Commitment To Performance Improvement example essay topic

891 words
The most important thing to notice in our questionnaires is the motivation methods employed by the supervisors on both levels: crack of the whip and fear, generated by some of the Store management team, encouraged by my supervisor being strong handed in attitude with me and the supervisor gives me a verbal warning if I dont react positively to what Im told. All the questioned employees also named the lack of positive encouragement as the way to improve their performance. The motivation techniques used by their supervisors do not have such an option at all. The role of positive encouragement in motivating and developing personnel and thus improving their performance is hard to exaggerate. Organizations objectives have been inextricably linked to the evaluation of training and development for many years. Training and development must have clear business measures that are understood by both management and staff.

Any individual involved in development must have a commitment to a personal action plan that is reviewed at regular intervals by their manager (13). A performance appraisal is able to measure the performance of an individual at their place of work. For performance appraisals to be effective and successful, coaches must have pre-agreed aims and objectives, clearly understood by all concerned. Performance targets should be realistic and achievable, balancing the need for effective and improved performance against effective resource utilization. Targets have to be set at an achievable level, or they will be ignored. However, if they are set at a level that is too easy to achieve, they set a wider agenda for the lowering of performance standards (14).

Business and managerial performance measurement is largely qualitative. This is because organizations are created and staffed by people, and because their customers, clients and users are people also. In addition to this, the precise measures of performance have to be judged and evaluated in the context in which they are established (15). Fundamental to a managers enthusiasm and dedication to coaching lies in the ability of coaching to improve staff performance and in turn to improve business results. A commitment to performance improvement may require the coaching review process to become an everyday occurrence for managers. Management better utilizes the evaluation process when it presents no difficulty in the staffs interpretation of it (16).

Although the Safeway personnel believe in the potential effectiveness and have the will to develop, the overall coaching program lacks effectiveness due to the lack of time spent on it and the authoritarian methods of motivating people. The principle encouragement is the absence of punishment seem not applicable to the modern workplace conditions and those of Safeway in particular. The practice of coaching is equivalent to a process, not an event. Coaching is about empowerment, building employees competence to take control of their time and their lives, enabling them to solve their own problems. The Coaches Training Institute (2000) depicts coaches as working with the whole human being, focusing on individuals strengths and cultivating their aspirations (17). The coach has knowledge and experience to convey to the learner.

The goal of coaching is to transfer that knowledge and skill to others. In order to be successful, coaching requires acceptance, trust, and the respect of the client. As well as this, it requires practice, repetition, time, and reflection (18). Learning becomes a state of mind, a way of thinking about the world and solving lifes problems, a way of growing.

If successful, the client takes over the learning process and is transformed qualitatively. Normally rendered one-to-one, coaching is a hybrid professional and personal service that lies midway on a spectrum that stretches from management consulting to psychotherapy. Coaches assist other practitioners and entrepreneurs to improve staff productivity whilst helping them target, acquire and integrate technology acquisitions (19). Coaches not only focus on the clients ambitions, they address how he or she can change as an employee and as a person to become better equipped to perform at a higher level. Perhaps the most important part of a coaches job is to instill and develop positive attitudes in their clients. The client must have a positive willingness to accept and apply coaching in order to realize any performance improvement.

It is also the responsibility of the coach to ensure that the clients build enthusiasm for the personal benefits they will gain from becoming an improved performer (20). The style of coaching should be non-intrusive with an emphasis on helping from a distance. The purpose of this is clearly identified as improving the performance of an individual person. Coaching managers can add value to an organization by helping their staff to learn, grow and develop.

The learning process will occur in the working environment so that actual work is the medium for learning. Managers who act as coaches may delegate responsibility for a task to someone who has no prior experience of the specific tasks duties. In addition to setting the goals of the actual work to be completed, they add learning goals. They coach the learner to give him / her the necessary skills and confidence to carry out the task (21).