Are you managing your employees’ performance as well as you can?

Four employees on Peter’s team, Mona, Alex, Rob, and Sam, didn’t meet their sales targets this month. But this isn’t the first time it’s happened; their performance has been inconsistent for the past few months.

Managing employees’ performance is one of the critical expectations of being a manager. As a prudent manager, Peter recognizes that these four individuals could be demonstrating equal levels of (under)performance but for distinct reasons. In order to support each one of them optimally, he begins with an attempt to accurately diagnose individual performance.

Peter calls a meeting with each of them to address their inconsistent performance and starts each meeting with a commitment to exploring the reasons for their underperformance.

Peter: This is the third time you’ve not met your monthly sales targets. Help me understand what’s going on.

Mona: (Shrugs) I don’t know. I tried.

Alex: (Confused) I really want to do great but I don’t know how to add new prospects to my sales funnel.

Rob: (Frustrated) I thought the sales reps were supposed to execute the qualification call and then hand off the lead to me as an Account Executive. But I’m wasting so much time on calls that don’t even qualify.

Sam: (Disappointed) I don’t know how you expect me to meet the targets when I rarely get the sample orders I need to make a sale in time. Even when I’m ready to close the sale, sometimes it takes way too long to gain the approval from the organization to close the sale. I don’t know how to meet the targets amidst the bureaucracy and inefficiencies in this department.

On the surface, each one of them may appear to have a valid explanation for their failure to meet sales goals, except perhaps for Mona. Instead of asking general exploratory questions, Peter uses the MARS model of individual performance to determine the specific source(s) of underperformance in each case.  MARS is an acronym that refers to the four factors that impact an individual’s performance that includes Motivation, Ability, Role clarity and Situational factors.

According to this model, an individual would perform well if he/she is motivated to do so (Motivation), has the knowledge, skills and abilities that enable him/her to do his/her job (Ability), and has clarity about the expectations of his/her job (Role clarity). In addition, the Situational factors should facilitate the individual’s desire, ability and understanding of the role to perform well. As such, the situational factors moderate the relationship between the first three factors and individual’s performance because an individual may fail to perform if situational factors, outside his/her control, may impede performance.

According to McShane and Steen (2012), the MARS acronym was coined by the senior officers in Singapore Armed Forces and researchers started considering all four factors in empirical studies exploring individual performance, as early as 1976. The MARS model is a simple and structured approach to understand individual performance. It can also help prioritize where one’s focus as a manager should be, thus helping managers be more effective and efficient in managing and supporting their employees’ performance.

Using the MARS model, Peter could identify the root cause in each employee’s case and take appropriate steps to facilitate their respective performance.

Mona lacks Motivation to perform

Upon further exploration, Peter realized that Mona was not motivated. She had accepted this job a year ago because this was the best job opportunity she encountered as a new grad. However, she was never passionate about sales. As a result, Peter could try one or more of the following strategies to increase Mona’s motivation:

• Encourage her to proactively evaluate her fit for the profession and for her current role at his organization
• Ask her to connect with the Career Development department, if his organization has one
• Reinforce the expectations to perform as long as she remains in her current role

Alex lacks the Ability to perform

Alex, like Mona, was a new grad when she accepted the job four months ago. But unlike Mona, she’s passionate about sales and is eager to perform. She, however, is not aware of the wide range of strategies that she could deploy to add new prospects to her sales funnel. As a result, Peter could try one or more of the following strategies to increase Alex’s ability:

• Peter could ask John, the star salesperson, to share some strategies with Alex
• Set up weekly meetings to provide specific feedback to support learning on the job; help Alex identify learning moments in daily work and analyze them to determine strategies that lend to her success on the job so that she can repeat those desired behaviours
• Share some readily available resources that may include books, websites, education/training, etc.
• Encourage Alex to proactively seek knowledge and skills that would enable her to perform well and meet her sales targets

Rob lacks Role clarity

When Rob was hired as an Account Executive, the team had very high-performing, experienced sales reps. Unfortunately, several of them left the organization when the organization was moved to the current location. The interim strategy focused disproportionately on hiring new grads with limited to negligible experience. To make matters worse, the organization did not offer the onboarding support needed to set up these new employees for success. So the implicit expectations for Rob’s role had transformed but he was not clear of the added accountability to buffer sales reps’ performance when needed. As a result, Peter could try one or more of the following strategies to increase Rob’s role clarity:

• Acknowledge the unique circumstances at the organization and clarify the transitory expectations of Rob’s role at this time
• Explicitly note the new expectations of Rob’s role
• If the role has changed significantly, ensure that the compensation matches the current role expectations

Sam lacks situational factors to support performance

Sam’s response demonstrates that situational factors outside his control are impeding his performance. Some of the factors related to the timeline of obtaining sample orders could be an easy and quicker win as compared to the time needed to reassess the effectiveness of the approval process. As a result, Peter could try one or more of the following strategies to address situational factors to facilitate Sam’s performance:

• Empathize with Sam and then encourage him to articulate his complaints as requests
• Identify the quick wins, in this case, related to the resources needed to close the sales
• Plan to explore the process inefficiencies as a team and encourage Sam to take a leadership role in re-engineering the process (if possible)

Focusing on one factor at a time can help build momentum for change. In general, any one factor alone explains on average only about 10% of the variance in performance as demonstrated by a meta-analytic research on sales people’s performance (Churchill, Ford, Hartley, & Walker, 1985). To understand individual performance, evaluate all four factors within the MARS model.

Managers often know best the factors that would increase employees’ motivation and strengthen their abilities. Moreover, managers can set up employees for success by clarifying role expectations specific to one’s job and environment. When managers ensure that the employees have the necessary resources to do their jobs and offer a work environment conducive to performance, then everyone benefits and performance soars.

I’d love to hear your insights if/when you use the MARS model to understand an employee’s performance.

References

Churchill, G.A., Ford, N.M., Hartley, S. W., & Walker, O.C. (1985). The determinants of salesperson performance. Journal of Marketing Research, 22(2), pp. 103-118. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3151357

McShane, S.L. & Steen, S. L. (2012). Canadian Organizational Behaviour. 8th edition. United States: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

 

About the Author

Sandeep is an Industrial-Organizational Psychology Practitioner focusing on Change Management. She is passionate about the Psychology of workplaces, work, and people at work and strives to help leaders create psychologically safe and healthy workplaces where employees proactively seek change for a better present and future of all. To learn more, visit: www.multilevelleaders.com