­clud­ed that it was the right prod­uct for CIM; a light and sim­ple dig­i­tal frame­work to sup­port and enable the new approach. 

Dis­cussing Clear Review as a prod­uct, Sarah said: 

Clear Review is a real­ly effec­tive prod­uct. Its cre­ator, Stu­art Hearn, had expe­ri­ence with­in a senior HR role so under­stood the chal­lenges, and this real­ly shows in the prod­uct, in terms of ease of use. It’s extreme­ly sim­ple, which means we can focus on help­ing peo­ple focus on the per­son­al devel­op­ment aspect, rather than train­ing peo­ple on the sys­tem itself. It’s also extreme­ly cost effec­tive for the val­ue we get from it. That’s large­ly because the sys­tem has the core of what we need, with­out loads of extras that are not rel­e­vant to us, and often result in giv­ing the end user a more con­fused expe­ri­ence. Final­ly, it’s incred­i­bly easy to imple­ment and man­age from an admin­is­tra­tion perspective.”

The Result

The impact of the change has been huge, with the new approach empow­er­ing man­agers to have mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships with their teams in a more open, one to one way. 77% of CIM peo­ple have had a quar­ter­ly check-in and in Sarah’s words: 

The organ­i­sa­tion has been through a sig­nif­i­cant peri­od of tran­si­tion and I can hon­est­ly say that with­out our new per­for­mance coach­ing mod­el, aid­ed by Clear Review, we would not have been able to achieve what we have. Clear Review has become inte­gral to our peo­ple man­age­ment strat­e­gy and has become the cen­tral place for manager/​employee con­ver­sa­tion, feed­back and per­for­mance focus. It’s about build­ing trust and empow­er­ing employ­ees, and we’ve real­ly man­ag­ing to achieve that. Man­agers don’t feel like they’re being policed, and we’ve got more pur­pose and align­ment than we’ve ever had before.” 

Dis­cussing some of the pre­vi­ous chal­lenges, Sarah said: 

Pre­vi­ous­ly, we had intro­duced the con­cept of CPM with a paper sup­port­ed sys­tem. How­ev­er, whilst it meant that many mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions were tak­ing place, we could not extract data to demon­strate this.” 

With the core project of engage­ment and align­ment going well, the next issue to tack­le was data gen­er­a­tion and vis­i­bil­i­ty of what is hap­pen­ing from a per­for­mance per­spec­tive. Clear Review reports pro­vide real time infor­ma­tion on who is and isn’t hav­ing per­for­mance con­ver­sa­tions, where feed­back is and isn’t being pro­vid­ed and the split between pos­i­tive vs con­struc­tive, as well as the abil­i­ty to see the how many goals are being set, bro­ken down by team and divi­sion. This data has allowed for a sim­ple but insight­ful KPI dash­board to be built, which is reg­u­lar­ly viewed by senior man­age­ment, right up to Board level. 

We’re excit­ed about how far we’ve come. How­ev­er, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that build­ing a high-per­for­mance coach­ing cul­ture is an ever-evolv­ing project, not a final destination.”

Advice for those shifting away from annual appraisals

• It’s impor­tant to focus on the ​‘Why’ as much as the ​‘How’. The sys­tem is very intu­itive and the need for sys­tem train­ing is min­i­mal. How­ev­er, this is a big shift in cul­ture for many peo­ple and it is impor­tant have a clear pur­pose about where you’re aim­ing to get to – this affects the way you artic­u­late and influ­ence to bring about mean­ing­ful, long-term change. 
• Align to the busi­ness strat­e­gy and the key stake­hold­ers’ agen­das. Focus on where the busi­ness is going and show clear links between how a more agile and focused approach to per­for­mance man­age­ment will help deliv­er on the organ­i­sa­tion­al goals. 
• Talk to peo­ple. Senior stake­hold­ers, your HR team, but most impor­tant­ly the man­age­ment and employ­ee pop­u­la­tion. Ask ques­tions, under­stand, ask more ques­tions. You can then sum­marise the core themes, speak them back, and build your method­olog­i­cal plat­form. Engage­ment sur­veys are also a great way to gath­er insight. 
• Man­agers want details. A great way of artic­u­lat­ing the ​‘how’ is by get­ting a free tri­al from Clear Review and show­ing them what the new mod­el looks like in real­i­ty. This demys­ti­fies the process and proves that you’re look­ing to make things eas­i­er, not demand­ing more admin­is­tra­tive effort. 
• I want­ed to move away from per­for­mance devel­op­ment being an HR ini­tia­tive and Clear Review pro­vid­ed lots of sup­port in terms of a comms & train­ing. We are a rel­a­tive­ly small organ­i­sa­tion with lim­it­ed resource, so for us this sup­port was vital in get­ting us up and run­ning. Clear Review is extreme­ly sim­ple to use, so you can arrange some brief ses­sions or drop-in clin­ics, sup­port­ed by the Clear Review user guides, which are con­cise and infor­ma­tive. I can’t stress enough though, focus on the on the cul­tur­al aspects of why you’re doing what you’re doing, and the tech­nol­o­gy will work out.