
It never ceases to amaze me how many athletic departments try to build a high-functioning, customer-centric culture, but still operate without performance reviews of their leaders.
Without a formal performance review process, leaders will be held to lagging metrics by default instead of leading metrics and behaviors. And having an actual performance review mitigates the impact of poor managers who never have performance conversations nor provide feedback to employees.
From my time working at Disney Institute, key behaviors that reinforced the culture were often the focal point of formal and informal performance reviews, of equal importance to revenue performance.
Creating and training key service behaviors is not enough. If you hope sustain a culture change or service initiative, you must build the demonstration of behaviors into your performance review process.
If your managers and directors are only measured against revenue and performance metrics, they will quickly sacrifice their 1:1 meetings with subordinates focused on personal development in order to achieve short-term goals.
As we help our clients enhance their cultures, building clear processes for feedback, organizational alignment, and ongoing expectation setting are key elements for successful culture change sustainment.
Inspiration for this post came from:
https://engagemintpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/High-Performance-Culture.pdf