Leadermorphosis Episode 67: Andy Brogan & Helen Sanderson on reinventing performance management

Leadermorphosis Episode 67: Andy Brogan & Helen Sanderson on reinventing performance management

Lisa: Okay, so welcome Andy and Helen to the Leadermorphosis podcast. I’m so happy to have you here for this conversation.

Andy: Delighted to be here Lisa, thank you.

Helen: Thank you.

Lisa: So I thought we could start maybe by talking about the why, you know, what is the current landscape at the moment in terms of Performance Management, in terms of how we create kind of mutual accountability and what good looks like in organizations, why is it broken and you know, why did you feel compelled to want to do something about that Andy?

Andy: Yeah, so there are so many reasons why that I almost feel like I can’t answer all of that question, but let me pick out a couple of things that feel front of mind. So the sound bite I think I’d give this is that current Performance Management approaches turn responsibility into an act of resistance. So what I mean by that is that they tend to come from a place of compliance essentially. We’re often about “how do we get them to do it,” so the fact that there’s a “them” in there is immediately sort of othering, and the fact that there’s a “it” tells you that the people that are “them” aren’t in control of, you know, choices about what work to do, how to do it, how to evaluate it, and therefore in meaningful ways they’re not really in control at all.

So back to that phrase - turning responsibility into an act of resistance - I think what they do is they put people into a position of essentially being invited not to think, just to deliver. And then in a really complex world like the one we’ve got, I think thinking’s absolutely essential. But if we’re not, you know, intellectually and emotionally engaged with their work, then we’re not going to be able to do the right things because context requires us to think and adapt and learn and respond.

So that’s at the core of it for me, which is current performance culture preferences compliance over responsibility. And if we really understand the nature of performance in complex situations, then we know that what you need is responsibility as the fundamental essential characteristic of what we need people to embrace in order for performance to work well.

So maybe we can go into those things deeper if you want, but I think the second sound bite I’d say is that Performance Management doesn’t actually therefore manage performance at all. It manages delivery of specific performance goals, but those are completely different to managing the kind of combined impact.

So, slightly facetious example, but you know, cost is often referred to as, you know, an aspect of performance. So “how are we performing on cost” you might ask. Well, the cost isn’t performance, right? Because if cost was all of performance, we’d just close the doors and then we’re incurring no cost, and now we’re performing great.

So we know on a really sort of intuitive level that performance isn’t about, you know, one number to rule them all. It’s about how all these different things interact in really complex ways. And sometimes we’re prepared to lose money in order to drive added value in order to create future revenues. So these things interact in deeply complex ways that require us to be, you know, intellectually engaged with our work, and compliance just doesn’t do that.

Lisa: And did you have like specific examples or experiences where you know, you really felt this sense of, you know, this is just dysfunctional, like this way of doing Performance Management, I can’t do this anymore, in such a way that it kind of compelled you to look for something different?

Andy: Yeah, I mean, I think this sounds probably terrible to say, but I would say there’s pretty much not an organization that I’d worked with until, you know, the last few years where I wouldn’t have said that there were live, every day, almost every moment examples of the current Performance Management approach driving weird behavior.

So there’s one example that I guess got me kick-started down this line was – hope language is okay here Lisa – but it was what my colleagues referred to as the “oh shit” graph. And it was when I was working in a previous consultancy, but it was in local Authority planning services, so where you go to ask if you can put a conservatory in your house or whatever it is. And in those services in the UK, there’s an eight-week Target. So from the point of submitting an application to the point which a decision needs to be made, the planning officers have got eight weeks.

And you talk to all the planning officers and you say, “So does the Target drive behavior?” and everyone says “No, no, no, we’re professionals, you know, we’re driven by our vocation, we want to make good decisions.” And then you plot how many decisions are made by how many days after application, and the graphs are flat line and then a massive spike on 56 days, and then a flat line. And basically every decision is made bang on eight weeks. And that’s why it’s “oh shit” graph because everyone says it’s not affecting their behavior, but the whole system’s optimized around hitting that one number.

And so, you know, for me that was a salutary moment when I first saw that. But the really troubling thing is, you then go from planning department to planning department across the UK, and the “oh shit” graph is there in every single one of them because it’s a systemic consequence of the current performance approach.

And again, when you talk to planning officers, that’s not their vocation, you know. So they’re doing their very best to still make good decisions within that constraint, but the point is that constraint becomes absolute, it becomes all-conquering, and it becomes dysfunctional because it starts to lead to predictable unintended consequences like “make a good enough decision to get it over the line in time” or “you can’t miss the target twice, so once you’ve not made a decision in eight weeks, just don’t make a decision.”

And actually, when we looked at the data there, it was faster for an applicant to resubmit than to wait for a decision once the target had been missed, which is insane.

So you see these things all the time, and I see it whether it’s, you know, local Authority services, but also I see it a lot in Health and Care Services. And there, the consequences of it, I think, are deeply troubling. I’m sure Helen can say more about this, but you see how it has real… it causes real harm in people’s lives as well as it causes real harm in the lives of the people doing the work, not just the people they’re working for. Sorry Helen, I can see you wanted to come in.

Helen: Well, I think there’s a relationship issue here as well. So when I was managed, when I worked in the NHS, my entire focus was then demonstrating how great I was to my supervisor and would do whatever I needed to do in order to try and look good in her eyes, because of the significance of her relationship and her evaluation of my work. So I think it completely twists, or for me, you know, my being able to show up authentically with the person who I perceived to be in this managerial role, who therefore would determine, you know, many, many things about my work life. So I think as well as targets and performance, I think there’s a massive relationship and power-over element of course around supervision and the way that that’s handled.

Lisa: Yeah, I think what I can distill from listening to both of you is that current Performance Management Systems basically create compliance and not responsibility, and measure the wrong things in a sense, and sort of sub-optimize the system because people start behaving in a way to kind of impress or comply with these measures that actually don’t make a difference to, you know, the client or the patient or whoever’s kind of using the service at the end of it, but rather sort of arbitrary… you know, it ends up not adding value at all actually.

Andy: Absolutely, and I think on the point around measurement, there’s a sort of easy this, but there is a subtlety I think, which is, you know, I’m definitely not advocating for a world in which we don’t use measures. But I think the issue is that when we use measures to keep score, essentially we end up turning performance into a game to be played. Rather, it’s a shift from scorekeeping to sense making is what I would advocate for. So we still use data, but the minute that we start to treat data as a score to be kept, it switches off thinking, or it turns… it directs thinking and ingenuity and all that great human potential into almost solving the wrong problem. You know, we narrow that complex reality down to just the things the numbers tell us, and I think that’s a real tragedy actually.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s a really good sound bite – from scorekeeping to sense making. So maybe then we can go into, you know, the alternative then, these confirmation practices that you’ve developed over the years. What was the inspiration for that and how have you tried to design them to be different, to not fall into the traps that we just spoke about?

Andy: Yeah, so, well, it started off with just a really practical problem to solve, which I think is where most good things sort of start and where they finish as well. And so I was working with folk in a large insurance firm, and they had a culture historically of kind of scorekeeping and all that sort of stuff. And they recognized that, and they weren’t particularly happy about it, but they knew that they still had real operational challenges, and they were still in a massive organization that was going to require them to report their numbers and all the rest of it.

So we just started by essentially trying to solve the problem of how do we have good conversations about what really matters that lead to practical actions, so that we’re doing the work to improve, if you like, the value we’re delivering, with a hypothesis that if we do that, the numbers will fall out the bottom.

So we just started there, started with “how do we have good conversations about performance?” And one of the things that happened really, really quickly was it became obvious that everybody had a very good intuitive feel for what good looked like.

So I sometimes talk about this now as the sniff test, and you know, because you both do consulting work, I’m sure you’ll recognize this, but you kind of walk into organizations and metaphorically you breathe in the air and you get a sense almost instantaneously as to whether this is a healthy place of work or not, and whether people are focused on what really matters or not. And so what I saw with the teams in this insurance firm was that they absolutely had that in spades. They could breathe in the air and know their bankers from their roses straight away.

So we started with that and said, “Well, how can we turn that into something shared and explicit?” And what the team came up with were just some simple statements about things that they thought really mattered. And we used those statements as ways of checking in with each other and checking out with each other as well to see, you know, so if these are the things that matter, these are the things that we’re doing, or what’s impacting them?

And so our practice sort of emerged quite quickly, which was we’d reflect against the statements. And to make that reflection more efficient essentially, we said instead of starting by discussing each statement in detail, let’s start by just giving a subjective personal score against each statement.

So, you know, each member of the team would give a score from one to five, where five was, you know, everything’s cool, nothing to worry about here, and one is, this is terrible. And obviously scores in between.

And so we just, at the start of the team meetings, would have the statements up, everyone would throw their score up on the flip chart, and you’d see either broad agreement or significant variation in the scores. And either was good because if there was agreement that it’s terrible, great, let’s focus there. If there’s agreement it’s great, brilliant, move on to the next thing.

And so it turned into just a really very simple, common-sense way to get to conversations about what matters in areas where there was a real sense that something’s going on that we need to investigate. And when we did that, we then had the detailed conversation about “so what is it that explains our scores?” And sometimes, as it became a little bit more sophisticated, we’d move into how we could use some other more maybe traditional quantitative data underneath those statements to validate whether the subjective scores we were giving were, you know, accurate or not.

So we started to, from my point of view, put data in its place – i.e., you know, to support sense making. And I think the other thing that became quite significant was the role of coaches within this, by which I don’t necessarily mean people external to the team, but if what I’ve described so far is what you might call sort of first-order confirmation practices – you know, checking in with each other about how well we’re doing what matters – the coaching role became important, might call second-order confirmation practice, which is just working on whether the way we’re having these conversations about what matters is as healthy, as productive, as accurate as it could be.

So we had members of the team who’d rotate the coaching role, and their job was really just to observe the conversation and then to coach the conversation, and to do things like encourage the team to test for blind spots, or to pay attention when someone was quiet and, you know, not giving their voice because there might be something significant, or to point people towards whether we were just taking our subjective experiences and not then validating in some other data. So coaching became an important supplementary piece.

But I think just coming back to your initial question, Lisa, the heart of confirmation practices is really just turning that sniff test into something that is explicit, systematic, routine, and ideally something that is also shared. So it happens in a peer or in a team environment or something like that, so people aren’t left knowing those things but not giving voice.

Lisa: Thanks for sharing that. I’m thinking maybe we can bring you in here, Helen, because I know that you’ve used confirmation practices in Wellbeing Teams and with other organizations that you’ve supported in the kind of Health and Social care sector. So what, for you, what was compelling about confirmation practices? What sort of inspired you to start experimenting with them and what problem was it solving, you know, in your eyes at least?

Helen: So four years ago, we set up Wellbeing Teams, and I was lucky enough to have Andy working with me as an advisor around improvement. And we were initially working in home care in small self-managed teams. And of course, traditionally in home care, staff would have a supervision session usually for about an hour every six to eight weeks when they wouldn’t be paid for that, and they’d be expected to turn up at the office. And the agenda for that would be something like sharing information, the manager sharing that with the team member, checking things like leave, sickness, training update. So it was much more of an information share, nothing about reflecting on developmental learning or how people were delivering their role.

So as we didn’t have managers, clearly that wasn’t going to work. And actually, as a practice, I don’t think that works anyway. So we needed an alternative, and luckily that was the conversation Andy was able to have with us. So we started, I think what’s really important is to have a golden thread from the role description that we were explicitly recruiting people to, to how we reflected online. And that was both how we delivered support to older people who were living in their own homes and also how we’re working together as a team.

So the initial confirmation practices that we use in Wellbeing Teams were directly linked to expectations around the role. And although we didn’t have managers, of course, we had a wellbeing leader, and part of her role was a coaching role, so an internal role as Andy describes. And we decided to use the weekly team meetings as the place to do confirmation practices. So every two weeks in the team meeting, we’d have buddies sitting together. Now the role of the buddy is both challenging support, so it was somebody in the team that you’ve got to know really well. And we had then, I think, six statements that related to delivery of the work and how we were showing up as team members.

And people would, as Andy said, rate themselves on a scale of one to five and then have a conversation with their buddy to decide which one they wanted to work on, what they wanted to do differently over the next two weeks. And then we’d use Slack as our communication, so we’d have a channel called “Our Will,” and people would post their intentions about what they wanted to do over the next two weeks.

So I was looking back at them to prepare for our session today. So one of them is “I’m confident that I’m delivering safe, person-centered care” and that would relate to, you know, medication areas, how confident you felt supporting people to move, things like that. But another one was “I’m confident in giving my colleagues feedback, appreciation, recognition and encouragement.” So have I, in the last two weeks, said something positive to a colleague, given some good feedback, etc. And then another one was “I’m confident my colleagues would see me as the kind of person who helps team members out.” So some of them are how I think I’m doing, and some of them were how do I think I’m being seen by others, because one of the key things about Wellbeing Teams is sorting out rotas, covering sickness together, and that requires that we’re showing up generously with our time and being the kind of person that we can rely on each other for.

It went really badly the first time we used it. Two of our colleagues gave themselves five for every single one, and we thought, okay, we’ve not quite got this right. So we did two things then. To the form that we were using, we added in a separate column which was our values, because we wanted to do a better job of clearly linking the values that we’ve recruited people to and for, and the values of the organization, to the statements. So, for example, “I’m confident that I’m delivering person-centered, safe care” relates to a value of compassion and responsibility. So we made that really clear.

And then the other thing was, we said explicitly what fives looked like. So you could only give yourself a five, for example, if this had happened over the last two weeks, because we realized that wasn’t clear enough. And some of our colleagues, like all of us, would be more likely to score ourselves high, and other colleagues, of course, like many of the rest, are more likely to judge ourselves low.

So having Michelle taking a coaching role and, you know, going around the pairs and listening in the way that Andy described, and listening for people who were quiet or people who… well, making sure we were linking it back to that document was a really quite important part of us developing our practice.

And today, you know, we support other organizations to set up Wellbeing Teams or equivalents. We’re also using confirmation practices in the national team – in fact, it’s in my diary for tomorrow. And we’re using it as trustees as part of our governance process in the charity Community Circles. So lots of experience that I can share about that later on.

Lisa: Yeah, thanks for sharing. And I think what I… one of the things I loved hearing about with Wellbeing Teams and how confirmation practices helped sort of set up that self-managed, kind of mutually accountable culture is that when you get regulated or audited – I don’t know what the correct term is, but I know CQC did an inspection, and you were the first self-managing team to be inspected, right? And you’ve got an “outstanding.”

Helen: Yes, and they actually sat in our meeting where we were doing confirmation practices as part of that. And several things linked together. So Andy was talking about data and metrics. So in our team meetings, all our metrics are transparent and delivered with the team. So you could say, you know, so if we’re doing confirmation practice on delivering person-centered, safe care, and on the metrics board it says there were eight medication errors over the last week, we’d be expecting that to be taken into account as we’re reviewing, you know, how we’re showing up together and how we’re delivering with confirmation practices.

But as Andy said, it’s the massive shift in responsibility from me trying to impress my boss, you know, me gaining goals or whatever to try and make myself look better, to me sitting and looking at myself and saying, “How do I think I’m doing?” and then having a conversation about it. But then critically saying, “How do I want to do better in an area that is troubling me over the next two weeks, and what I’m going to commit to?” And then for those being transparent to the whole of the team so we can support each other in helping to achieve them. And no supervision practice I’ve ever seen, you would have two-weekly “how you’re going to improve what you’re doing” based on your analysis of your work every two weeks.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s making me think about as well, like, what do you both think about the fact that Performance Management and performance appraisal systems are so often tied to, you know, my salary or whether or not I get a bonus. And maybe I only do it once or twice a year. And so that is obviously going to influence how I score myself, or… you know, what are your thoughts about that?

Andy: So my take on that is, I mean, that’s a key part of why they’re so dysfunctional, right? And this is sometimes quite a difficult point to capture or to articulate, but in practice, I think it’s quite easy… that I think if you ask most people how they experience accountability in their organization, they would experience it as something that is proximate to blame, or judgment, or something like that. And I think that’s a mistake. I think that proceeds from a mistaken understanding of human nature.

In actual fact, when we leverage accountability that way – so I quite like to actually replace accountability with responsibility just linguistically, but even if we don’t go there, I think to shift our idea of accountability from “holding people to account,” which I think carries those overtones of blame and judgment and moves the locus of control for evaluation outside of the individual to someone else, to… if not “holding to account,” to “helping to account.”

The action strategies then for the person that’s supporting the individual isn’t “how do I judge you,” it’s “how do I help you to accurately reflect on the contribution you’re making and what’s impacting that?” And for me, that’s back to the coaching thing. It’s a conversation that is about helping people to take a view of whether what they’re doing and what that’s achieving is exactly what they want their impact in the world to be.

So it’s not about saying you’re doing well or you’re doing badly. It’s actually about helping people to self-actualize. It’s helping people to, in a sense, it’s helping people to really act in order to be able to leave the legacy that they want to leave. So I think it’s quite motivating, and it doesn’t carry with it that fear factor then because it’s about “how do I just support someone to practice their thinking skills and to therefore become a more accurate reflector, thinker, learner, such that they become a better performer?” Not because it’s my job to make them perform, but because they, of course, want to have an impact in the world. Why wouldn’t they? So it’s just helping them to have that impact.

And for me, that’s kind of what I think good Performance Management looks like – is helping people to have the impact that they’re already trying to make, and doing that by removing external judgment from them.

That then does have implications for when it comes round to pay and progression and these sorts of things that are going to be people outside of the individual who are going to take a view – you know, are you ready for promotion, these sorts of things. But I think we need to really deliberately and carefully delineate those things.

So one of the ways that I’ve come to talk about this is that we need to differentiate between the consequence and the cure. So the cure is these coaching conversations, supporting people, leaving the locus of control with them. Every now and again, there is a consequence where we have to make decisions about who’s getting the promotion or whatever. But again, I think it’s easy to tie yourself in knots with that, but I don’t think we need to, because anyone I’ve ever spoken to about this in depth, they want there to be consequences. You know, otherwise, their work has no meaning.

So I don’t think people are fearful of consequence. I think people are fearful of external evaluation that leverages blame and judgment.

Helen: Completely agree, and I think it’s how do we balance individual reward and team reward and what kind of proportionate response do we want to have to that? In Health and Care, there’s there’s no such thing, and I’m pretty confident in saying that, of people being approached to be promoted. It’s much more “there’s a role here, and are you ready for it, and do your skills and abilities match what’s required of this role, and therefore do you want to apply for it?” And that feels much more congruent actually with people reflecting on their progress, knowing where they want to develop as a person, knowing perhaps where they want to go in terms of their next role, and being supported to think about whether they’re ready for that, and then applying for that role when that’s available.

And the idea of my manager deciding whether I’m getting recommended for promotion or not feels deeply, deeply uncomfortable for me because it then takes me back into “my job is to game how I want my managers to see me.” You know, and it sets me up in competition with my colleagues, and I think both of those are deeply, deeply unhappy.

Lisa: Yeah, I really agree. I’m wondering also, I remember you saying once, Andy, that confirmation practices, if done well, are designed almost to invite us to disagree with them because that then enables us to kind of put the elephant in the room and talk about that. Can you say more about, you know, why that’s important?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m always nervous to sort of say, you know, the tests of a good confirmation practice or anything like that, but I think the closest I’ve got to having them would be something like, when you look at the statements that we’re using to do our confirmation practices against, you know, we might ask questions like, “Do they help us see through the fog? So past all that complexity, these are things that we think really matter, to therefore help us talk about what really matters and discuss the undiscussable.” So that, for me, that’s one good test of a confirmation statement.

Associated with that, “Do they help us test for blind spots, see alternative perspectives, surface disagreement?” And finally, “Do they help us move to action, or do they invite a move to action?” So they’re the kinds of things that I think about when I’m looking at a confirmation statement and asking, “Is this a good one?”

And I suspect for your listeners, the reasons why those things might be good tests are probably obvious enough, but I think it all comes back to being cleared around what’s the problem we’re trying to solve with these things. You know, we’re trying to create an environment of responsibility, of thoughtful practice, of the locus of evaluation being within the individual, but the locus of sense-making being in partnership, in the group, so that we’re not in isolation, you know, building walls around our thinking.

Again, I think it’s about we’re trying to get really good at learning how to ask the right questions rather than how to provide the answer someone else expects. So if these are all the problems that we’re trying to solve with them, I think a statement that passes that test of inviting disagreement is a really good statement because then we’re gonna have the right conversation. Then we’re going to see the different angles, test for blind spots, all of those things.

Helen: I like to think of them about as being slightly scary, because if they’re asking the right questions, they are slightly scary to approach because they cut through the rubbish. As Andy said, I have a practice on a Sunday morning of doing a reflection on my week, and I had some personal confirmation practices around how I want to develop as a person.

And one of the things that I’m focusing on is I’ve been very invested in the past and been showing up as looking competent. And one of the things that I’m proactively working on is asking for help when I need it because I’m hardwired not to do that. So one of my Sunday morning confirmation practices is “have I asked for help this week?” And I find that deeply confronting.

And another one is “I’ve had courageous conversations this week and leaned into conflict rather than avoiding it,” again, my natural place in the world is to try and avoid conflict. So my Sunday morning practice, I go “oh no, I’m going to be asking myself these difficult questions again, and how have I done?” And so that’s how I know that I am hitting the buttons that need to be hit in order for how I’m doing.

And I think there’s so much that confirmation practices could do in a coaching scenario. So that’s my personal reflection stuff, but I’ve also used them with some coaching clients. And I’ve been supporting a fabulous woman leader who just came back from maternity leave, so one of her very practical confirmation practices is about working part-time and whether she’s overworking her hours or not. So I think that there’s so many different ways that these can be helpful to us.

Andy: And actually, that prompted something there for me, which is I think what I’ve seen is a pattern emerging with people who’ve been using these. Often good confirmation statements come from taking an area that we know we have difficulty with. So if we’re not having courageous conversations, for example, then just framing a simple confirmation statement around that is really useful because it gives everyone permission to have that conversation. We don’t need to dance around the handbags on it. We can just get straight to it.

There’s a set of statements that I quite often use with project teams that I like because they sort of come from that place where we check in on things like, “so are we working on the right things? Are we working on the right number of things? Are we working at the right pace?” I mean, these are really sort of open-ended statements, but the value of them is that, you know, every time you use them, you have people going, “God, I wasted three days this week working on blah blah blah, and I’m juggling 50 things and getting nothing done.” And, you know, I think we can just cut through the noise by asking those things directly.

Helen: Completely. And you’ve given examples of using them at the end of meetings and project team meetings, and the example that I gave earlier was a role-based one with Wellbeing Teams. And just talked a bit about personal development ones, but the other huge area that we’ve been using them in is around meeting agreements – so how do we agree that we’re going to show up, team agreements or meeting agreements.

And in Wellbeing Teams, in the National Team, we review those every four months. So we have all our statements, and then rate ourselves against each statement individually and coached around that. And then we look at our collective scores, and we then use that to change our statements, “why that’s meeting with you,” and it’s your team agreements, but accordingly.

So the last time we did it, one of our statements is “I ask for feedback each week.” And that will be part in our tactical meeting, which comes from Holacracy, and part of our practice is we ask each other for feedback each week. And that was our lowest performing score over the last six months. So we decided to work on that. It then became much better, and then we decided to up the ante on it. So “I’m not just asking for feedback each week, I’m asking for feedback about how I show up.” And it’s much harder for us to feedback about how you show up, which is on a relationship basis and how you’re contributing to meetings and stuff, as opposed to just generally asking for feedback. So we’ve seen that we have changed and improved reflecting where we are as a team in our team agreements by using confirmation practices.

Lisa: Yeah, I love that because when I’m working with teams and people in organizations that are experimenting with self-management, I think people so often struggle with agreements in terms of, you know, how do we want to be with each other? How do we want to be together? And it’s one thing, you know, even if you get so far as to create them, I think it’s another thing entirely to actually live them and keep them kind of update them and review them and keep them alive.

And so I love that example you share because I think that’s a great way of kind of regularly checking in with it and scoring it and maybe tweaking the statements or sort of reviewing that. “This one’s been a low score for a while, what do we want to do about that?” So I think it’s really helpful for that.

Helen: And I think, if you think about, Andy, what you said at the beginning of this podcast about performance, when we talk about performance, we’re only talking about the things we do, not who we are and how we show up. And I think confirmation practices gives us the opportunity to have both. So in, you know, the Wellbeing Teams one, we both had “how are we delivering the work and how are we showing up together?” And I think that’s one of the, you know, fantastic things about this.

I think the other massive opportunity, which I’ve started to do with a couple of coaching colleagues, and I know that we’ve had conversations about this, Lisa, is when you go on two days training, nobody will ever mention that again likely, that your manager will talk to you about it. So one possibility is to go from two days training or five days training, whatever, and then say, “What would we expect to be different? What would I expect to be different about my behavior as a result of going on this training, and how can I check in to see how I’m doing?” And confirmation practices are the obvious example for me for that, so embedding this as an L&D practice so that we can really build on skills that we’ve been developing. You know, just seems a really, really obvious thing for us to do.

Andy: And I think one of the next steps that I’m certainly wanting to pay attention to… just to pick up on something implicit in that as well, I think, Helen. I think one of the underpinning reasons that they can be useful is that, you know, things that are measurable sometimes come too late. It’s, you know, we can measure the consequence, but we can’t measure the thing up front. So, you know, how do you measure morale? Well, we commonly end up doing things like looking at sickness rates and so on, but that’s all after the fact.

And I think natural language is just a much richer language. And if the focus, again, is “how do we have the right conversations at the right time,” just checking in with each other around, you know, “how are you feeling? How’s it going? Does this feel like a healthy environment?” You know, that, again, I think is something that is very easy for humans to do intuitively. And one of the traps, I think, of traditional Performance Management is it seems it often starts with a question, “Well, how do we measure that?” rather than “How will we know?” We’ll know by just going and sniffing the air, you know. How we measure it does matter, but it’s a different sort of question that I think actually closes thinking down.

Helen: So completely. And I’ve been doing a lot more thinking recently about why and purpose, and thinking about when we’re recruiting people, rather than just having a traditional job description, that we get really clear about the role, but we start with “this is the essence of the role or this is the purpose of the role.”

And in the confirmation practices that we use with the national team, we have our role, but the essence of the role, and make sure that both the confirmation practice statement and the metrics that relate to it and the checklists that relate to it connect with the essence of the role. Because I think it’s so easy to lose them. Why are we doing this, you know? We’re delivering, you know, the purpose of Wellbeing Teams is to support people to live well and be part of their community. So what questions do we need to ask ourselves to keep checking that that’s exactly what we’re doing?

I think keeping coming back to purpose and values, and confirmation practices being a way of having, as you say, Andy, courageous conversations about what really matters in a way that helps me to reflect on how I’m doing and be coached about how I can keep improving.

Lisa: Yeah, I was just reminded, listening to you, second, Andy, as well, that one of the key principles that I really liked about confirmation practices – and I know you don’t like to kind of say that they should be or must be this or this – but I know that you’re quite passionate about kind of jargon-free, really kind of human language as well. Like, you know, could you go out and, you know, say the confirmation practice statement to a stranger on the street, and would they understand what it meant? Why is that important, would you say?

Andy: Yeah, so maybe it’s partly a personal prediction, but also, you know, again, I think if we anchor back to what we’re trying to achieve with confirmation practices, you know, it’s that people are taking responsibility, having the right conversations, you know, we’re naming the elephant in the room and all of those things that we’ve talked about. And I think it just pays to take as many barriers to engagement and to having the right conversation as possible out of the way.

So, you know, again, the example that I gave earlier of a couple of statements, things like “we’re working on the right things.” You know, that’s something that I think anybody, you know, a nursery child could get their head around what’s the question we’re asking there, and they could engage with that. So for me, that’s part of the motivation there, is just, you know, can we frame it simply so that it promotes engagement?

But also, I suppose the other side of this is something we touched on earlier as well, which is when we try and polish and polish and polish and polish to the point where we think we’ve got an absolutely perfect definition of what good looks like, we’ve almost closed the conversation off. It disinvites differences of perspective because it’s, you know, it’s the finished article. So I think keeping it simple in, you know, everyday sort of language also helps to invite those different perspectives and therefore keeps us open to where we might have blind spots.

So again, back to that one around “we’re doing the right things.” You know, occasionally I’ve had conversations before, and they say, “Well, what do we mean by right?” And for me, that’s the whole point. Yeah, what do we mean? Let’s allow that to come out as part of the subjective differences in how we score it so that we’re constantly learning about what right looks for us now in this context.

Helen: It’s permission for supportive challenge. So one of my colleagues spends each month about eight hours a week printing and creating these marvelous, marvelous reports. They go to key people and then posting them. And I look at this and think, “Takes eight hours of your time, you’re paid at this rate, what are you not doing because you’re doing that?” I encourage, “you know, people want hard copies.”

So in confirmation practice, it enables me… so he’s very proud, and it will give himself a four on “am I doing the right things” because he thinks these reports look amazing, and they do. But it enables me to say, “Do we know how much people value having hard copies versus PDFs? How could we find that out? You know, and maybe, and do people know the cost of creating these hard copies versus the cost of creating PDFs?”

But I don’t think in my normal day-to-day work, unless I was doing confirmation practices with him, that I would bring that up as a subject matter, because I kind of go, “Well, I mean, who am I to say that?” And, you know, “we can trust him to do his job.” But confirmation practices gives me a format to say, “Can I ask you some questions about that? Because I’m really curious about learning more about it, and can we talk about it a bit more?”

Lisa: I’m wondering if either of you has an example you could share of working with a team where there was a real kind of noticeable shift in focus, you know, from a previous system of metrics or practices to confirmation practices in a sort of “aha!” moment, you know, realizing perhaps we were focusing on the wrong things or, you know, less useful things?

Helen: Yeah, I’m wondering if, I don’t want to stop, Andy, from coming at me for example.

Andy: No, please go, because we’ve started all our teams with confirmation practices at the beginning, and I don’t have an experience of before and after like you’re doing.

Helen: So probably my favorite example of this – there are a couple, but my favorite one is working with a pathology service, which I always use this example, but just because I love it so much. So the world of pathology… this is essentially medical diagnostics that gets done in the lab. So, you know, people send blood samples, etc. And the world of pathology has historically been regulated on the basis of what happens within the four walls of the lab, which, you know, there are good reasons for that.

But what that means is that if you’re a pathologist, the thing that you’re mainly measured on, held accountable for, etc., is whether the tests that you do are reproducible, by which I mean if you got the same sample twice, you could produce the same result twice. Yeah, that allows you to know that you’re doing good science, basically.

But what it doesn’t do at all is ask you whether the tests that you’re doing are necessary. And it doesn’t get you thinking at all about, “is the format in which I’m providing these results to the clinicians that requested them, the patients who need them, a format that actually promotes informed choices and right action?”

So when I was working with pathologists, and we did this, they came up with some statements that looked at those aspects of the performance because we’re thinking from the perspective of, “if this is about doing what matters and having the right conversation, what matters is that we do the right tests for people that need them and give results on time in ways that allow them to make sensible decisions.”

And when they ask themselves those questions, they went gray because, first of all, they didn’t know with confidence. But what they did know with any degree of confidence was that we’re doing an enormous amount of unnecessary testing that probably causes harm. And the format we provide things in, you need to be a pathologist with a PhD to be able to interpret the results. So in other words, we were doing this crazy, mad, brilliant science, but to what purpose?

And so that fundamentally changed things for that particular team. And as a result, you know, for people who maybe are interested in the “so what” question around, “yeah, but okay, so what happened to performance in traditional terms even?” Well, the answer was they saved a bloody fortune, they saw causing harm, and they do 40% less testing now without picking up any less pathology. In other words, they’re still finding as many instances of ill health.

And what’s quite exciting about that example from you as well is that the confirmation statements that came out of that have turned into framework that now the national accreditation agency is looking at using. So the NHS just published a report, a gets-it-right-first-time, and the confirmation statements are in there as essentially the core of the recommendation, which I think is pretty awesome.

Lisa: That’s so cool. And for me, like when I hear that story, it makes me realize how important it is to be aware of from whose perspective are we asking what good looks like? Because there’s, you know, in that example, the sort of the end user, the person who’s receiving the results of the test, is sort of was absent in the initial kind of measurements, and that made a big difference.

Andy: 100%. And I, again, I suspect I’m preaching to the converted here, but I think that’s the story of how performance has often happened because it’s trying to leverage accountability in those traditional terms. So it focuses on what are in people’s direct or autocratic control. But we all know that in systems, it’s the product of interactions that are the big points of leverage.

So if actually we manage performance from the basis of what’s in your control, then we’re managing the thing that has has least leverage on the system and it actually is likely to propagate most dysfunction. So managing pathologists on how fast they can do unnecessary tests repeatedly only inflates cost and harm. And that is the story of what’s happened in the system, and pathologists know it.

But they’re put in this double bind of, “if I don’t deliver within the current performance regime, then I potentially stand to lose my job, lose my, you know, accreditation, etc. And so I have to deliver within the current regime. But if I deliver within the current regime, then I know I’m inflating costs and doing harm.” So it’s a double bind, and the only way out of a double bind is to think differently.

So for me, you know, it was I think that example is significant because it shows how when you kind of take that different end-to-end perspective, if you like, and you start focusing what matters, you can actually satisfy the existing performance requirements and still do the right thing. But it requires you stepping back from the current performance approach first.

Lisa: I think, what are your thoughts are about – because you know, there have been a lot of articles and blogs and stuff written about “we need to reinvent Performance Management,” and a lot of big companies like Deloitte have done that in recent years, or, you know, reinvented it in a way that they see is reinventing it. So there seem to be a bit of an acknowledgment that the current Performance Management systems are, you know, dysfunctional. And yet, I don’t really see much radical change. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s just… yeah, why is it so difficult for us to really kind of disrupt the current paradigm of performance?

Andy: Oh, gosh, this is where I’ve probably already had a rant, but here’s where I could really have a rant. So I need to hold myself back. But I think I really want to resist pointing the finger and seeing this as true across the board. But I’ve definitely seen examples where attempts to change performance systems in large-scale institutions have been informed by some of the things we’ve been talking about today. But the place that action proceeds from isn’t “how do we help people self-actualize?” It’s still “how do we get them to do it?” And it’s just a kid gloves approach of trying to be smarter about how we get them to do it.

And I think, you know, for me, there may be a lot of people listening to this that just wouldn’t agree with me on this, and, you know, such is life. But where I’ve got to in my own thinking is that actually, there’s a real question, I think, around “have institutions outlived their usefulness?” Because what I think I see increasingly happening is that the people that work within institutions end up being required to preference the needs of the institution over the needs of the humans. And I think that’s a really weird place for humanity to find itself in, that suddenly we’re serving institutions rather than institutions being in service to us. You know, that surely that’s why we created them.

So I think that’s the fundamental challenge in all of this, actually, is can we somehow right the ship to a point where we see that the reason we’re doing all of this is so that, you know, humanity and the planet meets its needs better? And if we anchor our action from there, then I think we get traction with this because then we’re putting ourselves in service to each other, not in service to institutions, basically.

Helen: Food for thought. And I think it’s the paradigm challenge, isn’t it? If the paradigm is hierarchical management, you haven’t really got much wiggle room to change how you think about performance because the power is set in a particular way. But as we shift to greater autonomy in teams and move perhaps towards self-management, or certainly at least managers taking a little coaching role as opposed to a power-over role, then other possibilities emerge.

And the possibilities, as Andy says, are about how do we move towards self-reflection on “how am I doing? How am I showing up? Am I working to the essence and purpose of my role? You know, where I can I keep improving, and how can we support each other to do that?” It’s a completely different way of thinking and looking at the world.

Lisa: Yeah, I also think that, you know, to that point, Helen, that a lot of organizations that I talk to are really looking for, you know, if they are wanting to explore more autonomy in teams or self-managing teams, it’s really quite scary and difficult to step into nothing, to not know what the alternative looks like, and to kind of lose some of that familiarity in terms of structures, you know, the kind of previous supervisory-type management, hierarchical structures, and to not have anything to replace them with is quite scary.

And I think for me, it’s exciting because I think confirmation practices offers an example of an alternative set of structures or practices that you can co-create and introduce together that creates a bit of a scaffolding for people to, you know, coach and support each other to sort of track out, you know, “are we doing the right things? Are we focusing on the right things? Are we sort of working in service of our purpose?” And is that been your experience, Helen?

Helen: I’m curious about what Andy thinks about this, but a baby step would be instead of a manager having traditional supervision with a subordinate, could that be a coaching conversation around confirmation practices where the person shows up and says, “Here’s how I’ve scored myself. Let’s have the conversation about why I’ve scored myself as I have, and help me set my goals for the next two weeks or the next month based on that.” And that requires completely different behavior from the manager and completely different behavior from the colleague as well, and agreement on, “well, what is it you’re doing in service of the purpose of your role, and let’s start by having that conversation?” And equally, that is a conversation I’m sure isn’t happening in very many places.

Andy: Yeah, I’m just, I mean, just to validate from my perspective, since you said you were curious what I might think, I agree with that. And I think again, I know you know this, but the pitfalls to avoid in doing something like that are the person in the coaching role often, in my view, to be the arbiter of what the statements are, for example.

So I think, you know, it’s fine that they might be co-produced. That can be a good thing because that’s part of the coaching role, is to help people think about what would be helpful. But I think, you know, if you might have been thinking to ask this question, but I’ve seen plenty of examples of confirmation practices being attempted and then not done well. And, you know, for me, one of the lessons I would say I’ve learned from doing this stuff is that the sort of onboarding process into confirmation practices matters quite a lot.

And I think the way I would suggest people do that is to really give someone that’s going to use confirmation practices the opportunity to to step into an outside-in perspective. So what I mean is, look at their work from the perspective of purpose. So who is that work for? Where does it create value and that sort of thing? And I think that’s an important process to go through, just to take the time to really learn about what value looks like to the people that are, you know, the customers or patients or whoever it is, in order to then come up with some things that allow us to talk about what really matters and frame like the statements.

And my experience is, as long as you do that, then entering the process Helen’s just described is a really useful, valuable place to start. So the pitfall to avoid is just jumping in and saying, “Here’s your statement, start scoring yourself.” Or the other pitfall to avoid is to say, “What statements would you like” without any sort of anchoring process that takes you back to value.

Lisa: So, yeah, that’s really helpful because I guess there are probably people listening to this conversation now thinking, “I love the sound of confirmation practices. This is something I’d like to start trying out in my team.” And if they are thinking that, what would your recommendations or advice be?

Helen: I’m laughing because I know every time Helen and I try to kind of pin you down, Andy, “What are the do’s and and shouldn’ts, and dos and what can people do?” I know you don’t like to be prescriptive, but to in order to sort of guide people, what would you say?

Andy: So the traditional consultant answer should be, “Oh, you have to pick up the phone.” But I don’t believe in that either. I think that the trick is to start to try, you know, to make an attempts. But don’t blindly stumble into it just because it feels like a good idea.

I think it really pays to first of all be clear around what are the problems with existing Performance Management. So we’ve touched on some of those today, but I would strongly recommend that if you’re someone who’s a team leader or in a managerial position in some capacity, and you want to bring this into your organization, that you start by actually doing some work to go and understand your current performance management system and what it does and doesn’t achieve. Because that will help you to, if you like, fine-tune your antenna such that when you start using confirmation practices, you will simply avoid some pitfalls because you know they’re there. And other ones you’ll be sensitized to, so if you start drifting into them, you come back from.

So I’d start with that. I think the next thing I’d do is, as I described a minute ago, around so get really anchored to purpose and value, framed from the outside in, from the end user’s perspective, or whatever, you know, framing we want to give that. And then I would see, enter into a sort of co-productive process.

And again, you know, you’re right, I hesitate to say there’s a recipe or hard rules for this, but I definitely think trying to do something new, whether it’s this or anything else, at scale, is a mistake. Just, I often talk about “take one, do one.” So just, you know, take one type of conversation or one relationship that you want to sort of test this within, and just practice it there. And make part of practicing it for both sides of that relationship the job of saying, “We’re almost certain to get this wrong the first time of trying, so let’s make part of this the process of improving it.” That would be my recommendation as well.

Helen: Is make it experiential. So start with you and your role and what’s the purpose of your role, and if you could come up with five or six statements that felt scary and related to the purpose, and you personally try it, you know, for a few weeks to see what it feels like to have a better understanding of it. And then whilst you’re going through the process that Andy just described, I think I’ve been enormously benefited by having my confirmation practices as part of my bullet journal, you know, and almost on a daily basis thinking about how am I doing. So I think using it as a process of self-reflection, as well as working on a team with it, is really powerful.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s super helpful. Thank you. I guess, like, looking to the future now, what excites you both about the potential application of confirmation practices, you know, what do you think it could bring to the world if you allow yourself to kind of dream big?

Helen: You’re probably trying to keep on my megalomaniac tendencies, Andy. I just think it’s amazing that it’s within an NHS document. So I think my big wish would be that this is recognized as a way of helping us have more and better courageous conversations about what really matters and taking responsibility for our development and how we show up in relation to our role. It’s like, I think it’s so fundamental.

But I think the potential links for, you know, for self-development, for coaching, for L&D, for making recruitment better because we’re linking role descriptions right through to this is what we’re expecting in induction, and then this is what we’re expecting in terms of delivering on roles. And I think Andy’s conceptualization of this being, you know, something you can use to evaluate whether you’re talking about the right things in meetings, whether project teams are focusing on the right thing, in terms of how we show up together with team agreements, as well as roles. And it took me a while to get past the “you just use this with roles” to actually, actually, the application of this is much, much wider. But we’ll ask you, Andy.

Andy: Well, I think the thing I’m definitely excited about is, you know, what does this look like playing out through that GIRT report and, you know, accreditation and so on, and where might that lead. But I think for me, that illuminates maybe two other things, which is, I guess what I’d love to see is that this ends up as part of a sort of fairly standard toolkit for, you know, people in coaching roles, people in teams, around how they maybe do reflective practice individually and together.

And that desire isn’t because… yeah, I mean, maybe there is some ego in there, who knows, but it’s not specifically about the ego. It’s just because the people that have used it and used it well have got benefit from it. So it’d be great to see that sort of being widespread, and particularly widespread in practice rather than just talked about. The value’s in the doing. So I’d love to see that.

And then the sort of other end of the scale, if you like, so not just at practice, I’d love to see this going beyond the pathology example and playing out in the arena of actually how do we shift the current model of regulation, accreditation, and accountability more generally. Because I think… So I’m actually, I’ve shifted my view from, you know, maybe five or ten years ago where I used to see things like regulation, etc., as almost part of the problem.

For us now, I would say actually there’s enormous value, and actually, I think there’s a completely legitimate need for things like regulation. But if we can move that stuff out of… I’m hesitating here because actually I know there’s a lot being done in this space to move in the direction I’m just about to describe, but I think it still burdened with a hangover of how it’s always been done.

So if we can rehabilitate people’s view of regulation and how we engage with regulators and how regulators engage with the regulated to something that is a generative model of that, then I actually think things like regulation, accreditation can be rocket fuel for a world of responsibility where, you know, people really feel free to do the right thing, but also feel like it’s the responsibility to do the right thing.

And actually, I think rather than getting what we sometimes get today for, you know, this sort of top-down autocratic type model of accountability evaporates off responsibility, I think we can get it doing the opposite and actually reinforcing and amplifying responsibility. And that’s ultimately, that’s the thing that I’d be really excited… you know, if I was thinking about what’s the thing I want to try and influence in the world, that’s the thing I want to try and do.

Helen: And if I could give an example from CQC, Commission who regulates Health and Social Care, there’s a widespread belief in Social Care that CQC requires six-weekly supervision. That’s not true. That’s an interpretation. The regulations say that staff need to be supported. So if inspectors were shifting their questions from… By using supervision, actually, the form that providers have to fill in actually asks the number of supervision, even though that’s not required, you know, by their regulations.

But if that shifted to “how are you supporting colleagues to reflect on their own performance,” it just takes some tweaks like that that opens up the doors for confirmation practices being able to evidence, you know, supporting colleagues to reflect on their practice and grow and develop in the way, the way that they work. So I don’t think it would take much for that kind of thing to happen.

And I really think that confirmation practices are a lever for changing thinking in traditional hierarchical organizations, as well as the natural successor to Performance Management and self-managing organizations. It fits beautifully with Holacracy and other approaches to self-management. So I don’t think there are many things that can help change the existing paradigm and sit so well with the new ways of working that many of us are exploring.

Lisa: Yeah, I agree. So in starting to wrap up this wonderful conversation, is there anything else you really want to share that you haven’t had the chance to say yet that you think listeners should hear?

Helen: I’ve got one.

Andy: Go on.

Helen: Andy, I’m so grateful for you inventing confirmation practices and your generosity in sharing them and not copywriting them and not selling them, but being so open to people exploring and testing them out, and for us in Wellbeing Teams, they’re one of the things that really made a significant difference. Thank you.

Andy: That’s incredibly kind of you. So just to reciprocate, I’m super grateful for, first of all, even being allowed to come on a podcast like this, but also, you know, for both of you taking this idea and running with it and testing it and improving on it, Helen, and, you know, the way that you anchored it to values and other things.

And so, you know, that’s… I think that’s, maybe aside from just sharing my appreciation for that, maybe that’s the thing that I would say that I haven’t really touched on, which is, you know, there’s lots I’ve learned about how to do this, and there’s lots of tips and tricks and all the rest of it. But I think the most important thing for me in all of this is to be anchored to “what’s the problem we’re trying to solve with this?” Because then the practice will continually emerge in different contexts. So I’d really invite anyone listening to this to just have a crack at it and see what you learn, and to share what you learn as well. That would be really helpful.

Lisa: Brilliant. Well, I want to echo Helen as well in saying thank you because you are this real, quite a rare example of a really humble visionary, I think. And I really appreciate the way that you are so open to people experimenting with this and sharing what you’re learning. So thank you. It’s a huge contribution to this field. So absolutely appreciate it.

Andy: Thank you so much. It’s really kind.