Companies must focus on outperformance

Management, in its purest sense, means that there is an inherent belief that one can change something for the better. When the word is used beside performance, there is a difference. As opposed to other forms of management, performance works differently because it involves regular goal-settings, checkpoints and reflections about what works and what does not to enhance and improve performance. Clubbing all forms of motivations into one bracket of performance management is too simplistic. Performance management is really about conversations, not about performance, but about outperformance. For example, a conversation around achieving outputs of 10X compared to the previous year and ways of getting there is truly a conversation about outperformance.

The place where most organizations go wrong with performance management is when a certain model is mimicked and applied across all times. For organizations like InMobi who approach performance not in terms of a process, but in terms of outperformance, it is just not logical to follow a normal distribution. For us, it is alright to say that 50 per cent or even 80 per cent of our employees are high performers.

For an organization that views performance across the entire employee lifecycle, including hiring, achieving great performance is not too hard. If an organization truly believes in hiring extraordinary people, then the key conversations should be about outperformance. It is the natural order of things that there will always be a performance differentiation. In an outstanding organization, there will still be differentiation between great performers and average performers. But to penalize an individual just because s/he is in the presence of other great people is unfair. It is, therefore, important to drive motivations that help employees and teams to outperform in the coming times.

In our organization, we do not believe in explicitly communicating high potential status to people. We believe that it is important that they know and feel it, even if it is not stated or explicitly advertised. It is meaningful to be recognized. While having a high potential program is valuable, it should not become the source of disengagement.