In a small, entrepreneurial business you can get by with people not having clear reporting relationships. You might benefit from loosely defined roles and responsibilities. Yet as your company grows, the ambiguity around reporting, roles and responsibilities can start to create mayhem. People don’t know who to take direction from or what the priorities are. Focus and performance suffer. But who’s truly accountable for what?
To successfully grow into an entrepreneurial organization you need to institute a basic foundation of performance management. Communications are at the heart of this. Your people need to know the answers to these six questions: 1) Who do I report to? 2) What am I responsible for? 3) What are our goals as a company? 4) What is expected of me to support those goals? 5) How will I know if I’m doing a good job? 6) What support will I receive to help me improve?
Both the employee and the manager have a role to play in an employees’ performance. Ensuring that you continually answer the six questions helps to fulfill your responsibility. And helps to avoid the mayhem that arises when informality in a growing organization breaks down into chaos.
Your thoughts?
Michael
