CONTENTS
- Objectives, Responsibilities and Growth Goals
- Creating Objectives, Responsibilities and Growth Goals
- Measuring Objectives, Responsibilities and Growth Goals
- Kendo Talent Profile Assessment
- Creating your Career plan
- Continual Assessment
- What’s Next
What Stage Two covers is highlight in the figure below.
Objectives, Responsibilities and Growth Goals.
A fundamental principle of The Kendo Way is to define what success looks like at the individual, team and practice level. This involves defining and agreeing specific deliverables and undertaking regular measurement of the progress towards each outcome.
There are several advantages of this approach including actions to rectify under-delivery, recognition of high performance early, and of course, avoiding a train wreck if a problem is not detected and rectified early on.
In Kendo we have three features that help define what success looks like.
Objectives: typically, business outcomes that involve a number of activities. Objectives can come from the practice business plan, a team’s business plan or from an individual who has an agreed deliverable. Sample objectives include revenue targets, marketing plans, technology plans, HR plans, finance plan and other operational matters.
Objectives drive the business outcomes and are inter-related. Kendo Talent provides the ability to create objectives for the practice, teams and individuals. The Kendo Plan+Do module provides a more sophisticated set of features where objectives can be linked to each other to show the dependencies. Plan+Do puts an emphasis on accountability and execution of the business plan.
Further on we discuss some golden rules to follow in creating Objectives and in measuring them. For more detailed information on Objectives click here: Objective help guide
Responsibilities: typically, a personal accountability that contributes to Business as Usual rather than being a cog in the overall set of objectives. A Responsibility, unlike an Objective, has no “due date” and it is in place till it is changed. As Kendo works around financial years a Responsibility is assumed to run over the full year unless it is set up otherwise.
If an individual has a Responsibility that is core to their Role (which we defined in Stage One) or is critical to BAU then it can be nominated to be measured and in many respects it takes on the characteristics of an Objective. The critical difference between an Objective and Responsibility is that the latter involves just a single activity that is being measured. Take for example the Chief Compliance Officer for an organisation. They typically do not get a piece of the business plan to deliver but they have critical responsibilities for compliance, company secretarial, risk management, insurance etc. To objectively assess their performance, we need to measure how well they have managed their key Responsibilities..
An Objective will have multiple activities e.g. Build a presence in the building industry by getting 10 clients this year. Clearly delivering this objective will involve marketing, the sales, then customer service activities.
As Responsibilities can cover a broad range of undertakings these are catalogued into logical Responsibility Groups which are chosen by the organisation during set up. These provide the focus of the core BAU activities the people must be work on and could include for example marketing, career development, services offered and delegated authorities. Each organisation has the flexibility to provide direction and priorities for their people when setting up their Responsibilities Groups.
This structure allows the determination of the difference in responsibilities for each Role Level. For example, as a person progresses from junior levels to senior levels, their marketing responsibilities will change.
For some people their key responsibilities comprise the primary requirements of the Role and, where appropriate, should be measured so they can form part of the performance assessment for that individual. If a Responsibility is measured it appears on an individual’s dashboard and is treated like an Objective.
You can see all your Responsibilities under the Responsibilities tab and those that are to be measured will have a tick in the measured column:
When adding a responsibility, you can nominate it for measurement by clicking the check box.
The details of how it is to be measured can be added right away, or you can save it and come back to it later. Responsibilities marked for measurement will appear as a draft objective and can be accessed as a Draft objective on the Objectives page.
To view a measured Responsibility that is saved, navigate to the Objectives tab and expand the Draft objective section. When a responsibility is nominated to be measured it is moved into Draft Objectives so you can shape it for easy measurement.
Once all the measures are added send the reponsibility to your manager for agreement.
For Responsibilities that are not nominated to be measured, an individual’s performance in delivering these is captured in the annual Retrospective so they do count.
Growth Goals: these are personal development goals that are created by individuals after completing their Talent Profile assessment. These have specific types of actions that relate to learning and development.
For more information on Growth Goals click here: Growth Goal Help Guide
CREATING OBJECTIVES, RESPONSIBILITIES and GROWTH GOALS
Kendo supports the adage of if you don’t measure it then it doesn’t matter. Objectives, Measured Responsibilities and Growth Goals are all measured but for this to be meaningful they need to be set up properly. A little planning at the start of the process can save a lot of extra work and grief down the track.
Kendo uses our version of SMART methodology and we apply this to the creation of Objectives, Measured Responsibilities and Growth Goals where SMART stands for::
S – Specific which mean the deliverable needs to be clearly defined. It is very hard to measure things that are abstract so the outcome needs to be specific.
M – Measurable which recognises that all outcomes are measured by some sort of metric i.e. $, % complete or quantities (#). When creating an Objective, Measured Responsibility of Growth Goal a decision needs to be made about what metric will be used for its measurement.
A – Assigned which ensures that the outcome has a clear and unambiguous single owner. This ensures accountability. The person who is assigned to an outcome can pass responsibility for all or parts of it to other people, but that does not allow them to sidestep their accountability for the outcome.
R- Resourced which is meant to ensure the deliverable has been allocated enough resource for it to be completed. Resourcing can be in terms of funding, HR resources, capability of the assignee and time availability. Many deliverables fail to deliver because the necessary resources were not made available. Kendo wants plans to be achieved and proper resourcing is essential.
T- Time Based which recognises that all deliverables have timelines where there are expectations of an outcome. Objectives have milestones, Growth Goals have timelines and Responsibilities (even though they do not have a due date) will still have timelines that need to be met.
This approach needs to be followed when you create any of an Objective, Measured Responsibilities or Growth Goal. A big tip is to start with a verb e.g. build, deliver, achieve, grow, reduce, close etc.
When creating an Objective, Measured Responsibility or Growth Goal Kendo will guide you through process. Follow the guides and use the help files.
Measuring Objectives, Responsibilities and Growth Goals
Objectives
Essentially there are two approaches to measurement of Objectives in Kendo.
Numerical Measurement
- Set numerical objective with success being defined by a number. Where the number can be a value ($ or £), a quantity (#) or a % (e.g. percentage growth, or percentage of safety events etc).
- The number is a figure that is to be exceeded (a sales target) or under (a budget) and this needs to be defined when we create the measurement.
- Measurement frequency is the frequency with which the target is measured (monthly, quarterly, half yearly) and is where you record you actual progress to the target.
- Pulse Check frequency is how frequently (monthly, quarterly, half yearly) you will review this objective with a pulse check and have your manager review it. A pulse check is where you can score your progress and provide commentary about it. The pulse check frequency cannot be more frequent than the target frequency.
These fields are encircled in red in the screen shot below.
In Kendo to help make sure your logic is sound and we can create the mathematics that is required to do the calculation we ask you create a statement of what is being measured. This isencircled in blue in the diagram below.
Follow the steps below to create the measurement statement for your Responsibility.
- Select the period for the measurement
- Is it a target to be met every month and resets to zero at the start of the next month eg a target of less than 5 customer complaints per month
OR
- Is it a yearly target such annual sales target
- Do you need to meet or exceed or stay below the target number to achieve success
- Success could be either exceeding a sales target or staying below a customer complaints target
- Select the numerical unit type ($, % or #)
- Insert the Target value i.e. the target number you’re measuring against. This will automatically create equal milestones for the period (depending on the frequency chosen). However you can manually enter different specific monthly milestones for each period to take into account seasonality
- Enter what is being measured – for the avoidance of doubt this describes what is being measured – e.g. complaints, waiting time, customer satisfaction.
This measurement statement clearly defines your Objective or Measured Responsibility as and it should be consistent with your description as it appears on your Objectives page.
Percentage Complete
- The second approach is to view the deliverable as a project and progress is measured by the percentage complete of the project. The project might be to write a training course and roll it out across the firm.
- Project management breaks a project into phases or specific activities that need to be completed. Each of these will have due dates which become milestones and of course not each activity requires the same work for example designing the course might be 10% of the overall effort, writing the course 40% of the overall effort and delivering the training 50%. When measuring progress Kendo applies the weighted average against the milestones so an accurate measure of progress is made.
Responsibilities
Responsibilities are measured only with numerical targets. Open the responsibility in Draft Objectives and make sure it is written under the SMART rules. Sometimes Responsibilities are not written this way when they are created so you may need to reword them.
Enter the start and end date of the measurement period for the responsibility, it defaults to the financial year, but it can be for any period. Don’t set it up for a whole year if the responsibility relates to a specific activity that runs for a specific period of time. An example might be to organise a marketing event which is scheduled for a specific date. You don’t want pulse checks running after the event.
Growth Goals
Growth goals are measured by progress towards the goal. They are effectively projects with a personal outcome rather than a business one. Each Growth Goals requires one or more activities and these activities are one of three types:
Do which is learning on the job (where 70% of learning happens)
Learn which involves training or education
Connect which is coaching or mentoring
Help Guide link: Growth goals
Kendo Talent Profile Assessment
To complete a Talent Profile you do a self-assessment of the technical and behavioural skills required for your role level. This involved completing two questionnaires, one for Behavioural (soft) skills and the other for the Technical Skills.
Behavioural Skills
Go to Talent Profile in the left menu and select Mine. This opens up the pages that lists all Behavioural and Technical skills. The first section is Behavioural Skills and you can see the Start Assessment button.
In Kendo we focus on the six Role Specific Behavioural Skills that are critical to your current role level. You must complete the questions relating to these soft skills. There are other behavioural skills that are not considered as important at this stage of your career and you do not need to complete these, although you can if you want to do so.
Technical Skills
Further down the same page you will see Role Specific Technical Skills and again a Start Assessment button. Work through this assessment.
You can suspend completing the questionnaire at any stage and your work will be saved. When the self-assessment is completed the Talent Profile dashboard displays the self-assessed score against the required Behavioural Skills and Technical Skills.
From this information a person can identify the gaps in their capabilities and develop Growth Goals. See Growth Goals section below for further information on setting Growth Goals.
Help Guide link: Skills Assessment
Creating Your Career Plan
Every employee should have a Career Plan which defines their aspiration and maps out a pathway of how to get there.
Help Guide link: Career Plan or watch this video
Career Aspiration :
In your Career Plan you start by defining your Career Aspiration – it’s your long-term direction and career goal – where you’d like to be, what you’d like to be doing and by when. Your Career Aspiration is private and only you can view it.
Growth Goals :
Completing your Talent Profile identifies the gaps that require further learning and development. These are addressed by creating Growth Goals where learning objectives are set with a series of development activities needed to achieve the goal.
Growth Goals have timelines for each activity creating a roadmap for the learning and development. Goals are measured periodically in the same way as Objectives and Responsibilities and progress can be discussed with your manager. The section above dealt with creating and measuring Growth Goals.
Growth Goals are linked to the Kendo capabilities framework and each one can be tagged to a behavioural skill and technical skill.
You can also have private growth goals that don’t need to be shared with your manager.
Help Guide link: Growth goals
Continual Assessment
Updating Actuals And Pulse Check
A critical ingredient for improving performance is to regularly measure progress and, if need be, to “trim the sails” to ensure performance is on track and to provide help or guidance to the individual.
This is done through a Pulse Check. When an Objective, Measured Responsibility or Growth Goal is created it has a set of activities, targets, milestones – and a decision about the frequency of measurement. This can be monthly, which is the most common for Objectives, quarterly, half yearly or annually. Measured Responsibilities are usually looked at quarterly to ensure they are not drifting. Growth Goals are also typically measured quarterly. But, of course, you set the frequency at whatever level you feel works best for you and your manager.
Completion of a Pulse Check is easy and does not take much time. You can complete the Pulse Check and your manager can look at it online or in a meeting and provide their input. This creates a record that is used in the performance assessment process.
To complete a Pulse Check you access Objectives and Responsibilities from the Objectives page and Growth Goals from the Career Plan page.
Help Guide link: Pulse Check
Feedback
Kendo’s detailed Feedback feature allows a person to give, receive or request feedback. Given about 80% of learning occurs doing work, giving and receiving feedback is important for growth – both your own and others.
Positive feedback tells people when they are doing something well and encourages more of the same. Everyone likes to hear that they have done something well.
Conversely when actions or behaviours need to improve, constructive feedback helps a person to understand what they can improve, change, or stop doing and why. Without feedback people are often unaware of how their performance or behaviour is perceived by others and the impact it has. This can lead to a train wreck that could have been avoided.
In the Feedback page you can see all the Feedback about you, Feedback you have given others, and Feedback you have requested from others.
Help Guide link: Feedback
One on One
A One on One is a meeting between you and your manager. It provides an opportunity to discuss progress, uncover roadblocks, revisit priorities, provide feedback, coach, and check in on how individuals are feeling. In Kendo the One on One structure can be a wide ranging well-being check-up or it can deal with a specific issue e.g. some constructive feedback that needs discussion and resolution.
The meeting should be a safe space to address issues, follow up on agreed commitments and seek further support.
As part of continuous assessment, One on Ones should be undertaken regularly and should be:
- Driven and owned by the employee and supported by the manager.
- Scheduled as regular recurring meetings in your and your manager’s diary.
- On time and rarely cancelled. Sticking to One on Ones shows that they’re important.
- Prepared – know what you want to talk about
- Documented – agreed actions are noted so that these can be followed up.
- Short and sharp – ½ hour in length
- Focussed on developing employees through everyday activities by being continuously challenged and receiving ongoing coaching.
- Future focussed – acknowledging contribution and progress, while focussing on upcoming priorities, goals and career progress
- An effective use of everyone’s time.
Help Guide: One on One
WHAT’S NEXT
Next step is Retrospectives which are the end of year review of performance and career progression.
You will be advised when we move to the next stage of onboarding by HR and the Announcements tile on your dashboard.
Please look out for emails from your HR team detailing Kendo workshops and help sessions.
Finally, here is your get out of jail card. Read the guides and enter what information you can but if you get stuck (or have “messed up” something) please contact askaguide@thekendoway.com and if you can take a screen shot we can help you more quickly.