UNIT 4
Ongoing Performance Monitoring and
Review
Supervision
Monitoring managee performance is an essential part of
supervisory leadership and naturally follows planning
managee performance.
This is a phase in which the cycle of PM
Planning > Monitoring > Stocktaking occurs several times.
As a function of management, supervision concerns
overseeing the work of individuals who respond to a
supervisor in order to ensure that they meet their role
objectives.
Supervision also means a superior ability to perceive
situations and use them to achieve desired outcomes is
whatever emerges as her role.
Supervision
The task of a supervisor is
To organize and manage her supervisees as a team
To function as a link between them and organizational
management,
To control supervisee outcomes to conform to
organizational needs and requirements.
Supervision-Span of Control
Earlier researches showed that in a moderately differentiated
work situation, the optimum span of control for a supervisor is
5 to 7 direct reports.
If a manager has fewer than five direct reports, chances are
that the supervisors will micro-manage.
On the other hand, if the supervisor has more than seven direct
reports, she may be unable to provide adequate guidance to
each of them.
The more the supervisor can delegate the greater the number
of direct reports she can supervise.
Competencies of supervisor will determine her ability to
efficiently develop her supervisees
Supervision-Style
Quality and style of supervision is also a matter of organizational policy and
culture.
Relatively tough or supportive supervision, the supervisor’s willingness to
meaningfully conduct performance dialogue, her enthusiasm to effectively
implement PM – all these flow from the concept an organization reveals in
treating its staff: commodity or factor of production or partnership concept
For example. These organizational attitudes and values flow down the
organizational hierarchy.
A manager who is aware of this subtle influence on her can reflect and
develop a personal style – the own with which she – and her group – feels
more comfortable, ethically and psychologically.
In doing so, it is important that the manager uses due subtlety and
sophistication so that the manager’s own attitudes and style smoothly lead to
the achievement of results that the organization legitimately expects –
avoiding dysfunctional conflicts at the same time.
Monitoring and its Objectives
PM explicitly promotes the value that a manager and her
managee accept joint responsibility for monitoring progress
on the tasks and goals agreed upon during the initial
performance planning or expectation setting meeting and
subsequent review meetings.
Managers use instruments like written reports, review
discussions and on the spot inspections to track.
Monitoring includes
Timely and quality fulfillment of managee tasks and goals.
Help and support legitimately needed by the managee’s tasks,
including that agreed upon during planning and review
meetings.
Monitoring and its Objectives
Important objectives of ongoing performance monitoring
and review are to:
Systematically observe managee performance against the
planned quantity, time, cost and quality etc., dimensions
of tasks and goals; and intervene where intent of the plan
doesn’t seem to be correctly understood.
A primary task of supervision is to ensure that the intent
of the performance plan is correctly understood and
interpreted by the managee at all times throughout its
implementation phase.
Jointly ensure the requisite completion of all planned
tasks and goals.
Monitoring and its Objectives
Mutually and reciprocally exchange – provide and
receive – developmental feedback within the manager-
managee dyad, helpful to effective execution of
performance plan.
Check and coordinate that the manager and others have
provided to the managee the needed and agreed upon
help and support for plan implementation adequately and
in time.
Together with the managee, identify hurdles or road-
blocks ro performance, and make available manager’s
superior problem-solving skills to identify alternatives
for smooth passage, besides discussing corrective actions
if needed to improve managee performance.
Process of Monitoring
Monitoring is intended
Less to control and more to encourage the managee to make
progress toward achievement of agreed upon objectives
To enable her to identify problem areas and new skills or
methods needed
To analyse problems
To make plans to use new skills or methods
To overcome problems and performance road-blocks
By providing assistance, advice and on-the-job training a
manager helps her managee to develop, in the hope that, in
future, the managee will solve more problems on her own
and take on more responsibility.
Process of Monitoring
The manager observes managee performance through;
Periodic written reports
Scheduled meetings
On-the-spot inspections, or field or site visits in case of managees whose
location is different from that of the manager.
Relevant and reliable information from other available sources.
In the course of monitoring, the manager provides feedback to the
managee(s) and asks for feedback from the managee(s) during
Group or team meetings to discuss common issues, problems etc.
One-on-more meetings to discuss specific issues and problems encountered by
individual managee(s).
The manager and the managee, thereafter, discuss corrective measures
needed, actions to be taken by either or both of them and other help or
support needed to accomplish the requisite tasks and goals.
Communication
Effective dialogue between a manager and her
managee is a back-and-forth process involving
repetitions and revisions of what is discussed.
The aim of the dialogue is to carve out patterns from
incoherent facts, such that the mutuality of
understanding between manager and the managee is
enhanced, and differences reduced.
Statements must be used where greater clarity and
knowledge are needed.
Questions help achieve deeper insights and awareness.
Communication
An effective dialogue involves dealing with reality at four levels;
Factual levels where the manager and the managee discuss data and
information – observed behaviours or events, organizational policies,
guidelines, procedures and precedents, known or anticipated constraints.
Reflective levels where the more subtle views, feelings, values, beliefs and
assumptions – which influence a situation – are shared and clarified.
Intuitive or interpretive levels where manager and the managee attempt
to understand the factual and the reflective data, what these mean, and
what their implications or ramifications are for the managee’s
performance.
Decisional levels where the manager and the managee reach conclusions
or agreements in the nature of decisions, action plans or procedures for
implementation of follow-up.
Problem Solving
A major contribution of a manager, during this phase of
performance, is to help the managee get over problems – obstacles
and roadblocks to fulfilling performance plans.
Effective fulfillment of this contribution is essential to assure the
managee that the manager is, in fact, her fellow traveler and wants
her to succeed.
To an enlightened manager, her managees must succeed – in fact
more than succeed – for her to be able to deliver her own
performance plan.
There are no two ways. In PM, there is no way a manager can
succeed if her managees fail.
Problem solving, in that sense, is a critical skill in an effective
manager’s skill box.
Problem Solving
How does a manager go about solving the managees’ performance
problems – in fact very much her own?
This is something that a manager must work on and become proficient!
For a start, she must explore, together with the concerned managee,
about
The nature of problem
Its description and its cause
Possible ways of overcoming it
Who needs to work on it, and with whom?
When?
How soon?
Now or later? How?
Then jointly work out a plan of action.
Problem Solving
This is the phase that demands the best out of a
manager or supervisor.
Fully stretches her abilities to make sound decisions
Harnessing all her knowledge and experience
Motivate her managees or supervisees
Take charge of a situation when it threatens to go out
of control
Assure responsibility when courage is needed to do so
Give everyone a square deal and inspire confidence.
